Don't Freak Me Out

 

THE DAVY LAMP: SHINING A LIGHT INTO THE DARK CORNERS OF THE WALL OF SOUND.  No.1  Jimmy Stevens - Don't Freak Me Out (Atlantic 1972)

I came across this when ploughing through The Unsorted in the Cultureberg Vault.  Jimmy was a Liverpudlian musician whose only Lp was a result of the patronage of Maurice Gibb, Lulu and Robert Stigwood.  On the cover he looks like the mid point between Chas and Dave.  The music reminds me of Randy Newman's take on 'Gone Dead Train' on the Performance soundtrack, barrelling along on 88 percussion keys. His vocal is Randyesque, but irony free, with a similarity to Terry Allen on Lubbock (on Everything). A bit of research (Okay, googling) reveals he toured as support to Emerson, Lake and Palmer (unimaginable) and the Bee Gee's.  He preferred the latter experience. I read his Myspace page which has a detailed, atmospheric and interesting biography/autobiography, full of close calls with career breaks and rubbed shoulders.  There's a contemporary cutting there in which the journalist likens him to "a fat John Lennon".  Worse things to be.  What might spark a reissue (I could find no trace of one) is the presence of John Bonham on 2 tracks, including the title track linked to below.  They sound on vinyl to be well suited; to read the article on Jimmy's myspace page, they both seemed to like a drink as well.  Also on there is Peter Frampton and the aforementioned Gibb brother, whose production company Moby (not that one) Jimmy was signed to.The LP was released in the States as Paid My Dues, another of the better tracks.  There's a few tracks that veer into sentiment like Sweet child of Mine (not that one), but it's mostly earthy rock and roll with no frills but with grit and a surfeit of feel.  Jimmy disappeared  back to family in Liverpool but he paid his dues and he made a good LP which has stood the test of time.  Here's the title track -

SILENCE

About the time Morrisey put a picture of Charles Hawtrey onto the cover of The Very Best of The Smiths' he said something like "Charles Hawtrey's silence surpasses Garbo's" or words to that effect.  He was absolutely correct.  Charles Hawtrey gets a name check from the Beatles, is more sexually ambiguous than Garbo and more of Morrisey's hetero fanbase will have seen the Carry On films than will have seen The Blue Angel.  I was brought to pondering on this when two recluses popped up this week.

No 1:  David Bowie.  I came home from work on what I didn't know it was his birthday and watched the video which (as it said in The Times, something like, arrived unheralded in the night like snow).  Everybody has a view.  It's profoundly moving.  At one point Bowie was ubiquitous to the pointof invisibility - nobody cared.  He re-entered the public world and retained his dignity - enhanced it.  The song reminds me of 'Heroes', and not for the Berlin references, but for its existential honesty.  Its Georges Melies meets Ashes to Ashes meets End of the Pier meets Lindsay Kemp meets Edwyn Collins.  I really don't want to watch it again as it must diminish the experience, like watching Harry Lime appear out of the dark on watching The Third Man for the second time.  It's here anyway, and if you've not seen it...



No 2:  Mark Hollis.  Slighty less noticeably got a mention in Uncut, as he has directed the track listing of the new Talk Talk compilation, which seems to be less synth pop, more bucolic epiphany post-rock.  Co-incidentally, there'd been a mini season of Talk Talk on the Cultureberg stereo, especially the Mark Hollis solo album.  No wonder he has been silent.  If you go from The Colour of Spring, through Spirit of Eden, Laughing Stock and The solo album there is nowhere left to go except some synthesis of silence and inarticulate spirituality.  Which, to me, is David Bowie, in a dark blue T-shirt, looking out at the world through the camera.

Rewriting Rock History Part One

Lee Hazlewood:  Poet fool or Bum. (Capitol)



Poet.

DVD: CSNY Deja Vu

Easy Rider on the tour bus, Neil Young as Bernard Shakey directs this tour film of the wizened and whiskery super-group taking a bunch of anti-war songs (Neil's 'Living With War' album plus Ohio, Find The Cost Of Freedom, For What It's Worth etc) across America.  It's surprising in a lot of ways , but what's not so surprising is that the music is pretty slapdash.  Not slapdash in a Time Fades Away manner, more in a drums like dustbins and four guitars sludge manner.  At one point the portly Stills puts his foot on the monitor and falls over, though he gamely continues soloing and laughing.  As the film progresses the music thins out, gets a bit better and the film gets a lot better.

The point seems to be that The Over The Hill Gang are using their 60's peacenik cartoon persona's to give their audience a different message from the US media's.  The Shock Jocks who make irony-free appearances make Beavis and Butthead look like Noam Chomsky.  When Neil on a TV talkshow starts into Let's Impeach The President he seems to know the hosts cut to the adverts is semi-jokey, semi-panic.  Half the concert audiences seem to be that disenfranchised minority, old liberals who were appalled at Vietnam, sitting atomised in front of their TV's thinking, Where's the Protest This Time?

The best element of the film is when it gives a voice to the survivors , veterans and families of Iraq casualties, in a way that is open, candid and democratic.  Often confused and tolerant, often angry and disappointed, they have the gritted jaws of the duped.  Neil has been returning to the veteran since Lookout Joe on Tonight's the Night, but this is more multilayered and democratic. They thought they were going to Iraq as The Magnificent Seven not The Dirty Dozen, but, tellingly, they're not the ones streaming out of the show in Atlanta flipping Neil the finger, their singing along " Let's impeach the president for lying."  The most surprising thing is that it seems the 4 veteran musicians seem more in tune with the American heartland than their politicians.  Deja Vu?  Waging heavy peace?

The real star of the film for me is Stephen Stills, who looks like a Pixar animation in a huge Hawaiian shirt all odd facial tics and nervousness, but whose low-key support for veteran Congressional candidates at barbecues and on the stump is old fashioned but (as we learn at the end) successful.  Graham Nash is played by Paul Whitehouse as Angry Greyhaired Internet Warrior. David Crosby is quiet, way off stage right and Neil Young is driving the thing forward even when he's not there.

The film ends with an Iraq veteran riding his Harley down a secluded road.  Unlike Easy Rider, there is no van load of hayseeds appearing out of the blue to blow him away.  Nothing that melodramatic.  All the violence has happened a long way away and some time ago.  He's been had and he's living with war.