Big Star – Punk Rock 1974

Ah, the thrill of the chance encounter on a wet n’ cold Wednesday afternoon while hiding out in the warmth of a British Library reading room. I had been distractedly flicking through old NMEs when a thumbnail photograph of Big Star pulled me up short. It was illustrating a 1974 article on overlooked American acts, among them Steely Dan, Todd Rundgren, Jackson Browne, Bachman Turner Overdrive, Joe Walsh and the like. But the piece kicked off with Big Star, true unknowns . . .

 This is a band that just won't budge despite the flatteringest reviews imaginable, much of which puzzlement is rooted in the poor distribution job by Stax on behalf of Ardent – mini-concern based in Memphis and run by ex-DJ John Fry.

With the departure of guitarist/writer/vocaliser Chris Bell following the recording of “Big Star 1” some playing-gaps have begun to show on the just-issued “Radio City”, an exotic, meandering production that needs compound listening before it takes hold, but they still do beautifully as a trio.

The band now consist of leader tortured punk-genius Alex Chilton (former Box Tops chieftain), with Jody Stephens on plug drums and Andy Hummel on bass. "Big Star I" remains highly recommended – an immense pop beauty rotating across the breadth of the Sixties' experience, through The Byrds, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin

“Radio City" in probably just as great, but we're still getting into it and we’ll be coming back to it by and by.

This March 1974 sub was most likely written by Andrew Tyler (though Nick Kent would be a good second guess). Promises to follow something up that came to nothing were fairly commonplace in the NME so expecting more after Tyler had done his duty and seen if ‘compound listening’ would pay dividends seemed unlikely to be shared with readers. A week later, however, we have his full review and it’s a beauty, not only because he catches what’s so great about this album but also because he takes the still forming notion of ‘punk’ and attempts to give it some shape and substance. Not as one might expect around Iggy and the Stooges or the New York Dolls, but Alex Chilton two or three years before he was kicking around the Lower East Side and hanging out with the Cramps.

To cap it all he puts ‘New Wave’ together with ‘punk’ in his first sentence and in the second paragraph is calling ‘punk’ last year’s thing. In Tyler’s definition punk is a badge of authenticity worn by ‘true rebels and outlaws’:

 So what do we ask of a rock ’n’ roll outlaw? Only that he doesn't grovel for an audience or the industry, that he moves in a kind of agonised innocence and stays clear of gurus and lefties.

 Tyler’s punk outlaw will be a ‘musical visionary’ but not one parlaying some ‘Arts Supplement bilge’. Chilton fits his bill, ‘Big Star leap past everyone of their American and British contemporaries and set Chilton up as one of the Great Misunderstoods of punk rock’. He celebrates Chilton’s ‘snarl’, ‘nervous raw voice’ and ‘untampered arrangements’ against the ‘studio technicalities’ and reverence of the band’s debut. Radio City is full of a kind of bravado that has been missing since Revolver, he writes (and Nick Kent concurs).

What Tyler has to say about individual tracks you can read for yourself as you ponder the idea of Chilton as ‘tortured punk-genius’. Like with Big Star the history of punk rock could benefit from some compound thinking

For further reading that goes way beyond this footnote head over to Grant McPhee’s deep archeological dig into Big Star’s legend HERE

Postscript

October 1973, NME Teazers column suggests Slade to cover Big Star’s ‘Don’t Lie To Me’ . . . Fabulous

An Evening Recital of New Music – MC5 (May 1968)

Mid-way through 1977, when all the reissues of Stooges and MC5 albums were cluttering up the review sections of the British weekly music press, Miles of Better Books fame (at least I think it is him) offered his take on the Mighty Five and the claim du jour they were Punk’s progenitors – he counter-asserts they were a ‘hippy band’ and Exhibit No.1 in his defence is a ‘Programme’ (English spelling for extra cultural capital) for ‘An Evening Recital of New Music as performed by Detroit’s Own MC5 at the Grande Ballroom May 10 & 11, 1968’.

As a bit of memorabilia it would be nice to own but as a historical document I think it fascinating, produced between ‘Looking At You’ b/w ‘Borderline’ – ‘latest underground killer single’ – and Kick Out the Jams recorded five months later.

In the set they would play in October only ‘Kick Out the Jams’, ‘Come Together’ and ‘Borderline’ from the 14 listed as to be performed in May made it onto the album. Many like ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’, ‘I Put a Spell On You’, ‘Ice Pick Slim’, ‘I Believe to My Soul’ and ‘Upper Egypt’ have subsequently been made available on Total Energy discs, so perhaps there are few surprises here, but seeing just how dependent they were at this stage in their development on covers of familiar blues and R&B numbers – Larry Williams ‘Slow Down’ used ‘by revolutionaries to dissolve inhibitions, cause fucking in the streets & give you “sickness in the mind”’– and an obligatory Dylan tune, suggest they, like The Yardbirds, were struggling to create their own songs while still cleaving something wholly original out of the found material.

‘Riot, Punk and Revolution Rock' . . .’ (March 1977)

I’d love to hear what they did with John Coltrane’s ‘Tungi’ [sic. I think that should be ‘Tunji’] – I also love that they give you the album cat. no’s. for both the album’s mono and stereo versions; as they do too for Pharoah Saunders’ Tauhid. From that album comes ‘Upper Egypt’, which they don’t directly cover but use for inspiration (you can hear a version on the CD of the Sturgis Armory show from June 1968). It works in the same way that ‘Starship’ would draw on Sun Ra, I suppose, or ‘Ice Pick Slim’ pulls on Archie Shepp.

I don’t know how common it was to produce a printed programme for a rock concert in 1968, I’m guessing this is a one-off. It does seem antithetical to being a high energy rock n’ roll combo that the Five as Punk forbearers were being credited with; it is certainly pretentious though it is not embarrassing, as the NME editorial intervention calls it. I think of it as a testimonial to the band’s genuine ambition to expand the music they loved in ways that stayed true to both rock n’ roll and to the moment they were working within.

 ‘Black to Comm’, the programme noted, had been part of the band’s set since 1964 and was responsible for forcing out their original rhythm section, because:

In those days it was difficult to relate to new forms. The people could dig exaggerations of existing forms but new founding concepts were intolerable. Even today in some places where we play, it often gives people an excuse to dislike us.

Sounds (May 28 1977)

Sounds (March 12 1977)

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)

Bowie's Pinups: Punkoid Wimpasilic Adulation

From Buffalo State University’s student paper, Strait, in its Shakin’ Street Gazette subsection, November 1973, comes Andy Cutler’s veracious take on Bowie’s Pinups and third-generation rock ’n’ roll.

‘the new saluting the old. What more could we ask for to paint an accurate picture of the current trend in pop music’.

On the way to that conclusion, Cutler sputters out a near half-a-dozen uses of ‘punk’ to describe what Bowie was delineating.

1964–67 British beat is labelled as the ‘English punk scene’, which might well be the first time the term for second-generation American suburban teenage delinquent rock ’n’ roll was rowed across the Atlantic to depict Britain’s most blueswailing.

Bowie’s retrospective take on his formative years is figured by Cutler as ‘neo-punk’, which leaves, even before the fact, the 1976/77 version as post-punk.

The Prefects – Going Through The Motions

I’ve been buying recordings by The Prefects for something like 43 years. It’s not an especially big catalogue of releases, small really, but it is kind of perfect.

I saw them twice, both times at The California Ballroom, Dunstable. The first was bottom of the bill on the White Riot tour and then with The Saints (I think). At the latter gig, Robert Lloyd stood front centre, didn’t move much, and wore a two cowboys cocks-out t-shirt. That might be a false memory because I don’t remember much else beyond that I liked them for their attitude and the noise they made.

After they’d broken up I bought their sole single at Old Town Records, Hemel Hempstead. The bloke who sold it said it was dull and repetitive, or something like that, but I loved it for those attributes and have done ever since.

Somewhere along the line I bought the Strange Fruit Peel session, later the ‘Amateur Wankers’ and the lo-fi live CDs. Both those digital releases are now on black wax, the live one I got just last week. It has some nice repro flyers and Jon Savage’s sleeve notes that might be the best he has done for any band. They probably sounded something like this in Dunstable, but I don't remember . . .