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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Air Guitar Nation

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:20:03 -0800

My brother gave us the Air Guitar Nation DVD for Christmas, which chronicles the USA's first entry into the Air Guitar World Championships in Oulu, Finland in 2003. The documentary centers on US rivals Dan "Bjorn Turoque" Crane and David "C-Diddy" Jung, the latter shown here:

C. Diddy Air Guitar Nation Performance

Need I mention that the movie is a blast? My daughter is so taken with it that she has signed up to do air guitar for her elementary school talent show. I helped her pick out a song last night, then edited out some slow bits to get it down to under three minutes. She asked me to post the song here, so here it is: she'll be rocking out to Buckethead's "Brewer in the Air"--

Brewer in the Air

Buckethead

This comes from Buckethead's 2007 album Pepper's Ghost, which received a mixed verdict from fans. I'm mostly familiar with Buckethead from his 1990's (pre-Guns'n'Roses) work with Praxis, Bill Laswell's thrash-funk-prog project. (Amazingly, he has kept up the mask-and-KFC-bucket disguise for 15 years or so.) Pepper's Ghost is definitely more conventional than that groundbreaking work, but on the other hand it's perfectly suited for, say, air guitaring. I'm going to have fun coaching this performance!

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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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