Burl Veneer’s Music Blog

Iggy is everywhere

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 14:00:54 -0700

Bill Laswell's Praxis project, originally a turntable-and-sampler affair, changed direction in the 90s to invent the "cyberthrash" genre. With a core lineup of Laswell, Buckethead, Bernie Worrell, and Brain, they constantly switched gears from funk to metal thrash to hip-hop to ambient to free jazz, often within the same song. Praxis has always been primarly an instrumental band. Their latest album, Profanation, includes a series of guest singers and a dose of nu-metal; it's watered down the Praxis concept, but on the other hand they now have some anthemic choruses to shout along with. On first listen the fourth track, "Furies," grabbed my attention, because it sounded like Peter Murphy singing. Peter Murphy on a Praxis album?! Then as I listened and the singing went into a higher register and exhibited some very un-Murphy-like inflections, I decided it must be Iggy Pop, remembering that Bill Laswell had produced his Instinct album. And it is indeed Iggy Pop, but did you ever notice how similar he and Peter Murphy sound sometimes?

04 - Furies(1)

Praxis with Iggy Pop

It was not long after that that I happened upon Iggy Pop again, this time on the soundtrack to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which I was listening to for my spy music roundup. The Stooges' 1973 classic "Search and Destroy" plays during the scene in which Steve Zissou drives the pirates from his ship, a perfect bit of snarling energy for the onscreen action:

Iggy and the Stooges - Search and Destroy

So the other night I was watching the BBC Four Hawkwind documentary Hawkwind - Do Not Panic, and I heard "Urban Guerilla" for the first time. I've been a fan of Hawkwind for over 25 years, but I was never a Hawkwind completist, and a good thing too because that's a losing proposition for sure. I wouldn't say there are gaps in my knowledge of Hawkwind; it would be more accurate to say that my Hawkwind albums are gaps in my ignorance of their body of work. My little collection of pre-Robert Calvert albums (Hawkwind, In Search of Space, Warrior on the Edge of Time), Calvert-era records (Quark, Strangeness, and Charm, Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music, PXR5), and the post-Calvert Live Chronicles provided plenty of listening enjoyment. I never have been able to see the "real" (i.e. Dave Brock-led) Hawkwind. I got as far as actually going to a show at DC's Bayou nightclub, but the band were unable to obtain visas and the show was cancelled. Some years later I did get to see Nik Turner's Hawkwind at the 9:30 Club, with Helios Creed in the band, and that was good but not quite the full Hawkwind experience, I suspect. So anyway, I was heretofore oblivious to "Urban Guerilla," but what struck me is how close it is to "Search and Destroy." Both songs were written in 1973; they both contain first-person lyrics boasting of fighting, bombing, and general dangerousness; and while Hawkwind don't have the visceral punch of the Stooges, Iggy Pop and Robert Calvert deliver uncannily similar vocal performances. Here's "Urban Guerilla" for comparison:

Hawkwind - Urban Guerilla (Promo)

1973: the Vietnam War, IRA bombings (which caused the "Urban Guerilla" single to be banned by the BBC, and ultimately withdrawn from the market), the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Army, revolutionary (and pseudo-revolutionary) terrorism and bloody counterterrorism were in the air worldwide. Iggy Pop and Robert Calvert both picked up on it, apparently independently, and produced a pair of songs that will now be forever entwined in my mind.

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Prog backwards: Memories

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:08:59 -0800

Cranking up The Mars Volta's Frances the Mute album the first time was revelatory, and it had me jumping around for days. I caught up with their other albums afterwards, but none of them quite did it for me the way Frances did. And now they have a new one out, as you may have heard, The Bedlam in Goliath. They have also released five cover songs as bonus tracks. One of them is "Memories"--

The Mars Volta Memories (cover)

Listening to that the first time I recognized the tune; it took me a minute but I placed it as a song from Material's 1982 album, One Down. It's a nice breather from the electronic funk of the rest of the album, and significant for being sung by a pre-solo-career Whitney Houston:

07 - Memories (Voc. Whitney Houston)

Material with Whitney Houston

I had always assumed this "Memories" was either original to Material or an obscure R&B cover, but The Mars Volta listed it as a Soft Machine cover. And sure enough, the first version of The Soft Machine--Robert Wyatt, Daevid Allen, Kevin Ayers, and Mike Ratledge--recorded it in 1967 with producer Giorgio Gomelsky. It never got beyond the demo stage, but has been released several times on "Soft Machine early years" albums:

06 Memories

Soft Machine

But wait, there's more! It wasn't actually a Soft Machine song originally, but a song written by bassist Hugh Hopper in the pre-Soft Machine band The Wilde Flowers. The Wilde Flowers first recorded it as an instrumental, then added lyrics for a 1966 recording, with Robert Wyatt singing but not drumming:

03 Memories (Hugh Hopper)

The Wilde Flowers

Hugh Hopper joined The Soft Machine after their first (demo) recording of "Memories," and in 1969 the new SM lineup --Hopper, Wyatt, and Mike Ratledge--recorded "Memories" once again... but as The Wilde Flowers!

22 Memories (Hugh Hopper)

The Wilde Flowers

And that's only a part of the rather amazing history of this little song. Luna Kafé has the definitive article on "Memories," the Dutch Progressive Rock Page has a complete Wilde Flowers chronology, and Richie Unterberger gets some interesting tidbits from Daevid Allen himself about the early Soft Machine. I obviously still have a lot to learn about the swiftly-shifting alliances of those nascent prog rock years.

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Zillatron

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 17:44:00 -0700

I've been hankering to listen to Zillatron's Lord of the Harvest again recently, and after about a week of looking I located a copy. "Zillatron" is one of the alter egos adopted by Bootsy Collins for this 1993 album, produced by himself and Bill Laswell for Ryko's shortlived Black Arc imprint (and reissued by Innerhythmic in 2004). The other driving force behind this album is guitar phenom Buckethead; the album as a whole achieves a weird balance between Bootsy's supremely funky bass playing, Buckethead's metal licks, and a running thread of William Burroughs paranoia and Area 51 UFO conspiracy theories, either sampled from movies or narrated by Bootsy through a vocoder. The sound is rounded out by P-Funk alumnus Bernie Worrell's keyboard wizardry. Frankly, all the crazy talking can get tedious when you want to hear music, so I've snipped the first minute and a half from the album's tour de force, "Fuzz Face" (another character played here by Bootsy):

Zillatron - Fuzz Face

Zillatron

This is another album from my earliest days of parenthood, when I couldn't afford to buy any music, so I would tape the new CDs that my friend Brian (a.k.a. "Tumbleweed") brought over every Saturday. I distinctly remember listening to my Zillatron tape in the car on September 23, 1994, driving home after spending the night in a recliner in my wife's hospital room with our newborn son. I was exhausted, but "Fuzz Face" woke me right up and carried me home. (And when it got to the part where Bootsy says, "My speakers blown, my speakers blown," it was almost prophetic, as I'd cranked it all the way up by then.) It also carried me home from work last week, but that wasn't quite as momentous.

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Simon Shaheen at Cornell

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 21:24:31 -0700

The news that Simon Shaheen would be performing at Cornell was exciting; I was familiar with his violin and 'oud playing from Nicky Skopelitis's Ekstasis album (1993), which got me through many a long day at my record store way back when. Shaheen plays violin on "Proud Flesh:"

04-Proud Flesh

Nicky Skopelitis

The other players on this track are Jah Wobble, bass; Jaki Liebezeit (of Can), drums; Foday Musa Suso, kora; Guilhermo Franco, tambourine; and Nicky Skopelitis on one or more of his arsenal of guitars and other stringed instruments. Ekstasis is the pinnacle of Bill Laswell's ethnic fusion productions on his Axiom label. Every song grooves right along, but not for too long, with funky drumming by either Liebezeit or Joseph "Zigaboo" Modeliste of the Meters, and throbbing basslines from Wobble or Laswell. A few more of Laswell's usual suspects put in appearances as well: Amina Claudine Myers on organ, percussionist Aiyb Dieng, and Bachir Attar on ghaita. I also love James Koehnline's cover art; I am usually ambivalent about collage as an art form, but Koehnline really makes it work. Many of his collage covers for Axiom are in one convenient online gallery here, and an index to all his online galleries is here.

On Sunday, Simon Shaheen was at Cornell not as a sideman but as a bandleader, with his ensemble Qantara. Palestinian-born Shaheen has lived in New York since 1980, and has been an ambassador for Arabic music ever since. One thing I learned at the concert is that Arabic 'oud styles are the basis of Spanish flamenco, as demonstrated in "Al-Qantara:"

Simon Shaheen & Qantara_10_Al-Qantara

Simon Shaheen & Qantara

(That brings to mind Eric Random's Ishmael album, featured here on July 20.) The other thing I learned at the concert is what a versatile instrument the tambourine is. One of the two percussionists, Michel Merhej, played only the riqq (tambourine), but that single instrument can be made to sound like a whole drum kit (minus the bass drum). Holding the riqq with both hands, he taps the fingers of each hand in different places on the instrument's head to produce a whole range of percussive sounds. The left-hand motion is all in the fingers, but the right-hand motion has a lot of wrist action as well. Even so, you must have to have strong fingers to make the beats heard over everyone else! Then there are the jingles (cymbals): they only sound when he wants them to. He could be tapping away on the tambourine head without the jingles making a sound, or he could decide to let them ring along with the beats. He would sometimes shake the tambourine to emphasize the jingles, or ring them with his thumbs, or lift the tambourine up in a circular motion to make them ring non-percussively. Can you tell I was fascinated? My previous notions of tambourine playing (i.e. that it's what a band's singer does during the songs that another band member sings) were completely invalidated. After the show, Merhej wrapped up his two riqqs, put them in a Louis Vuitton messenger bag, and carried them away. Now that's a portable instrument! (Click here for a Quicktime video demonstration of the riqq by Vince Delgado.)

To give credit where it's due, I will note the other members of Qantara: Bassam Saba, flute and nay (Arabic flute); Brad Shepik, guitar; Najib Shaheen, 'oud; Thomas Bramerie, double bass; and Matt Kilmer, percussion. Thanks for a great show, gentlemen!

Finally, since embedding a YouTube video takes practically no effort on my part, here is a clip of Simon Shaheen and Michel Merhej taken at a 2004 performance at McDaniel College in my onetime home town of Westminster, Maryland:

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