THEM featuring Lester Bangs

To mark my survey in Ugly Things #69 of the 1973 debates in the British press about the relative merits of THEM and Van Morrison, here’s the full text of the marvellous Lester Bangs’ sleeve notes for THEM Featuring Van Morrison (1972), all 6,500 words of ’em, which pretty much kick-started things . . . It’s Bangs, in full flow, at his very best

SPAWN OF THE DUBLIN PUBS: THEM CREATURES & A WIGHT NAMED VAN. No one would question that Van Morrison is one of the finest songwriters and singers of our time, as well as being a rock ’n’ roller without peer. He has cut a swath across music which proves unmistakably that he can do it all: write some of the tenderest odes of the day, and still get down and churn out the boogie, should he be so inclined. Liking him is not merely a matter of belonging to a specialized following, as with a David Bowie or even a Neil Young: his music is so universal, and so diverse, as to be joyously inescapable. We have grown up to Van Morrison: gone through make-outs and periods of adolescent darkness, found rock poetry sans pretence in his lyrics. turned up our radios a little louder (as he counseled in “Caravan” every time he came on, heard in his music hit singles and sheer art (though never “Art Rock”) and gorgeous combinations of the two.

Blowin' Your Mind was Van’s first album under his own name, but despite the presence of the hit “Bown Eyed Girl” it failed to capture the large audience he was destined for. Even Astral Weeks, that magnificent, moody outpouring of musical poetry reminiscent both of Bob Dylan and Walt Whitman, would not take him to the heart of AM heaven. Moondance was the turning point, of course, with its mellowly mutated R&B setting trends for years to come, and with Band and Street Choir he reached the point where each successive album was guaranteed to produce at least one hit single, bridging the gap between “serious” and vicarious mass audiences (between AM and FM, to reduce the equation to its simplest level) more effortlessly and with less rankling artifice than anybody since Dylan.

But what even many of his staunchest fans don’t know is that Van Morrison was an AM star a long time ago, a jive prince of what many aging rockers of 23 or so are beginning to think of as the “golden era” (meaning their golden era, the mid Sixties when they were still in high school) who hit the scene with all roots totally assimi­lated by the time of his first album, a sometime hitmaker and man whom, if you heard him at all, left no doubt that he was destined to promulgate some non-plastic surgery on the face of Pop.

Because the first Van Morrison album wasn’t Blowin’ Your Mind it was something simply called Them, with ‘Here Comes the Night’ pasted prominently on the cover when that song rocketed to the Number 2 spot on the charts in America and most everywhere else. The band was Them, and they functioned for Van in much the same way as the Velvet Underground for Lou Reed and John Cale, or Buffalo Springfield for Neil Young and Steve Stills, or the Byrds for Crosby and others, or . . . but this was a birth of another color than most of the celebrated legendary-group-as-proving-­ground-for solo-superstar myths of our time. Van Morrison was Them, and the hand (and various bastardizations subject to musical-chairs personnel shifts which never raised the quality of their post-Morrison music) was one of the tightest, rowdiest, most diverse groups to emerge from the Isles in the twilight of the Liverpool Beat era. Peter Bardens (organ, replacing a now-obscure but incredible cat after “Here Comes the Night”), Bill Harrison lead guitar), Alan Henderson (bass), and John McAuley (drums, piano and harmonica). Most of those names are lost now (although Bardens has resurfaced recently with some less-than-train-derailing albums on MGM), but in their day they were unbeatable. Some of them hailed, like Van, from Ireland, and some from London, but their sound was enough to turn the head around of anybody who’d thought the R&B chops of the Animals, say, were pretty spiffy; and when you added Van’s busting at-the-seams vocal and compositional talents, it was enough to even make you forget the Rolling Stones for the duration of an LP or single side. And in 1965, that was saying something.

The original Them had the best of everything, their British blues chops down so solid they could let the standard forms ride and cruise out on some stuff that was pretty damned experimental, and successfully so, for its day (some of it still is). An impeccably tight and always driving ensemble sound, and soloists who knew how to compress enough feeling and enough ideas into a few deliberate seconds as to make you sob in this post-Cream era of rampant guitar ego-tripping. And a little tiny cat who was pretty funny-looking, it seemed to us at the time (we could hardly be­lieve that that short, pudgy replica of the grey nerd who sat behind you through a whole semester of Driver Education and never spoke a word, that that absolute antithesis of every Superstar image ever stamped in our skulls, could be the helms­man of this wild night’s ride), and came bounding out of far left field with a voice bigger than two Belafontes and songs that, when they weren’t taking all the best of Ray Charles and Chicago blues and Chuck Berry and Jackson and British R&B and distilling it to rusty perfection, were taking us to sonic zones we’d never dreamed of in all our born days, headphones or no headphones.

Dave Marsh’s review of the album in Creem (December 1972): ‘Lester Bangs liner notes complement a package which is just trashy enough to be perfect. Bangs' commentary is so lucid and clear that any expansion on the songs is superfluous. With it. Them's recordings can be seen in both historical perspective and in the context of the career Van later carved for himself. It is easily the best thing I've ever read on Morrison. (If only Hot Rocks had had the same advantage .. .)’

That was Them, named after a rousingly lurid mid-50s American sci-fi trash flick about prehistoric monsters time-warped into the middle of the Mojave Desert discov­ered by a little cutie whom no official will believe till the things are crunching their shopping centers. Like the Animals (who took too long to shake their matching suits and ties) and The Troggs (ditto, except their delivery told the whole salacious tale), Them were a concept bordering on the kind of raw subversion the Rolling Stones were the pioneers of, and the Velvet Underground, MC5, Stooges and Alice Cooper later brought to high art. They scowled and glowered like a borough full of broken windows on their first album cover, even if all of ’em but Van did have on ties and one said in Hit Parader that his ambition upon Making It was to get a Jag so he could pick up chicks with more finesse. Like the Yardbirds, they didn't really understand the concept of pop subversion, but Van had enough organic spleen in front to carry all the aura of Danger the band needed. The liner notes of Them Again, their second American release, tell it like it maybe was: “Van Morrison, the lead singer with Them sometimes throws his advisors info a frenzy of hair-tearing despair . . . moody, unpredictable, perverse, often downright wilful (and god forbid!)­­ – but always, creative. On sessions when asked to alter the phrasing of a number or in­crease the tempo, he will say with quiet rebellion: ‘No! I always sing this way . . . the way I feel,’ and he is invariably right.”

Solid! You used to read PR stories in the Beat, with Hit Parader the pre-Rolling Stone bible of the rock cultists, about how Them would come to Hollywood on an American tour and when not onstage Van would sit for hours in a corner booth alone behind the biggest, darkest shades, chain smoking and emanating a malevolent aura that mesmerized and terrified and bagged him an early reputation as a lonely, strange, distant genius who could only communicate to the rest of the world through his music. And, of course, much of that was true, His songs have always veered between expressions of traditional romantic love which would have been mawkish from a writer with less talent and a different sensibility; and explorations of the ultimate darknesses of the soul – corny as that sounds, Morrison pulls it off as authentically as the sweet stuff – the nihilistic options the present offers us all and occasional pictures of the desolation angels on their way down the slag heap. And that darkness tends to be rendered just about as romantically, with a truly Irish-literary sense of doom and fear (the same terror-as-epiphany found in James Joyce, and probably just about as rooted in Catholicism).

One of the amazing things about Morrison is that he took these natural artistic proclivities and made them work In the context of black American R&B and white British pop music, with no loss of integrity. It was a bit as if Samuel Beckett’s deranged but jivecat son had decided to take on Herman’s Hermits just to see how far he could derail the 1964 lollipop train. Van ended up laying a whole new set of tracks,

From the beginning Van and Them seemed determined to shatter the mould – when you looked at the album covers you saw bank clerks and pub-crawlers, but when you listened you heard already topnotch musicianship breaking its ass to jump out of the moptop mass and be accepted on its own terms. The liner notes again: Their “quality lies not only in the rendering of the numbers on these tracks – but in Them’s efforts to break away from the popular image of long haired maracas-shaking pop groups (!). On this album, Them have introduced vibes, sax and flute. They are not content to stand still musically and rest on the laurels of three big hit records, and are moving towards a ‘sound’ very close to the jazz idiom.”

Ego and hype, sure, but Them were hardly the forerunners of Chicago or BS&T, out to prove they can play note-perfect solos by members of big bands from two decades ago and unite jazz and rock and classical and folk and blues and anything else they can exploit. Them began as the apotheosis of the bar band – some of the tracks on these two records are right out of Wayne Cochran’s dreams – and built from there into a superbly eclectic vehicle for Van’s young and rampaging consciousness. You can hear the process in the grooves herein.

Their earliest recordings, not featured here, included an also-ran single called “Don't Start Crying Now,” a legendary talking-jam roughly equivalent to the Stones’ “Stoned” called “The Story of Them,” and “Baby Please Don’t Go.” The last was a hoary blues on more archivists’ country-blues anthologies than even the archivists can count, supposedly written by Big Joe Williams and given new life, to put it mildly, by Van and Them. In fact, it was a big hit in England, where it became the theme song for the period pop TV show Ready, Steady, Go, and a minor (but as earthshaking for those who had been waiting for something exactly like this as the early Stones singles or the Who’s “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere”) hit in this country. Structurally it was way ahead of its time, featuring heartbeat bass and bitterly slicing guitar as well as Van's deja vu agonized vocal, and there are many non-purists here among us who think it the best version of the song ever laid on wax.

Released In late ’64 b/w “Gloria,” it never quite made the upper brackets of the surveys, but a few months later Parrot-London was smart enough to merely flip it over and ship “Gloria” to all the radio stations and rack jobbers (with “Baby Please Don't Go” still the flip), and the rest is history. Almost. Them’s version of “Gloria” was a monster hit In the West, but never quite made it across most of the rest of America. A few months later a prototype punkrock group out of Chicago called the Shadows of Knight covered it and hit everywhere in the country except the West, where everybody had heard, cruised and danced to and memorized the real original until placebos were unthinkable. The Shadows of Knight had lots of energy and enthusiasm, but Van’s and Them’s “Gloria” was a chromosome-blaster before most of us even knew we had ’em to blast. It was the first distinct rock ’n’ roll classic to come from the pen of Van Morrison, and perhaps still the greatest. I mean, “Doctor My Eyes” is fine and all, but it shore ain’t “Louie Louie” . . .

Van’s second Instant & Eternal Classic was “Here Comes the Night,” which managed to become a full-fledged national hit and was a delightful and surprising change from “Gloria.” Completely different, in fact, proving that the man had as many voices and visions as we could endure before turning in our brains for a mess of pottage. And its flipside [“All For Myself”], also still unrepresented on U.S. albums or U.K. either as far as I know, was a devastating employment of the classic Bo Diddley “I’m a Man” riff to build a sonic riptide that was as adventurous in its way as what the Yardbirds did with the same material, and its lyrics sealed forever the stigmatic mark of desolate brilliance on Van’s stout-sweaty brow,

Which brings us finally to those masterpieces small and large which have been gathered, reprogrammed and manna'd on all of us in the set you are holding in your hands. From “Gloria” to the covers like “Out of Sight,” all the music here is vibrantly alive with the spirit-feel, as Milt Jackson would have it, both of its funky roots and its significance as solid, ripup, bring-’em-on-in commercial rock ’n’ roll. Commercialism is much derided in some hipper than-thou quarters these days, but it’s still the firstest with the mostest pulsation when it comes to propelling you off your ass and into some primordial rug-cutting. And as gorgeous as Van’s recent work has been (and as fine as he must feel to have somehow, finally resolved the tensions brimming from his early music), any reasonable ear just gotta fess up to the fact that one or two “Wild Nights” an album don’t really satiate, especially when these early Them albums were burger heaven and wham, bam, thank you ma’am from stem to stern.

Interestingly enough, the bar-band traces were for more in evidence on Them Again,
the second album to be released in America, than on Here Comes the Night. Although, since the English releases differed so drastically From both of these in content, and the American LPs were probably selected from a body of work covering several months, sessions, and recordings from Over There – well, it probably  doesn’t make too much diff vis a vis American album chronology.) And an edited edition of Them Again comprises the first record here, minus “Call My Name” (which was as exciting as most of the material around it and memorable for Van's pronunciation alone: "When you're burdened down with cur/And troubles seem so hard to burr”) and “Don’t You Know,” a passable jazz-rock thing heavy on the flute and Ray Charles influence.

It’s also worth mentioning that much of the material here was written not by Van but by their producer Tony Scott, who would make heavy attempts to mould Van’s sound in much the same way as Bert Berns did later. The only difference is that Berns had a way of turning out hits that Scott seemed to lack. But the music is just as good, and not really very far from Van’s own early work.

Like “Could You Would You,” a great opener with strong guitar chords bearing what Miles Davis called “the Spanish tinge” and quite close to Berns’ own Spanish Harlem musical proclivities as evidenced in Van’s later work. There is a strong organ line that puts you in mind of the Band when they’re willing to be hot ’n’ nasty, and Van sings the first line almost like Arthur Lee would, shifting later into a classic middle-period (meaning circa–“Brown Eyed Girl”) Van Morrison vocal. The song is unmistakably Morrison-penned, and proves that the utterly old-fashioned romanticism of his recent music is not mere sentimental dreck (as some people, who seemingly will never forgive him for surviving those Astral Weeks will claim), but as true an expression of a sensitive and original sensibility as the darkness of “Mystic Eyes” and Weeks. Why, it almost sounds like he’s saying “Janney, Janney, Janney, I love you!” at the end.

“Something You Got” is a great Chris Kenner song popularized by Chuck Jackson, done here as a sort of mutated New Orleans R&B with a wondrously old-fashioned vocal by Van.[i] Followed by none other than “Turn On' Your Lovelight,” which is fun and tight – to hear its familiarity is just like breathing the airs of home, which is more than can be said for some recent renditions. The thing that makes recorded (basically) bar-band music work is when the natural excitement and the authority of the band are so strong as to cut through the banality and familiarity and keep your attention by the purity of that power. It’s no easy trick, but Van and Them pull it off more than once in this album, and if I didn’t want to make patrons of Good Rock mad I’d say how delighted I am at the proximity of the organ work here to that on the best records by stalwarts like the Kingsmen and Question Mark & the Mysterians.

“I Can Only Give You Everything,” co-authored by producer Scott, is a period piece of filler which ends up exciting enough to stand the test of time. Its fuzz guitar line is such a cliche it’s become a classic (Hint: it wasn’t recorded before “Satisfaction” and the lyrics were gloriously rank enough to induce the Troggs to cover it. In fact, it’s just about as close as Van Morrison ever got to true punk-rock, with his vocal overtones of Jagger, Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders, and even a taste of Iggy Stooge.

Followed by the perfect contrast of a prototype Van Morrison romantic ballad: “Fill me my cup/I’ll drink your sparkling wine and tell you everything is fine until I see your sad eyes/Throw me a kiss across a crowded room some sunny windswept afternoon is none too soon for me to miss/My sad eyes/Ohh, not bad eyes/Uh, glad eyes/For you my sad eyes.” The romanticism is lavish enough to verge on the sticki­ness and purple “poetry” of a Rod McKuen or Erich Segal, if not for Van’s strong, rich delivery, his incredible way with words – “across a crowded room some sunny wind­swept afternoon is none too soon” rolls off his tongue and around the rhythm like some of Dylan Thomas’ more sonorous recorded cadences – and the traces of the other, darker side of this life he never left out. The poetic sense is all but Victorian, the wine could come from ancient Greek couplets or Omar Khayyam (though it just spills in with his wine lyrics running through Blowin’ Your Mind, the other Bang album, and just about everything on Warner Brothers – just as with sweet young things, when the man finds a subject that gladdens his heart he keeps returning to it – and who wouldn’t), and the song itself is just one of the most polished early expressions of his vision of love and harmony as a state of innocence, even naivete. Van’s work really does comprise songs of innocence and experience, innocence being the breeding ground for love and knowledge the mutable terrain where darkness creeps up quickly from behind and mugs you in the middle of your purest joys. Even in this song, the attraction is in the melancholy, and when he sings “Who are you and I to wonder why we do so?” the fatalism and sense of how little it is that things really do make sense is subtle but firm.

[i] Which reminds me of the time, in the day of “Brown Eyed Girl” when an American pop paper reviewed a Morrison concert at which he must have done much of the material on this album by complaining that his music was too “old-fashioned” to be really listenable today and that no one so backward could have much of a future In the new Hip Art realms of show-biz.

Van was not best pleased with the album . . . of course he wasn’t . . .New Musical Express (September 16 1972)

A 1974 collection that pulled together many of the more significant omissions from the double-album and the first release of ‘Mighty Like A Rose’

And if there really is a vacuum in every joy, then the only recourse is to fill it with more wine and general animation, and pubs become tabernacles, and parties are indicated. So side two roars off with “Out of Sight,” a great bar-band cut that illustrates, like two songs on the first Who album, the English mid-60s R&B band's fascination with James Brown. Its instrumental break isn’t going to give Brother JB any sleepless nights (although with the kind of music he's making these days, it should), but this music always sounds better and has more charm in retrospect. It was so much fun to just slap it on and let all 2:21 of it grind out, especially when you know that if it was any of today’s bloated jazz-rock bands it would probably run three or four times as long and be flabby with preening solos.

“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” is a classic cover (and covers certainly can be classic – just ask the Stones or Ike and Tina) and perhaps the most unusual version of this song ever recorded. The piano sounds like droplets running down a windowpane, and with Van’s vocal the song becomes not Dylan’s declaration of irrevocable separation, psychic displacement and vindictive rejection taking the form of a self-righteous putdown; there’s a feeling here of real love and regret, shot through with painful resignation, as if to say “We’ve both lost something, but it’s no good pre­tending that it’ll ever come back.” A very traditional rendition, in fact, far less “hip” and independent than Dylan’s – perhaps the shift in emphasis is summed up when Van changes “your lover who just walked out the door” to “your lover who just walked through the door.” Like the emotional difference between John Lee Hooker and Smiley Lewis singing about a breakup.

“Bad or Good” is some of the best Ray Charles influenced white pop gospel of the period, finding a soulful strength in absolute fatalism just as Gospel always has: “Don’t even have to say one word/lt ain’t nothin’ that we’ve seen or heard/Get out/Get out/Jump and shout/Then you know what it’s all about . . . Gotta hold on when all is good/Make out like all is fine/ Gotta let it happen/Bad or good.” And, in spite of all obvious influences, unmistakably a Morrison original—lyrics don’t lie.

“How Long Baby" takes similar musical strains deeper into a soul blues ballad with prominent Pop Staples type Delta echo guitar, leaving Van no recourse but to rear up and ride the side out shouting “Bring ’Em On In.” Raveup time, enhanced by the narrative style which appears in many of his songs. When not exploring a bleak corner of some urban scene with a novelist’s attention to detail : “Madame George”), or merely reflecting the joys his wife and child have brought him, (Tupelo Honey), Van delights in moving on, down the sidewalk, across the steet, from here to there and across the water. I saw him once on American Bandstand in 1966, stewed to the gills, and when Dick Clark: tried to conduct his usual Barbie Doll interview and asked him what he’d been doing lately. Van drooled a few seconds of garble and "WuhhhIll, y'know, man, l just like, I just walk on down the street, right along, and keep on comin’, and come by some cafes, and see somebody or whoever, and they say and I say an’ we sit and drink an’ then walk on . . .” Clark hustled him off camera in favor of a zit-creme commercial pronto, but that reply, essentially, is what this song is about. Places: “I was walkin’ down by Queensway/When I met a friend of mine/He said ‘Come on back, back to my pad/We can have a good time’” and “When I stepped off the boat and I walked upon the dry land/Slowly!/To the carpark/And I jumped in” and rolls off down the road once more, reeling in and out of a great scat section that bridges into a blustery 50s sax solo. Off the wall and up the avenue of dreams. When he sez “out of my mind!” it ain’t like Neil Young fainting in the back of an ambulance, it’s jumping loose enough to smash your head against the wall and pour half a pint of Bordeaux on the wound! Shout don’t stop!

The second record, which corresponds except for two dropped songs again and some shifts in sequence to the Here Comes the Night album, is less raucous, perhaps, not so pub-loose, but better produced and a far more potent statement by a band and an artist beginning to feel the heady extent of their powers. Heavier on the basis of being almost all Morrison originals alone, it is really a landmark album in the rock ’n’ roll of the Sixties that nobody who cares about the music (or wants to have their skull pulverized now and then) should be without. To say it’s essential is to understate its importance – it’s more than history, it’s timeless jive that drives you straight out of your mind and into your body, as John Sinclair would have it, and maybe even clear up the wall if visceral music ain’t yer cup of meat.

Opening with the showstopper of them all, “Gloria.” This, folks, is the Rock of Ages, sure as “Long Tall Sally” or “Sweet Little Sixteen” or “Let's Spend the Night together” or maybe even “Are You Ready.” It’s a demonstrative self-contained definition of rock ’n’ roll that will have you moving or shrivel you into a Librium puddle of MOR drool. It’ll be heard as long as rock ’n’ roll endures, and never sound less timely than it did the day they cut it. A paraplegic could dance to it – it has the magic that’ll set you free like few songs by the Spoonful or anybody else. Cruising for burgers to it in 1965 was more cosmic than any acid trip, and after even one hearing no one could ever forget those creaming lyrics and how seethingly Van spat them out: “She comes around here/Just about midnight/ She makes me feel so good, Lord/Ohh, I wanna say she make me feel all right/Cause she walkin’ down my street/She knock upon my door/And then she comes to my room/Man, she make me FEEL ALRIGHT!!!!!”

Myles Palmer’s notes for the British version of ‘Featuring Van Morrison’: ‘Ultimately this album needs no bendiction. Them’s music reaffirms the primal rock and roll values of urgency, simplicity and danceability’

Ah, sexism! The joys of that utterly apolitical horniness has brought a tear to the eye of many a reminiscing campus revolutionary as he wrestles with the problem of whether he’s got a right to ask his girl to shave her legs! In the days of “Gloria’s” first ascendance, people sweated other neuroses. Just dig “Here Comes the Night” for some real sick sentiments: “I can see right out my window walkin’ down the street my girl with another guy/His arm around her like it used to be with me. oh it makes me wanta cry!”

“Like it used to be with me” (“his arm around her”)? What is this, Sunday Bloodly Sunday? Nahh, it’s just the remarkable rhyme scheme of this song which pulls off the all but unparalleled achievement of being simultaneously perfect and awkward as hell. The words seem to tumble backwards over each other in true spazz spew. Which is absolutely appropriate, since the song was about being a poor awkward pube losing his long dream and short steady to some strutting BMOC [Big Man On Campus]. Adolescent angst is technicolor and Todd-A0, and if we all came clean who has not mused more than once ’twixt twelve and twenty or even after “Wonder what is wrong with me?”, just as Van does here. If you went to high school with this song, like I did, you probably lived it too. If not, you may even be living it now. In any case, it was Them’s first solid national hit on this side of the pond, shooting straight up the charts and nudging into the number two spot only because the new Beatles single came out at the same time. And despite being a superhit, it’s a totally bizarre song, as the lyrics attest. The way Van barks “Wow, here it comes!” is enough to keep you awake nights, and the structure is unusual, changing from a vaguely Latinish balladic lament (the Bert Berns touch, again; the man never quite got the hot sauce out of his ears after his “Twist & Shout” conquered the world, and though Van didn’t suffer by it, it did make some of his music fairly predictable) into a sort of wierdo hillbilly roundelay, which is where the gawky lyrics quoted came in. There’s no doubt that is was as much a rock ’n’ roll classic in its way as “Gloria,” if destined by Its form never to become such a standard, and even ends with the protagonist playing voyeur outside the window where the objects of his jealousy carry on in every unmentionable way his fertile pube brain can dream up.

The next song is, simply, one of the most powerful pieces of music you are ever going to have the opportunity to hear. "Mystic Eyes" was an all-time brain blitz that’s fully as devastating today as it ever was; vicious, utterly nihilistic barrages of sound, coherently performed and pristinely recorded, making the rage that much more vivid. The lyrics are cornball but terrifying (an early liner says that the song was originally supposed to be instrumental and they were adlibbed in the studio, which is believable but detracts not a whit from their impact), and the guitar lines are as razor edged as anything Mike Bloomfield did on Highway 61 Revisited or the first Paul Butterfield album (both of which came out after this, by the way . “Mystic Eyes” is an exercise in pure adrenalin frenzy, Van Morrison’s darker side at its most ferociously anguished. And if all that wasn’t enough, it also contains one of the best harp solos (almost cer­tainly by Van) ever recorded. When he finally returns to his harp after the vocal it is with a savage snarling chomp!, as of a barracuda biting down.

All of which makes “Don’t Look Back,” a bar-band ballad harkening back to the other album, a welcome relief. Originally a John Lee Hooker song, it’s not as senti­mentally innocuous as it might at first appear. After all, Dylan named a movie after it. And even if that’s not really true, it’s a beautiful composition and performance with an unforced message that becomes neither preachy nor sappy. When he says, “Those days are gone,” he means no Gee-whiz but exactly, strongly what he says: “Stop dreaming and live on in the future/Darlin’, don't look back.” Which seems doubly applicable today, even if the appearance of an album like this one is evidence of the uses and vitality of the past.

“Little Girl”. Ah, nymphomania! Well, not necessarily, but there comes a point where the honest chronicler must deal with certain recurrent themes, as I said before, in Van’s oeuvre, and this is the cookingest mutation of “Good Morning Little School Girl” this side of Vladimir Nabokov. It has a great chugging construction, and voyeurism of so poetic a turn as to make a grown lecher cry: “Saw you from my window” – “Cypress Avenue,” here we come – and a dreamscape middle section: “In miles and miles of golden sand/Walkin’, talkin’, hand in hand”. Leading to a final lust-crazed raveup. Another classic – “Sweet Little 16” was a stunner, but you shoulda seen her little sister. Van did.

“One More Time” links generically to “Don’t Look Back” and “How long Baby” as blues ballad and functions as throwforward to his current stuff: “It won’t be long till I’m comin’ on home/Gonna get you in my arms and make love to you, darlin’, just one more time.” Straight, to your heart like a cannonball. The spoken section even reaffirms that “There’s a girl for every boy,” which was nice to know in the 11th Grade and nice to know now if you’re in between embraces. Their lives were saved by rock ’n’ roll.

And rescued not even once this side but twice at least: “If You and I Could Be As Two” comes complete with spoken intro: “I kicked my heart when I saw you standin’ there in your dress of blue/The storm was over, my ship sailed through!” How could it not’ve? Perfect penetration, perfect joy. It’s the eternal teenage dream, rendered in a classic ballad form: “What is this feelin’?/What can I do? lf you and I could be relieved/To walk and talk and be deceived/I’d give my all, and more I would do,” even to the point of “Sew this wicked world up at the seams.” Love will win, and despite the Utopian cast which links it to such prime slices of puppylove megalomania as the Troggs’ “Our love Will Still Be There”, Van is realist enough to declare his willingness to be deceived, knowing full well he’s gonna be anyway whether he apprehends any sweetness or not. The most pragmati­cally horny anthem you could name.

“I Like It Like That” ain’t Chris Kenner’s 1961 hit; today they’d probably call it a boogie, though it’s closer to a shuffle, a traditional medium-tempo R&B form common to many British getdown bands of the period. You can dance to it and you don’t need a Funk & Wagnall’s to apprehend the kozmik import of the words. Same thing applies to the closing raveup, Bobby Troup’s “Route 66”, which was one of the few songs that Chuck Berry ever wrote or popularized that the Rolling Stones managed to cut old Chuckle on, and even though this version don’t cut the Stones’ (that’d be a mighty tall order), its latter-day-barrelhouse piano and cheerfully (beerfully) bash­ing drums make for more great party music, taking the album out on a joyous note.

In between those two mainstream whoopups, however, lies one of the greatest pieces of pure psychedelic music ever recorded: “One Two Brown Eyes.” Sure, it preceded the fad, doesn’t sound anything like Chocolate Watch Band ersatz fuzz-feedback anyway. What makes it really chilling is that it’s so lucid, deliberate and ungimmicky. Strange as anything Astral Weeks, perhaps stranger, more vein-chilling than “T.B. Sheets,” it’s put together like no other song here or elsewhere, with elements that shouldn’t mix in a month of stolstices but somehow, eerily, do. Like the weird irony of the tinkling percussive background (glockenspiel?), not to mention the infernally, surrealistically vindictive lyrics. Or the brilliant use of the pocketknife alternative to bottleneck guitar, which slithers and slides and makes all appropriate incisions, almost as if peeling skin away from a still-warm body. A further perverse twist is provided by the underpinning of a bossa nova beat. Astrud Gilberto will never sing this, though, that’s for sure. “I’m gonna cut you down to my size,” hisses Van, and you look at the diminutive unsmiling presence on the old album cover and think simultaneously of A Clockwork Orange: real horror show. Well, he does say “Don't read about it in good books,” and it ain’t nothing like Lou Reed singing “Like a dirty French novel” or Joni Mitchell watching “all the pretty people reading Rolling Stone.” Beyond Sade. Bizarro, years ahead of its time in both that and its structure, and totally coherent to boot. The Chill as Van hasn’t rendered it since save perhaps in some of the remoter labyrinths of Astral Weeks. And nobody can put The Chill on like he can, and he don’t even have to indulge in no juju hocus-pocus; plain old fashioned cold blooded virulence does just fine.

This is not the latest or the last Van Morrison album you’re ever going to get, but before scrawling my John Hancock at the end of these perhaps overly effusive notes I must say that when it comes to this man’s music you're never going to hear anything better than the best moments of these two albums. Which is not at all to denigrate his current work, but to note that genius never stands still and when he laid down these sides with Them he was moving at a pace perhaps more furious than he has ever matched since, simply because it was all new and there were so many things to say at once that the man literally exploded. I don’t know much about his personal life, which is probably just as well for our purposes here, since I suspect that the creative eruption comprising these records, Blowin’ Your Mind and Astral Weeks laid the same heavy tax on his soul and body as that which Dylan endured in the process of living and recording the cycle that ended with Blonde On Blonde. Like Dylan, Van seems to have found a modicum of the harmony he was always lunging after in his post-apocalypse, connubial country life. But that does not make the artistic product of the apocalypse any less crucial and exciting – more so, if anything. Even wanting to believe that we don’t really want our heroes to immolate themselves to sate our vicarious craving for the truth and profundity and danger they have lived, we’ll always have the disturbingly beautiful music of the outer edge to move and keep us aware of what lies there. I think Astral Weeks was Morrison’s haunted cathedral erected on that precipice, and much of the music here belongs to an earlier, perhaps easier and certainly more prosaic period. But it’s inescapable that some of the music here, and it is usually the very best of it, comes from that singed outpost on that harrowing highway where artists push against either the looming crunch of the juggernaut or outward into sheer nothing­ness. And that extremism is this music’s strength. “Mystic Eyes” is strong and vital because for all its agony and desperation its totally unafraid.

And it’s strong because, like everything around it on these two pieces of wax, it’s real rock ’n’ roll of the sort that comes rarely and scores your life without your even trying, by its truth. Music like this can’t stay out of sight long, and if all goes well and there are no contractual snags this company may even get around to putting out a second collection of early Van Morrison­-Them material in a few months, with all the goodies and masterpieces that a mere two albums couldn't hold: “Baby Please Don't Go,” “All For Myself,” “Richard Cory,” songs from English albums like “Just a Little Bit,” “I Gave My Love a Diamond,” “You Just Can’t Win,” “Bright Lights Big City,” “The Story of Them,” “My Little Baby,” “Don't Start Crying Now” and all the others.

In the meantime, should you be standing even now in the records section of the local department store with the plastic slit by thumbnail and this package open, reading these words and trying to decide... don’t hesitate.

Get it while you can.

Lester Bangs

CREEM Magazine

Bangs’ sleeve notes – a design nightmare – overly crammed, squeezing out the very cool photo. The UK edition has a better set of tracks . . . MORE! . . . and a readable layout

Danny Holloway recalls going to see THEM play at the Whisky A Go Go and elsewhere . . . I wish I’d been with him . . .

The Troggs: 'I Want – You Want'

A recent acquisition of the two volumes of the Best of the Troggs, released in 1967 & 1968, had me heading back to Lester Bangs’ essay from 1971, ‘James Taylor Marked for Death (What we need is a lot less Jesus and a whole lot more Troggs!)’ ,to see which of the 23 tracks on these comps he had also singled out for praise.

(There are a dozen tracks apiece on the two albums but for an unknown reason the less than essential b-side of ‘Wild Thing’, ‘From Home’, gets a place on both discs).

Turns out Bangs only put seven tracks under analysis on his groin thunder odometer: ‘Wild Thing’, most obviously, ‘I Want You’, ‘I Can’t Control Myself’, ‘Give It to Me’, ‘I Can Only Give You Everything’, ‘Gonna Make You’, ‘66–5–4–3–2­–1’ and ‘I Just Sing’ (which didn’t appear on either of the Best of volumes). Honourable mentions along the way are given to ‘Anyway That You Want Me’, ‘With A Girl Like You’, ‘Girl in Black’ ‘I Want You to Come into My Life’ and ‘Night of the Long Grass’.Bangs kicked off his essay with his preferred trope of directly addressing his reader in what might turn out to be a conversation, debate, argument or rhetorical ramble. I’m not sure he knows which it will be until the piece is done. Here’s the rumpus:

PART ONE: KAVE KIDS

All right, punk, this is it. Choose ya out. We're gonna settle this right here.

You can talk about yer MC5 and yer Stooges and even yer Grand Funk and Led Zep, yep, alla them badasses’ve carved out a hunka turf in this town, but I tell you there was once a gang that was so bitchin' bad that they woulda cut them dudes down to snotnose crybabies and in less than three minutes too. I mean their shortest rumble was probably the one clocked in at 1:54 and that's pretty fuckin swift, kid. Oh, they didn't look so bad, in fact their appearance was a real stealthy move ’cuz they mostly photographed like a bunch of motherson polite mod clerks on their lunch hour, but they not only kicked ass with unparalleled style when the time came, they even had the class to pick one of the most righteous handles of all time: the Troggs.

Perfectly named, the Troggs sprung fully-loaded out of the primal ordure that all great rock n’ roll comes from. Subterranean Neanderthals who briefly stepped into the light to promote a clutch of hit singles:

’Cause this was a no-jive, take-care-of-business band (few of the spawn in its wake have been so starkly pure) churning out rock 'n' roll that thundered right back to the very first grungy chords and straight ahead to the fuzztone subways of the future. And because it was so true to its evolutionary antecedents, it was usually about sex, and not just Sally-go-to-movieshow-and-hold-my-hand stuff, although there was scads more of that in them than anyone would have suspected at first, but the most challengingly blatant flat-out proposition and prurient fantasy.

That’s the cue for Bangs to range far and wide over his adolescent wet dreamscapes. His term for the Troggs’ libidinous thrusts was ‘groin thunder’ which was an image as impeccably realised as the band’s name. Its most basic expression, he wrote, is obtained in ‘I Want You’:

This is the Troggs at their most bone-minimal (which is also where they are usually most effective). Like the early Kinks, they had strong roots in ‘Louie, Louie’, which is where both song and guitar solo issue from here. The lyrics are almost worthy of the cave: ‘I want you / I need you / And I hope that you need me too . . .’ The vocal has a musk of yellow-eyed depravity about it, and the singer sounds absolutely certain of conquest-steady, methodical, deliberate. This is the classic mold for a Troggs stalking song.

Bangs developed his line:

‘Gonna Make You’ is more of the same, Diddley rumbleseat throbbing with sexual aggression and tough-guy disdain for too many words, while the flip side of that single, ‘I Can't Control Myself’, begins to elaborate a bit. It opens with a great Iggyish ‘Ohh, NO!’, employs a buckling foundation of boulderlike drums as usual, and takes the Trogg-punk's intents and declarations onto a more revealing level. ‘Yer socks are low and yer hips are showin’,’ smacks Presley in a line that belongs in the Great Poetry of Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.

I hear ‘slacks’ not ‘socks’ though maybe the latter fits better with whatever fetish or ‘pube punk fantasy’ Bangs had a predilection for. ‘A two-sided single whose titles were “Give It to Me” and “I Can't Control Myself” was on a collision course with some ultimate puissant bluenose from the start, and sure enough it was banned in America’.

About midway through his essay Bangs hits the caps lock on his typewriter and finally lets loose about why all of this fuss n’ bother over Reg and the Boys is worth his reader’s attention:

THE LESSON OF ‘WILD THING’ WAS LOST ON ALL YOU STUPID FUCKERS sometime between the rise of Cream and the fall of the Stooges, and rock 'n' roll may turn into a chamber art yet or at the very least a system of Environments.

Bangs was not wrong, the Velvets, MC5 and the Stooges, he wrote, all gainfully pushed back against the tide of musical civility but they could not be the primal thing itself, they were all too knowing, too self-reflective, too intellectual. As for the Troggs:

Quite possibly they understood or ruminated about what they were doing on very limited levels. Because that was all that was necessary. Had they been a clot of intellectual sharpies hanging out in the London avant-garde scene, they would most likely have been a preening mess unless they happened to be the Velvet Underground who were a special case anyway. I really believe maybe you've gotta be out of it to create truly great rock 'n' roll, either that or have such supranormal, laser-nerved control over what you are consciously manipulating that it doesn't matter (the Rolling Stones) or be a disciplined artist with an abiding joy in teenage ruck jump music and an exceptionally balanced outlook (Lou Reed, Velvets), or chances right now are that you are almost certain to come out something far less or perhaps artistically more (but still less) than rock 'n' roll, or go under.

From here on in James Taylor and his self-obsessed singer/songwriter peers become the target of Bangs’ ire. But Bangs is soon back on the trail of Reg Presley and co., chasing down the real meaning of ‘66–5–4–3–2­–1’ – the countdown to penetration; the S&M overtones of ‘Girl in Black’ and the anal sex pleasures espoused in ‘I Want You to Come into My Life’ and, of course, the drug scene of ‘Night of the Long Grass’. He spends a good deal of time on ‘I Just Sing’ – ‘an anthem of loneliness and defiant individuality’ that he likens to the Stooges ‘No Fun’ but by this point in his essay the band’s catalogue is looking empty and Bangs is running on fumes.

I’m not a hardcore Troggs fan, other than the two Best of LPs, I’ve a handful of singles and the 3xCD set Archeology from 1992 that Bill Inglot, Bill Levenson, Andrew Sandoval and Ken Barnes put together, the first disc is mostly essential 1966–67 cuts, disc two is filled with not so essential selections from 1967–76. Disc three is the infamous Trogg Tapes . . . Part of the brilliance of Bangs’ take on their catalogue is to ignore the copious amount of filler they recorded, which were anything but explosions of groin thunder. Bangs name checks only twelve cuts (his editor Greg Shaw questioned this self-imposed limit – see above), each Best of has a dozen, and I think that is the perfect number for any Troggs set, so here’s my 2 x 6:

‘Gonna Make You’/’ ‘66–5–4–3–2­–1’/‘I Want You’/‘I Can’t Control Myself’/‘Anyway That You Want Me’/‘Girl in Black’//‘Night of the Long Grass’/‘Mona’/‘I Can Only Give You Everything’/‘Anyway That You Want Me’/ ‘I Want You to Come into My Life’/‘Give It to Me’/‘Louie Louie’.

I’ve dropped ‘Wild Thing’ because I don’t need to hear it again and I anyway prefer those rewrites like ‘I Want You’, not because they refine ‘Wild Thing’ but because they amplify what’s great about it. Bangs’ choice of  ‘With A Girl Like You’ and ‘I Just Sing’ fall short of my other selections because there’s too much Donovan and not enough Bo Diddley in them for my primitive taste buds even if, on the latter, the band put in a little bit of Yardbird-style faux-sitar licks.

Side one starts off in a hurry with the first three tracks but cools it down toward the end with ‘Anyway That You Want Me’ and ‘Girl in Black’. The last of those two songs comes in at just under 2 minutes and is a solid rip-off of The Who (and all the better for that),  while the cello and violin accompaniment on the former, at least in my imagination, following Bangs’ lead, leaks into John Cale’s contributions to the more melodic songs of the Velvet Underground and in Nico’s solo work. Side two stays in mood with ‘Night of the Long Grass’ followed by two non-single tracks, both something of beat standards. Bo’s ‘Mona’ is perhaps the longest cut from 66/7 that they recorded, it has an extended, by their standards, instrumental section but, unlike the Yardbirds say, they are not minded to do much with it; very Stooge-like in its focus, I think. Rob Tyner has said the MC5 recorded a cover of ‘I Can Only Give You Everything’ when the Shadows of Knight got the jump on them and released ‘Gloria’ so they turned to the next best thing in Them’s songbook. I don’t doubt the truth of that but Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith’s slashing guitar riff on the Five’s single is a straight lift from the Troggs’ version.

The last track on my imaginary compilation, which I’ll call I Want –You Want as it seems to adequately distil down the subject and theme of Reg’s songwriting (or maybe I should name it more simply Come), is ‘Louie Louie’ which is at the very heart of the matter. This album cut is by far the best of the period’s covers by a British band and leaves the Kinks’ tepid version far behind even if it doesn’t quite make the grade of the Sonics, whatever it’s a good place to end things.

In his inestimable study of ‘Louie Louie’, Dave Marsh ignores the Troggs version but he homes in on its most potent progeny, ‘Wild Thing’. Marsh writes,

Art it may not possess, but in its own way ‘Wild Thing’ is a rock ’n’ roll classic. The way it descends to lower depths with each bar is so astonishing, its unending thud so remorseless (the Troggs aren't playing this way because it's effective, even though it is – they're doing it because they can't think of anything else), that it just about takes your breath away, clouds your vision, brings unbidden moistness to the corners of your eyes. Of course, these symptoms might be nothing more than a neurological reaction to the axe murder of Western musical civilization, but let's cut the clowns some kind of break.                                                                            

Bangs would have agreed that the Troggs held no pretension to creating art but they were not clowns, idiot savants perhaps? I like to think of them as carnivalesque jesters capable of upending the courts of Procol Harum, Jethro Tull and the like – a band whose role was to cock-a-snook at those who thought themselves to be the band’s betters.

In January 1965 reader Alex Donald wrote a letter to Record Mirror about Richard Berry’s ur-text, or what he called a ‘pop yardstick’, ‘Louie Louie’:

British pop must be in a desperate state when the whole scene has revolved round one song – The Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie – for months. Besides completely copying the Kingsmen’s vocal and instrumental style, The Kinks rose to fame with two watery twists of this classic, then provided us all with endless amusement by recording it openly [released November 1964 on Kinksize Session EP]. Heinz had his second biggest hit ever with another disguised version of this R&B opus [‘Questions I Can’t Answer’] and recently it has been put out as a single on Philips by someone sounding like an in competent one-man band [Liverpool’s Rhythm And Blues Inc]. The parasites should at least leave off the newer American greats.

The Troggs version was yet to come, but I doubt Alex would have felt more kindly disposed toward it than he did to any other of the British covers. One of the issues conveniently ignored in Bangs’ piece was that, at least to the more hip British ears, the Troggs were always sort of behind the times, their parsing of ‘Louie Louie’ or Bo Diddley’s big beat had long been abandoned by the Kinks and Pretty Things. The Troggs in their company feel like an anachronism, or an echo.

Chris Britton’s slash and chime guitar patterns were very obviously modelled on Pete Townshend (checkout the perfected Who-like guitar chord that introduces the bridge in ‘I Can’t Control Myself’) giving a modern steel-sprung edge to the antediluvian thump of Ronnie Bond and Pete Staples’ rhythm section. Just as complementary to Britton’s guitar shards was Reg’s lewd thug sneer, which was often backed by a simple, most un-Who like, vocal refrain ‘da dah, da dah’ that would be varied, when the need for novelty called, from song to song by using ‘pah’, ‘bah’ or ‘lah’. The Troggs didn’t deal in subtlety, that was their appeal. They weren’t complex like the Who, full of contradictions, rather their method was, as Richard Meltzer called it, ‘blatant overstatement’ that Bangs more pertinently named ‘groin thunder’.

Postscript

In June 1973, Melody Maker’s Roy Hollingworth interviewed Reg Presley in Hyde Park. At age 31,  the singer was a veteran of the music scene, chubby and ruddy cheeked, he spends much of his time with Hollingworth making lewd comments about women who pass by. Once he was a pop star now he is simply ‘legendary’: the Troggs, were a ‘very heavy little band to be sure. “Punk music”, says Reg. “I like that word punk”’.

The band are capitalising on their fabled status and taking their act onto the university circuit:

‘Was at Hull the other week’, said Reg . . . ‘and after a couple of numbers we thought we’d turned up at the wrong gig. I mean people were screamin’ out and clappin’ and goin’ wild . . . I thought Reg old boy, what’s goin’ on here?’

In the State’s the Troggs’ reputation had been enhanced by the use of ‘Wild Thing’ on a Miller’s beer commercial and then the single  is ‘installed on the infamous Nobody’s jukebox, Bleeker Street’ and then word of mouth has done its turn and, ‘so’, writes Hollingworth, here [in New York] starts the Troggs Preservation Society’. Lester Bangs’ piece is not mentioned but Reg’s repeated and enthusiastic use of ‘punk’ to describe his band could hardly have come from a more local source; ‘Wild Thing’ and I Can’t Control Myself’ are ‘very punky records. Hollingworth explains:

. . . everything works in cycles. There’s a progression from a basic quality, through success to an art form – but then it must go back. It doesn’t of course go back to the exact basis it started from. It goes back having collected valid points during its progress. But if it didn’t go back ‘then rock will become as boring as jazz’, as Reg would have it.

‘If you could do anything this year’, Hollingworth summarises, ‘it would be to see The Troggs punking it out for the whole world and making it. It's people like Reg Presley that keep this business sane to a degree . . . ‘We're whap, whap, whap’, said Reg, ‘And I think that’s what it’s about’.

A few months before Hollingworth, NME were rolling with the Troggs as the Punk ur-text . . . December 16 1972

Teenage R 'n' R: The Shakin' Street Gazette

Launched in October 1973, the in-house SUNY Buffalo State student paper, The Shakin’ Street Gazette, (initially part of Strait) opened with an observation and a statement of intent – a manifesto almost, from editor Gary Sperrazza: teenage music, the punk muse, was back.

Sperrazza summarised what has been lost since The Beatles asked to hold your hand and second-generation rock ’n’ rollers edged into middle-age. Things had got baggy and elastic, the sound of ever longer guitar solos . . . commerce, sell-out, musical redundancy were all in play. But . . .

‘slowly but surely, there has been a trend developing concerning a rekindling of interest in pop consciousness/Teenage music in the 70s. A whole new generation has been weaned on the Beatles and the 60’s, as the Beatles were with Berry and the 50’s . . . There’s hope’.

In Part 2 Sperrazza surveyed the group scene, Brownsville Station, The Sweet (he loved The Sweet), Aerosmith and Slade were the tub thumpers, Badfinger, Raspberries and Blue Ash proffered pastiche, while Wackers and Big Star satirised and Blue, Curt Boetcher and David Beaver (who?) got mellow.

That list is hardly inspiring, but as the paper went through its 18 editions some of those names were dropped and a good many others, now very familiar, would be added.

Part 3 opens with the lyrics of Big Star’s ‘Thirteen’, a pitch perfect introduction. Alex Chilton’s band ‘suppressed masters of pop/rock and Teenage music. No matter how I fight the album always ends up on my turntable’.

Others interested in teenage music are sent off to read Greg Shaw (Lester Bangs would later climb on board)

‘Teenage music is based on a feeling: a feeling you can’t get from any other forms of music. It’s young, enthusiastic, fresh, vibrant, it makes you feel . . .  well, it just makes you feel. . . figure it out for yourselves’

One of the journal’s better, more amusing, writers, who went for that teenage feel, was Joe Fernbacher

Though the review dismisses the Dolls second album, the image of David Johanson on his arse is too good to pass by, fits so well with Fernbacher’s take on Too Much Too Soon’s shortcomings. Obviously a little enthralled by Richard Meltzer, Fernbacher is nevertheless a total pleasure to read, a lexicon of corporeal profanities:

That first LP was good. Real teenage rectal-mucous stuff . . .it kinda left you in the throes of impending formication horripilation . . . it was male dysmenorrehea . . . it was achromatic sonic devolution . . . it was so rock hard that it went nova, and slipped into anaphrodisiac . . . molah gay . . . coin operated hiney-rimmers. . . They were that and much more.

Fernbacher’s take on Silverhead’s 16 and Savaged is equally swamped in bodily exudations. . .

Some of Fernbacher’s later writings for Creem are archived (here)

The Punk Muse and its Killer Efficient Communicants – Richard Meltzer, Nick Tosches and Lester Bangs on The Stooges, or Michael Begnal’s Future/Now

Battle of the Bands: The Stooges vs. Led Zeppelin, International Times (April/May 1971)

Psychologists have fun trying to analyse rock ’n’ roll and the people who participate in that culture. They hope to connect what goes on there to what goes on in the rest of the world. They’re going to have a ball with The Stooges.

–      Detroit Free Press (September 1969)

It was not just psychologists who had a ball with The Stooges, rock critics who thought of themselves as being out of step with their peers also got their analytic chops in. The late 1960s early 1970s debate over whether rock music was worthy of intellectual effort or best left alone to struggle or drown in the primordial mire of its own making found its locus in The Stooges. Published in 1971, Twenty-Minute Fandangos And Forever Changes: A Rock Bazaar was the third of Jonathan Eisen’s edited collections, preceded by Age of Rock volumes one and two, published respectively in 1969 and 1970. All three volumes are symptomatic of the then ongoing intellectualisation of rock criticism, nothing more so than the inclusion of Richard Meltzer’s goofball obscurantism, equal parts erudition and claptrap, both confrontational and self-deprecating. For the avid readers of the new rock press, Meltzer played, to near perfection, the classroom boffin and clown – the tormentor of his teachers to the delight of his peers.

Twenty-Minute Fandangos included three fairly lengthy pieces on The Stooges, all focused on their three New York gigs at Ungano’s in August 1970 that followed on from the recording of their second album, Fun House, in May. Eisen included a long piece from Natalie ‘Stoogling’ Schlossman’s Popped, her Stooges’ newsletter, a discussion between Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd about Iggy’s prowess that he culled from a 1970 edition of Gay Power (also quoted at length in Dave Marsh’s piece on the band that ran first in Creem then in Zigzag) and an abridged version of Meltzer’s ‘Getting It Off And Taking It Off: Iggy and the Stooges’, which was first published in his biweekly outlet, ‘Rock and Raunch’, a column for the pornographic magazine Screw. The Stooges also enjoyed a double-page spread of photographs in the book’s plate section: Iggy giving the finger to his audience, courtesy of Lee Childers, and on all fours in ripped jeans by Dustin Pittman, both taken at one or other of the New York gigs. For a group still not much more than a cultish fad, such extensive coverage was indicative of the critical space The Stooges had assumed and been assigned. They were the avant-garde dum-dum band that critics could readily patronise, discuss in erudite terms or dismiss as bozos. Neither position being mutually exclusive.

After witnessing an Ugano’s show, New York’s doyen of rock critics, Lillian Roxon,  thought Iggy Stooge the ‘sexiest thing since Mick Jagger’. In her encyclopaedia of rock she described the band under their original name, ‘Psychedelic Stooges’, as having the spirit of W. C. Fields, the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers and Elvis Presley’ ­– a rock ’n’ roll comedy show. The Stooges were not apparently self-made, rather, ‘they were discovered in 1968’, she wrote, as if they were found in some Michigan backwater by a team of rock ’n’ roll anthropologists led by Prof. Danny Fields, Roxon’s good friend. Reviewing The Stooges’ October New York gigs at the Electric Circus, she wrote of Iggy:

His whole idea is to jolt the audience into a state of fear and shock. When he sings to a girl, or to the audience, he does not do it caressingly but with anger and violence. The girl doesn’t know whether she wants to mother him – or back away. Watching the indecision is part of the sadistic thrill of being in The Stooges audience . . .He seems to embody the violence around in America today.

The Stooges were rock’s pranksters, mocking its pretentions, and a broadcast from the dark side – a cipher for the rotten state of the nation. On the band’s third return to Manhattan in the early summer of 1971, Roxon wrote: ‘The Stooges are definitely the darlings of the avant-garde this year. It must be the spitting’. The ambiguity around how the band should be categorized or how they might be conceived was found in the question of whether they were a crass record company hype or a valid form of artistic expression? Whether synthetic or authentic? The conceptual task of answering the question was left to the critics in the audience. In this hot house atmosphere, as rock’s second generation began to mutate into its third iteration, Iggy’s clowning, his abuse of the audience, was most often received as performance art.

On the point about rock as social communiqué and critique, rock writers had no end of examples they could draw upon, not the least of which was The Stooges’ brothers, the MC5. The Motor City’s finest had been featured in Age of Rock 2 with a lengthy interview conducted by David Walley, first published in a July 1969 edition of Jazz & Pop:

Wayne: We need to talk about music because music really needs to be talked about. It’s the most personal thing. The important product.

David: All right, how is the energy level of music concerned with the MC5’s aims and goals? Is music a radicalizing tool?

Wayne: Oh, there’s no doubt about it. Music is, as you know, the killer efficient communication form. It feels good, it feels better than reading something.

David: It’s sort of like a cathartic effect.

Rob: (laughter) We’re from the Midwest – we don’t know any big words . . .

David: Where do you think this approach is going?

The rhetorical moves made by the band, from being highly self-conscious – ‘killer efficient’ communicants – to humorous self-effacement – ‘we don’t know any big words’ – is the common place in the era’s critical prose/pose. Humour was used to mask the pretentious, to track back from ideas that appeared to be over-reaching. Meltzer was past master of this game, its idiot savant. In a confected 1968 piece for Crawdaddy, republished in Age of Rock 2, he is supposedly being interviewed by Andy Warhol. The question and answer routine falls over itself as the concept of the ‘unknown tongue’ is discussed. Meltzer’s exercise is an absurd melange, a muddle of ideas that is at once a parody of the worst excesses of rock criticism and is the very thing itself. On The Stooges he wrote:

For every rock there’s a criticism and for every raunch there’s an epistemology. So raunch-wise, epistemologically speaking, my criticism of them is this: they dress real well, they have one shirt that’s pink with a shrunken head design, they have another that says Cocaine using the Coca-Cola logo, they have a lot of good shoes and some good boots. They’re what music is all about, going back even further than the first pair of blue suede shoes . . . [Iggy] learned the big beat from pounding on his tinker toys when he was just a youngster. THAT’S THE ONLY TRAINING YOU CAN GET FOR A LIFETIME OF ROCK AND ROLL, which makes the Stooges the only guys who know what they’re doing, including King Crimson.

Meltzer was not alone in his project of splicing the intellectual with the primitive, at its most reductive – The Stooges with King Crimson – it was a mongrelisation of the low and the high, the vulgar and the refined – Lester Bangs, somewhat, and Nick Tosches, wholeheartedly, joined in with similar flights of philosophical excess brought back to ground by earthy troglodyte pleasures.

Tosches’ oxymoronic intellectual primitivism took appreciable form with his sprawling essay ‘The Punk Muse – the lowdown on grease’, first published in Fusion and then collected in Twenty-Minute Fandangos. His point of departure was a critique of ‘honky bluesmen’, young white middle-class musicians who want to play black but can’t because they are not the authentic thing itself:

A straight Honky Music (Honk2) scene is a thing where you have a bunch of guys with teased hair up on a stage doing black blues, singing, with admirable ventriloquial skill, like Howlin’ Wolf in the throes of a Dexedrine orgasm, to a mob of suburban quasi-virgins who compensate for their fear of sex by substituting ‘The Lemon Song’ by Led Zeppelin at a distance of eighty paces for a good stiff dick in the dark meat.

Those who perform and listen to such acts of mimesis are ‘punks’, the honk squared is their muse. Contrary to this aspiring but lowly type is the ‘Grease’, exemplified by The Cleftones, who knew they would never know:

They knew that the secret of the universe was up in Betty’s drawers and in no one else’s. And they never got to know the secret. So they stand, left foot forward, in a timeless void, forever recreating that moment when Gnosis squirmed and said, ‘I’m not that kind of girl’. . . Grease tropes like that, sublimating the electric theme of unrequited love to dazed unrequited hard-on and back again, cultivating it with the lethal dronings of the honk fuck ritual choreography, are heavier and deadlier than anything the Stooges are capable of calculating. That’s because it comes from the heart (id) and not from the ego; poetry is puked not plotted.

As he overlooked Margate sands, T. S. Eliot would have been at odds with Tosches’ formulation, but, with their spitting, The Stooges would have slipped right in alongside The Cleftones. Except, on Tosches terms their artifice excludes them from the canon of Grease. The Cleftones were ‘speaking from the heart’, he wrote, ‘from the inside out as opposed to the I-wish-this-were-the-inside out’, which is where The Stooges did fit in. They are punks, a lesser form, lower on the scale to grease because they are a confection.

Tosches may have rejected The Stooges as ego not id, but the band were a good mirror to his own aesthetic:

Other great Honky Bluesmen of the Golden Age of Classical Grease were the Clovers, who drenched their melodies with the rhythms of the collective foyerfuck of a generation, bead-rolling the surroundings of sex memories and inducing minor key orgasms in parking lots throughout the nation, and the later female vowel-jobbers, Shirelles and Shangri-Las (although they are, in a strictly chronological sense, denizens of the Early Decadence), holy queens of greasefuck poesy, transmitting osmotic tau-waves of epiphanous pussy stench through silver-sequined lamé and jet-black stretch pants, moaning at America's youth for a transubstantial clit-strafe in the time-warp of adolescence. Kiss me there, Billy, kiss me there . . . (Ronettes, early liberators of Sleaze, unsublimated sex) fingertips (odors)    . . .  There, Billy, there . . .

Tosches’ vulgar turns are as learned as any stanza in The Wasteland, as are his arcane allusions and his shifts from the vernacular to the cultivated, from the profane to the sanctified. Yet Tosches is no more T. S. Eliot than The Stooges are King Crimson.

Opposed to the ‘Classical Grease’ were ‘THE NITWITS. Alias the Assholes. Those who sweetened sex. The Valentines, Playmates, Penguins’. But the Grease could not be suppressed or sanitised, it rolled on. To make his point, Tosches takes a detour into the realm of mathematics, into ‘The Metalflaked Alephteriaries’. The compound of ‘aleph’ and ‘teriaries’ belonged to Tosches alone, but no one, least of all the author, expected the reader to stop, pause and consider what was before them, only to wonder at the display of erudition as he traverses three forms of infinity. His final formation:

One who deals in visions, that is, one who perceives all the infinite rays of one object, or objects of conjugal positions (intersecting rays), is an Alephteriary, someone like the Heartbeats or Eza Pound or Andy Warhol, someone who can make dirt chairs by spilling it the right way. A metalflaked alephteriary is someone who can handle the infinite but, nevertheless, has a little plastic skull on the rear deck of his Olds that, for a right turn, blinks red in the right eye, and, for a left turn, red in the left eye.

Of The Heartbeats 1956 recording ‘A Thousand Miles Away’ – ‘an amazing catatonic blues, which rivals any extant Samuel Beckett soliloquy, with its eternal pledge of “coming home soon”’, Tosches wrote, ‘The basis of the song is the perpetration of desolation by the emission of artificial emotions, the absence of their non-artificial emissions dictating psychotic existentialism’. If this seems more than a two-minute street corner pop record can bear, Tosches provided the (faux) footnote in support: ‘5. See Andrew Duras, “The Year Dionysos Never Showed: A Study of the Heartbeats”, American Journal of Honk/Hieratic Communication, XII: ii (October 1961), pp. 92–117.’ Nothing to argue with there then.

‘The Fall of the House of Grease’, its ‘decadent period’, ran from circa 1958 to 1965, from the tv debut of 77 Sunset Strip to Alan Freed’s death, it was the age of Edd ‘Kookie’ Byrnes, Paul Anka and Leslie Gore. It was a time of superhype, of ‘punk media’, of Fabian and Dick Clark. In this time zone, The Beatles and Bob Dylan emerged, the latter ‘swept up in the then-big folk punk fad’. For Tosches, Dylan’s catalogue up and until Highway 61 Revisited ‘had perpetuated some of the honkiest bullshit in the history of American music. He had sat there with peach fuzz on his chin, singing like a hardened Negro loner about cold death’. That was the outside looking in, all ego, but then with Highway ‘he saw the whole derangement he’d been involved in and he began to spew out things from his own heart, all those things he used to pretend weren’t in him. . . Take ‘From a Buick 6’, a near perfect song, as good as anything the Heartbeats had ever done. Pure alephteriary’. He followed this with Blonde on Blonde, ‘one of the best rock albums of the decade’. The Beatles were similarly late developers into the state of alephteriary – ‘who the fuck wants to hold somebody’s hand?’ – but the combined effect was to win over ‘hordes of Cerebrum Groupies to become intellectual bodyguards of rock, spouting their dissertations of fantastic spiff genius into the nation’s offset presses and lecture halls . . . The Beatles made rock a punk religion’. They turned rock from a ‘calmative’ experience, you could rip it up on Saturday night but for the rest of the week you conformed. In revolt against this order, The Beatles said the rock experience could last seven days a week and ‘incited, albeit mildly, the feeling of discontent’. In doing so they paved the way for the ‘truly culturally revolutionary groups – the Jefferson Airplane, the Fugs, Country Joe and the Fish, even to a certain extent the Doors’.

Grease is the divine state of being, punk is the unworthy aspirant to that holy order, a rank acolyte. Those who solemnised rock, the cerebrum groupies, were punk critics. Meltzer, Bangs and Tosches were the grease who, from the heart, could see beyond the finite. But ‘punk’ and ‘grease’ were hardly separable from each other any more than the id is from the ego, or pure from impure. Writing in 1969 for the Detroit Free Press, Mike Gormley tacitly pulled together the cerebral and the somatic, the intellectual and the primitive, The Stooges were his test case:

The music they play has been described as stupid rock at its best. Iggy calls it dirty music and the group’s manager, Jimmy Silver, says ‘it’s dance music, fun music for kids’.

Iggy expanded on his definition. ‘The music we play is like a ritual we go through. It sounds like elemented rock but it’s actually based on classical and folk themes that are ancient. There’s a kind of bizarreness to it because we felt bizarre. When we play, a lot of things come out intentionally, so that’s the basic thing. It may be the reason our music is extremely moody. It has very simple moods to it.

Iggy as punk prophet and muse, The Stooges a greaser’s manifesto. Tosches wanted the purity of an untrammelled id, his Heartbeats, but they are a fantasy, his own honky blues; he was on surer ground with extolling the impurity of Dylan and Highway 61 Revisited.  With The Stooges, Tosches’ had tried to outdo Meltzer and Bangs, dismissing the band they had lauded to establish his hip credentials. In doing so Tosches ignored his own equation: punk + grease = metalflake alephteriary. Such a formulation meant you could convene with Iggy Stooge to testify on the infinite power of the Heartbeats, the one didn’t exclude the other. They were co-dependents. Meantime, without a care for the infinite, Ron Asheton, posed as the ultimate greaser punk in his pink Star of Hollywood shrunken head shirt, Iron Cross and white buck shoes, and pressed the keys on the jukebox selecting once more The Yardbirds’ ‘I’m a Man’.

What the band has to go on is showmanship. Right now their style is so unique that success comes easily.

But Iggy doesn’t seem to care either way.

‘The Stooges were together for a whole year before we even had a gig, and nobody even thought of us as a band. But I didn’t care, literally didn’t care, and I don’t care now. I don’t exalt some format of the band and I don’t exalt its success. If I want some success, and I happen to be in the mood to accept some success, sure, I’ll take it. I’ll grab for it, or maybe throw it away, or maybe I’ll kiss it . . .’

And that’s the word, straight from Iggy.

–      ‘A Painful Exercise in Pure Volume’, Honolulu Star-Bulletin (October 12, 1970)

Lester Bangs didn’t make the cut for Twenty-Minute Fandangos, his two glory shots ‘Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung’ and ‘James Taylor Marked For Death’ were published in the same year as Eisen’s volume, but his two-part review of The Stooges’ Fun House, published in November and December 1970 editions of Creem might have been a late contender. Perhaps it was and Eisen decided that he already had enough Stooges. Whatever, it so closely followed the lines laid by Meltzer and Tosches to suggest it wasn’t because the editor was opposed to Bangs’ sermonising.

‘Of Pop and Pies and Fun: A Program for Mass Liberation in the Form of a Stooges Review, or, Who’s the Fool?’ opens with ‘Anatomy of Disease’ or the critical reaction to The Stooges, who have been abused, derided, condescended to and have faced ‘outright hostility’. Their stage act made for good copy but is too easily dismissed, wrote Bangs, with an ‘instant wag putdown’. Their music appeared so simple anyone should be able to play it, he continued, ‘that so few can produce any reasonable facsimile, whatever their abilities, is overlooked’ and, besides, he added, John Cale got the credit, for whatever it was worth, for their debut. As ‘theme music for suburban high school kids freaked out on reds and puberty and fantasies of nihilistic apocalypses’, The Stooges are scorned and dismissed. They carried within themselves the same sickness that was at large in the culture as a whole, ‘a crazed quaking uncertainty, an errant foolishness that effectively mirrors the absurdity and desperation of the times.’ But if they were rotten with disease, they also carried ‘a strong element of cure, a post derangement sanity’. The critical positions ranked against The Stooges were accepted by Bangs, the hostility shown toward them, the accusations of being mailable amateurs, their sickness, these things were not refuted by him but returned as necessary attributes of rock ’n’ roll: the core of the matter. . . To reject what The Stooges represented was to reject rock ’n’ roll itself.

The Stooges are as important as any band working today, Bangs wrote, but don’t call what they do ‘art or you may wind up with a deluxe pie in the face.

What it is, instead, is what rock and roll at heart is and always has been, beneath the stylistic distortions the last few years have wrought. The Stooges are not for the ages – nothing created now is – but they are most implicitly for today and tomorrow and the traditions of two decades of beautifully bopping, manic, simplistic jive.

The Stooges could not be faulted for being what they were, a continuation of rock ’n’ roll’s illegitimacy. The critical establishment were not wrong in their observations, but their value judgement was skewed, distorted and based on bad faith.

To get to a point where Bangs felt he could explain this phenomenon he has first to clear the foul air that surrounded the release of their first album and the hype that surrounded British blues musicians and critical incantations like ‘supergroup’ and ‘superstar’ – Tosches’ Honk2 – that have bewitched and befuddled ‘your poor average kid, cruisin’ addled down the street in vague pursuit of snatch or reds or rock mag newstands’ who otherwise had ‘no truck with the Stooges’. It’s that kid, that malcontent, who Bangs intended to ‘liberate’.

A ‘pre-eminently American kid’, Iggy Stooge was a surrogate for the teenager Bangs was honing in on. Both singer and kid suffer from confusion, doubt and uncertainty, from inertia and boredom – ‘suburban pubescent darkness’. But was this a theme worth pursuing? asked Bangs. Did the travails of a suburban punk measure up to the Black Panthers confrontation with the ‘new social systems’? Comparatively an irrelevance? Weren’t the Stooges simply trading in adolescent caterwauling? And wasn’t Iggy Stooge ‘a blatant fool’? Bangs embraced the argument, and again returned the principal charge of Iggy as clown. He was indeed a fool, but better the fool than the emperor in his new glad rags was how Bangs read the scenario.

If the hype, the record industry, is a joke, cosmic or otherwise, then being a fool is the only legitimate response. If not, ‘fantasies of a puissant “youth culture”, would collapse, and with it would collapse the careers of the hyped talentless nonentities who breed off it. Can you imagine Led Zeppelin without Robert Plant conning the audience” “I’m gonna give you every inch of my love” – he really gives them nothing, not even a good-natured grinful “Howdy-do” – or Jimmy Page’s arch scowl of supermusician ennui?’. Iggy is Bangs’ court jester, an impertinent figure capable of pricking the airs and vanities of his betters by hurling a cream pie at them. He does this as readily as he succumbs to the indignities his audience imposes by return:

It takes courage to make a fool of yourself, to say, ‘See, this is all a sham, this whole show and all its floodlit drug-jacked realer-than-life trappings, and the fact that you are out there and I am up here means not the slightest thing’. Because it doesn’t. The Stooges have that kind of courage, but few other performers do.

For Bangs The Stooges had the strength to ‘meet their audience on its own terms’ and not respond with ‘solemn grimaces of artistic angst, no sir’.

Iggy is like a matador baiting the vast dark hydra sitting afront him – he enters the audience frequently to see what's what and even from the stage his eyes reach out searchingly, sweeping the joint and singling out startled strangers who're seldom able to stare him down. It's your stage as well as his and if you can take it away from him, why, welcome to it. But the King of the Mountain must maintain the pace, and the authority, and few can. In this sense lg is a true star of the rarest kind – he has won that stage, and nothing but the force of his own presence entitles him to it.

As to the music it is, wrote Bangs, ‘monotonous and simple on purpose’, ‘mindless rhythmic pulsation . . . providing effective hypnotic counterpoint to the sullen plaint of Iggy’s words’. Their pristine simplicity is compared to the one-finger organ drone of Question Mark and the Mysterians ’96 Tears’ – the ur-text and origin story for The Stooges. Bangs has a profound love and respect for the experimentation of The Yardbirds and The Who, the use of feedback and noise which finds its ultimate locus in the Velvet Underground’s ‘White Heat/White Noise’ but the end result of this sonic experimentation was not liberation but the dead end of ‘Art-rock’ embodied in Sgt. Pepper. Things had taken a wrong turn somewhere back down the line, so Bangs was intent on refiguring the map’s trig points.

Bangs argued that the route out from behind and around this problem was to marry the simple four-four beat of two or three chord rock ’n’ roll and its monotonous melodies with the complexity of free jazz. ‘The Stooges’ music is like that.’ wrote Bangs:

It comes out of an illiterate chaos gradually taking shape as a uniquely personal style, emerges from a tradition of American music . . . that a band can start out bone-primitive, untutored and uncertain, and evolve into a powerful and eloquent ensemble. . . rock is mainly about beginnings, about youth and uncertainty and growing through and out of them. And asserting yourself way before you know what the fuck you’re doing. . . It can’t grow up – when it does, it turns into something else.

After working through the impact (and misfires) of Fun House, Bangs concluded that the Stooges are ‘super-modern’ but definitely not Art. They are a put-on, a joke, but one that reveals the sickness at the heart of things and that revelation comes on like a threat, but a ‘threat that is cathartic, a real cool time is had by all, and the end is liberation’.

Detroit Free Press (December 26, 1969)

When Greil Marcus pulled together his collection of Bangs’ work he opened with ‘Carburetor Dung and Psychotic Reactions’ and followed it with a late 70s consideration of Astral Weeks, both fell under the heading ‘Testaments’: Bangs as advocate for a form of rock ’n’ roll as adolescent discontent matched with his empathetic side. But the Van Morrison interregnum does not last long before it is followed in turn by the ‘Blowing It Up’ section with the lengthy Fun House review and the even longer ‘James Taylor Marked For Death’ screed/manifesto.

‘Carburetor Dung’ opens with Bangs acting the role of Creem’s Uncle Remus for third-generation rock kids: ‘Run here, my towhead grandchildren, and let this geezer dandle you upon his knee’. His tale of yore concerns The Yardbirds ’65 before the rot set in with their ‘pretentious and overblown’ progeny of ‘emaciated fops called Led Zeppelin’. His story is part wallow in nostalgia, detailing the impact the Yardbirds had on numerous aspirant players, Bangs wrote: ‘and then punk bands started cropping up who were writing their own songs but taking the Yardbirds sound and reducing it to this kind of goony fuzztone clatter . . . oh, it was beautiful, it was pure folklore, Old America, and sometimes I think those were the best days ever’. Bangs felt the same psychotic reaction as that which had inspired The Shadows of Knight and The Count Five, but in his fantasy it doesn’t end in art and Sgt Pepper. In his alternative history the Count Five continue to record and ineptitude remains a righteous attribute . . . a refusal to conform to the mundane, to kowtow to refined notions of good taste, to grow up.

Bangs’ follow up piece, ‘James Taylor Marked for Death’ switched out The Yardbirds for The Troggs and where Amon Duul had picked up Bangs’ torch of ineptitude in this latest iteration it was passed onto, of course, The Stooges. What changed was that the flame had dimmed, the light he was shining on the juvenile malcontent was receding:

The MC5 might have put you ‘flat on your back’ with ‘nipple stiffners’ and ‘wham, bam, thank you ma’am’ jams, the Stooges might tie you up in feedback wires while Iggy performed unthinkable experiments on your mind and body, even the Doors might have given you a crawly gust or two, but the Troggs eschewed all trendy gimmicks and kinky theatrics, delivered their proposition with sidewalk directness and absolute sincerity, and came out for any ear that half listens the most powerfully lust-driven outfit in white rock ’n’ roll then or now.

Between the reminisces about teenage fumbling and sex fantasies, Bangs explored what it means for a band like The Stooges to channel these adolescent urges post-the lust driven and feedback paroxysm  of The Troggs and The Yardbirds:

I ain’t as desperate as I sound, but ‘Wild Thing’ is rock ’n’ roll at its most majestic and for all the volume of product we don’t have any ‘Wild thing’ these days – a few things come close, maybe a Velvets ‘Head Held High’ or Stooges ‘Little Doll’, but even these are created from a standpoint of intellectualized awareness and consequent calculation.

The imposition of self-reflection in rock ’n’ roll meant the ground had changed, what once fuelled The Troggs is today but a simulacra or at best a waning echo of the real thing. In his introduction to Richard Meltzer’s The Aesthetics of Rock, Greil Marcus considers the explosive moment of Sgt. Pepper that Meltzer is concerned with as the ‘apotheosis of rock-as-art’, which was ‘contradicted by rock's existence as no more than a brute actualization of everyday life.

With Sgt. Pepper, art-was-dead because it suddenly ceased to exist as a realm separate from everyday life – as a unit of significance distant from it. The record was so alive, so surprising, that people suddenly lived their everyday lives with a new intensity. They walked down their streets as if they had never seen them before. They didn't necessarily connect that experience to the appearance of Sgt. Pepper, just as they had not necessarily connected the dulling of their streets to the presence of bad songs, or the vitalization of those streets to the presence of good ones. . . The death of art is what rock 'n' roll, as the brute actualization, had aimed for from the beginning; from the beginning, rock ’n’ roll had meant to change ‘art’ into everyday speech . . . But then the triumph was forgotten; art went back to ‘art’; everyday life went back to banality.

In his review of Fun House and in ‘Carburetor Dung’, Bangs pushed back against that return to the quotidian binary of art and life, he wanted that moment where the two are fused together, or at least the possibility of that fusion as with his fantasy of primitive rock melded together with free jazz, but in ‘James Taylor Marked for Death’ he recognised, like Meltzer, like Tosches and like Marcus, that the act of synthesis changed everything, moreover, even if the streets return to a state of mundanity and art is returned to the gallery, that moment can never be regained, it has passed as certainly as the greaser teen years Bangs never got over, all that is left, as Tosches called it, is punk.

***

Detroit Free Press (September 21, 1969)

The Stooges are now firmly established in the rock canon in ways none of their early advocates would have prophesised (or would have wanted) yet in many ways the band’s first critics were as responsible for this state of affairs as anyone, their philosophical disquisitions, whether parodic or not, would leave a mark on a generation or two of writers to come. They promised that The Stooges were always, and in all ways, a more interesting prospect to consider than any other of their peers and contemporaries – a shape shifting object of fascination. The Stooges now, however, are fixed in aspic as the ultimate cult band – a connoisseur’s obsession. Fifty-odd years after the fact they are a familiar yet rare pleasure, available in all formats yet cliquishly exclusive. As the magazine articles, blog posts and books on the Stooges proliferate, as the bootlegs get turned into deluxe reissues and the few feet of extant live footage gets stitched into hagiographic documentaries we have never known more about this band and yet never understood less about them – are psychologists still having a ball with The Stooges? When Bangs and co. were obsessing the Stooges they were not yet a spent force, their potential to make an impression on critics and audiences alike was still in play. After the fact, how to regain that vitality, that tantalising sense of potential? Attempting to capture those moments-in-time is what any decent account or history of the band must reach for if it is going to be more than just another sacrament at the altar of their cult.

This is why Michael S. Begnal’s The Music and Noise of the Stooges, 1967–71: Lost in the Future (Routledge, 2022) is such a welcome intrusion into the stilled debate. It is an unapologetically academic volume and, as such, returns things to where Bangs, Tosches and  Meltzer left off. This is regardless of whether you see their ramblings as pastiche, pseudo-intellectual, pretentious or as the gospel truth. Meltzer, anyway, would surely enjoy Begnal’s use of European high theory to pull open the mummified corpse of the band to once more let loose the reverberations.

Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Attali and Theodor Adorno are Begnal’s key co-conspirators helping him to unwind the tension the band embodied as avant-garde practitioners and as music industry product. You can imagine other theorists and other methods to negotiate the continuum between art and pop, the high and the low, the vulgar and the refined as well as other contexts to make meaning out of The Stooges (a more thoroughgoing take on teen-trash consumption as practiced, in particular, by Ron Asheton – that pink Star of Hollywood shrunken head shirt –  would have been in my ideal study), but what’s important is the debate itself that Begnal is stirring up, not his particular methodology. If the theory sticks in your craw, if you won’t meet this scholar at least halfway, then we are stuck with The Stooges as empty godheads at whose shrine we can only offer up more and more arcane pieces of information and newly discovered facts that lead only to more solipsistic inanities, fetishistic practices and smothering sermons on why the band matter to you rather than on the matter of the band itself.

Lost in the Future moves through three key phases in the band’s careening – their initial adventures in Michigan’s art spaces, ballrooms and clubs as the Psychedelic Stooges; the second phase is the two LPs they made for Elektra and the third is dedicated to an unrealised third album. With the implosion of the band in 1971 Begnal ends his disquisition, but a second volume on the Raw Power era is promised.

A noise-art ensemble without melodic intent or song structure and sans the mundane line-up of guitar, bass and drums, the Psychedelic Stooges valued improvisation and playfulness that involved found objects and domestic appliances – producing a subversion of the principles ­– competence and respect for the generic rules of music making and performance – that the groups, which The Stooges, bottom of the bill, supported, held to be irreducible. Whatever the worth of their art practice, in this iteration The Stooges were so far out they could never be appropriated and packaged by the music industry, until they were . . .

Shucking off the psychedelic tag freed the band of a redundant signifier of their self-identification with rock’s progressive element that by 1968 had turned experiment into conformity. By then ‘psychedelic’ no longer carried an element of provocation nor adventure the band obviously intended it to have, but having a shortened name that continued to pay homage to the Three Stooges, purveyors of the lowest form of comedy imaginable – a dumbshow of physical clowning without an iota of self-reflection or artistic pretension – now that was inflammatory. Sitting outside of both rock’s mainstream and art culture, Begnal argues, The Stooges found purpose in bridging the divide between independence and a collective approach toward creativity, as members within a band and as a band unique among their peers.

When The Stooges entered into a relationship with Elektra records that channel between the communal and the individual was stress-tested. Begnal plots the line of tension that was revealed between the demand that the band conform to the marketplace and their attempt to hold true to the principles they had fashioned for themselves:

Having evolved from their original freeform, experimental approach into something more recognizably rock, there is still the affirmation that, even though Iggy takes the role of frontman, the shared ‘group voice’ – forged in the process of a mutually unfolding artistic evolution – predominates. In opposition to the machine-like aspects of both the hit-driven music industry and a regimented life of factory work, the Stooges’ music centralizes the creative development of organic human interaction.

Against the odds, the first album successfully negotiated this predicament, argues Begnal, but was it a repeatable experience and was that repetition even desirable? This predicament was especially charged, Begnal writes, given that the band ‘were committed to ongoing change and evolution’ and that their ‘deliberately anti-pop stance’ had ‘put them in a particularly difficult position in terms of building a wider audience and selling records’.

Analysing the creation of Fun House is the book’s centre piece, Begnal has clearly listened with dedication and care to the boxed set of the Los Angeles recording sessions. His exploration and evaluation of the development of individual songs and the album overall is erudite and refined, wherein earlier chapters his ideas tumble out in a rush, here he gives them ample breathing space that allows him to take up a more nuanced set of critical positions. His analysis illuminates the problem all bands face if they want to make records for a major company and not compromise on their vision. The conformists, Begnal argues,

can write slickly produced pop ditties, or. If they still insist on projecting some sort of countercultural or rebellious image or sound, they need to make sure it’s emptied of any real danger to the existing order of things, so that it too can be packaged and marketed successfully – recuperated, as Attali puts it (or assimilated, as Gioia puts it). Bands that don’t do one or the other can therefore be easily dismissed, market dynamic likely guaranteeing they will soon disappear from the scene. Most listeners don’t even need to be told to see them as ‘noise’ or as not actually ‘music’, because their tastes have already been formed by this same process.

Beyond the two albums, Begnal dedicates significant space and thought to their live performances, mustering a superb array of primary accounts (if you don’t like his methodology then you can at least harvest the fruits of his bibliographic labour) that effort pays off in what for me was the true delight of the book, his analysis of what would have been their third album if Elektra hadn’t pulled the plug. Concert reviews and interviews with witnesses are arraigned alongside his listening to the Easy Action set You Don’t Want My Name You Want My Action that documented in lo-fi form the five piece band with James Williamson, joining Ron Asheton, on guitar, across four shows from April/May 1971.

While steeped in nihilistic ‘thirst for destruction’, the new songs were not about death per se but rather signify in retrospect the moment of their creation, the desperation that the Stooges must have felt, the intimations of potential extinction, and a strange kind of joy at the same time.

But that potential album, as he writes, was lost to the future, a what could have been that keeps the story of The Stooges still moving ahead, still in virtual if not actual progress. Begnal ends his account on the cusp of tomorrow with the disintegration of the original band and their subsequent consecration – an act of fan based sanctification as it was of a music industry assimilation of their non-conformity, the taming of their radical intent.  And yet,

Concomitantly, there is still power in the Stooges’ work that remains and comes through every time we listen to their records. Though they may have often been perceived as ‘lost in the future’ in their own time, and finally animated as ‘classic’ in our time, the raw particularity of their music and the uncompromising nature of their vision continue to prompt us to reconsider what it means to make non-commercial art in a consumerist society.

Begnal’s book is in itself eloquent testimony to the fact that The Stooges continue to inspire listeners, those among us who are not content to accept instant gratification but instead join with the psychologists in having a ball with The Stooges as we follow the lines laid down by Lester Bangs that guarantee a real cool time with liberation as our goal.

Anyway Anyhow Anywhere – Intensity and Abstraction

Before Nik Cohn, Patrick Kerr was the Pop Scene columnist for Queen magazine. A choreographer on Ready Steady Go he clearly had his finger on the pulse of what the nation’s teens were getting into . . . He finished his June 2, 1965 piece with a tip-off on the band’s latest release with its ‘weird sound effects’. Two weeks later he provided a fuller appreciation – ‘on stage they are without doubt the wildest’ and they are the world’s ‘first “Op-Art” group’.

Five years later and the single seemed like ancient history, but for Creem’s Lester Bangs’ AAA’s ‘intensity and abstraction’ – a perfect summation – deserved to be resurrected. When everyone else was busy with the rock ‘n’ roll revival, Bangs had became the key archivist for sixties pop of the noisome and psychotic persuasion .

Meanwhile, in Youtubeland a sometimes great sometimes poor quality video of The Who making merry for Canadian TV has turned up . . . what a beautifully ugly racket they made. According to Andy Neill and Matt Kent’s bible, bits from ‘Substitute’, ‘Baby Don’t You Do It’, ‘See See Ride'r’ and ‘My Generation’ can be heard. The gig was at WestminsterTechnical College on Saturday, 9 July 1966.

My thanks to Dave Laing for the tip-off on this little explosion in SW1

Rock 'n' Roll's Evolutionary Tree: James Taylor v Groin Thunder

In March 1971 Time put James Taylor on its cover and inside explained that his popularity was the result of the ‘fading out of ear-numbing, mind-blowing acid rock’ and ‘the softening of the youth revolution’. What was being listened to on campuses across the nation was a’ kind of Americana rock’, which celebrates such things as

country comfort, Carolina sunshine, morning frost in the Berkshires. What all of them seem to want most is an intimate mixture of lyricism and personal expression—the often exquisitely melodic reflections of a private ‘I’

Which was why James Taylor was ‘marked for death’ by Lester Bangs who thought the future lay in the past. Pop was evolving into the new chamber music and what he wanted was more groin thunder . . .

The Troggs don’t feature in the magazine’s family tree of rock, Reg Presley never evolved into a balladier like Van Morrison, he never tapped his inner well of melancholy. Such desperate times called for a Manifesto for Third Generation Rock ‘n’ Roll . . . 1972 would right so many wrongs.