(MORE & MORE) STUFFS & THINGS & THINGS & STUFF (STTS-03)
Peter Tosh, The Soulettes, Ethan Miller/Howlin' Rain, Camille Roy, Walter Murch, Circuit des Yeux, Bert Jansch, Minor Birds, Mary Margaret O'Hara, TLC, Robert Wyatt, Joe Higgs, Pigasus, Sun City Girls
Been grooving on classic early Wailers, their ska-into-rocksteady period but through the Peter Tosh filter, which just means I’ve been listening to the 1996 comp LP The Toughest over and over. It gathers up 13 songs from “The Coxsone Years” and 5 from “The Lee Perry Years,” the former when the legendary Wailers vocal trio (Tosh with Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer), usually backed by The Skatalites, were working with producer Coxsone Dodd at Studio One. During this time, songs where Tosh sung lead with the Wailers were released on 45 under the remarkable stage-name Peter Touch, or variations like Peter Touch & the Wailers and Peter Touch & the Chorus (although maybe Peter Touch wasn’t even a stage-name, it was yet another absurd Coxsone typo that somehow survived from record to record), bumpy chugging old ska tunes like “Amen,” “Hoot Nanny Hoot,” and “Shame and Scandal,” up through the midtempo 1966 rocksteady glory of signature Tosh tune “I Am The Toughest,” where Bunny’s otherworldly falsetto gives it that sound, and the grimy/murky/ghostly Coxsone (non-)production fills it out, with that beautiful high-keys piano hook chiming over the top (a style still prominent and successful a year later with Derrick Harriott’s 1967 hit “The Loser”). As for that piano hook, it, along with the “I’m the toughest” chorus hook, were both completely copped from James & Bobby Purify’s “I’m Your Puppet,” a big American hit from September of 1966. Tosh’s song also seems to be dated 1966, which is a pretty quick turnaround, and though it’s notoriously difficult for an amateur historian like myself to get an exact release date (or even release year) from Jamaican discographies, 1966 is still likely because Coxsone had certainly taken the advice of Malcolm X and seized the means of production, he and his crew able to record at the drop of a hat, quickly and cheaply. He owned the record press too, so why not just press ‘em up and get ‘em to the (soul) vendors? Forget needing two months, he could probably do all that in two days. Btw, fun experiment: immediately after listening to the glorious original 1966 version of “The Toughest” as embedded above, go right to this ‘roots’ version that Tosh cut for Rolling Stones Records in the late 1970s, and see if you can make it more than 5 seconds, because I sure couldn’t. In fact, that whole album Bush Doctor is abominable. When it comes to the original Wailers, Rolling Stones Records:Peter Tosh::Island Records:Bob Marley, except 10 times worse. POSTSCRIPT: Also of note on the Toughest comp is “Can’t You See,” apparently also from 1966, sporting up-to-the-minute Swinging London psych-garage moves, complete with what sounds like it could be electric sitar, or at least just a really cool guitar pedal. Be careful, there are other versions of this song out there that are more reggae than this garage-rocking version, which was the B side to another Jamaican psych-pop move, a cover of the Byrds’ “Turn, Turn, Turn” by Rita Marley’s all-female vocal group The Soulettes, nicely retitled as “Time to Turn.” POST-POSTSCRIPT: So the Bush Doctor LP was recorded in 1978, and Tosh appeared in the classic 1981 video for the Rolling Stones’ hit single “Waiting on a Friend,” so it must’ve been at some point after that July 2nd 1981 video shoot when Tosh’s relationship with the Rolling Stones came to an end in a mythic confrontation. The story has it that Richards, while on tour, let Tosh live in his house in Jamaica, but Tosh refused to vacate the premises when Keith returned, demanding that he get paid theoretical royalty money first. The way Timothy White tells it on pp. 338-9 of his Bob Marley bio Catch a Fire is that “Keith threatened to get in Tosh's face if he didn't leave Keith's house. Tosh said he'd shoot Keith if he showed up. KEITH: I'm coming down to the house. I need it for myself. PETER: If yuh come anywhere near here, I'll shoot yuh. KEITH: You'd better make sure you know how to use that gun, and make sure you get the @#$%& magazine in the right way 'round, cos I'm gonna be there in half an hour! Tosh left the premises. And he found himself no longer welcome at Rolling Stones Records.”
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Ethan Miller of Comets on Fire, Howlin’ Rain, and Heron Oblivion (among other musical projects over the years) described America in a fascinating way yesterday, in this Quietus article that was published on October 6th, 2021, which won’t be yesterday to you when you finally read this, or ever again, but it doesn’t matter because this rap from Miller goes far past yesterday and deep into the hereafter, when, in talking about his 2018 Howlin’ Rain album The Alligator Bride, he says:
“[It’s] about the complexity of American history, and the complexity of the American present, and how, as a country, we will never be able to have a holistic understanding of America or its history. After World War Two, Germany experienced this shock and trauma over what had happened and what they had done, and what their fathers and grandfathers had done, and they came to a fairly clear reckoning. But we in America are doomed, because America is so big, and its histories are written in so many layers, by so many people, vying for so many different kinds of power and to control the narrative. And through our ignorance we develop a collective misunderstanding, and it creates a multi-dimensional aspect of reality in America that is unlike anywhere else. And I was coming to some kind of thinking about what America is now, and always has been, since the white man landed and started creating that kind of dimensional split, reworking history from the moment they landed and began creating holocausts to clear everything and everyone that was here before… What we now know as America, this huge thing of grace, beauty, horror, devastation, triumph, patriotism: just one giant carnival. I was coming to this place, philosophically, about who I am, as a son and product of this nation.”
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And, as long as I’m quoting feature articles from other magazines at length, here’s short story writer Camille Roy in the new Maggot Brain (no. 6, Sep/Oct/Nov 2021) on a problem with our culture:
“I do feel that our culture has become imbalanced towards the visual sense. It’s not just a problem for queers or lesbians, it’s a human problem, because we build ourselves from a symphony of senses. As humans, we naturally integrate visual and aural and physical and social contact, and so on. And this has become unbalanced towards this stream of images, especially from social media. I’m perfectly capable of interpreting the visual, but what’s the actual experience? Most commonplace images are not grounded in what a person feels like, but in how a person should look.”
I just think that’s so heavy, the idea of images that are not grounded in what a person feels like, but only in how a person looks. Thus we are consuming only the image itself, only the simalacrum and not the reality. That’s why cinema is so powerful, because when it’s working well, it’s demanding that we consume more than just the image. When it does this, cinema becomes an ultimately beneficial and even palliative art form, because it shows the viewer not just what a person is doing, but how a person is feeling, and it does so more directly than any other art form can. But even cinema doesn’t automatically achieve this, and not all filmmakers even want to, partly because it’s difficult, requiring just the right combinations of acting, lighting, angle, and sound. All four of these cinematic ingredients are necessary, and have to be working in sync, to successfully capture feeling, and just because they’re present doesn’t mean they’re working, and just because they’re working doesn’t mean they’re working in sync. Only in the really good films. Thank you, this musing has been brought to you by my reading of that Walter Murch book, which I really have to return to the library, having literally renewed it 12 out of the maximum allowable 15 times. UPDATE: Finally finished it, so before returning, just gonna quote here Murch’s significantly longer-than-mine list of cinematic elements that have to work in sync (p. 305): “[…] the staging, the casting, the photography, the sound, the music, the editing, the costuming, the art design, the props.” He continues, “In making a film you’re trying to get the most interesting orchestration of all these elements, which, like music, need to be harmonic yet contradictory. If they’re completely contradictory, then there’s chaos. If, on the other hand, all the instruments play the same notes—if they’re too harmonic, in other words—yes, there’s coherence, but I’m bored after a few minutes.”
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It wouldn’t be a Stuffs & Things without some more of your unregularly scheduled Circuit des Yeux stuffs &/or things, now would it? So here’s a classic Circuit des Yeux lineup, the touring band for In Plain Speech if I have it right, playing live in that album’s release year of 2015, at the historic Rockefeller Chapel on the University of Chicago campus down in Hyde Park. This is pretty much the same lineup I saw play a fantastic Speech-heavy set list at the Empty Bottle on 12/18/2015 (I looked up the date, my memory isn’t that good). Here we are almost 6 years later and her new album -io is out, she’s playing a few big shows to celebrate it, and it’s all very exciting. Somehow I haven’t really heard the new album yet, other than watching two or three (pretty incredible!) videos, but you can bet I will…
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How often do any of you Bert Jansch heads trip out to Avocet? (If unsure, please use the above embedded YouTube to trip out to it right now.) Kind of a singular album in the man’s oeuvre, is it not? Completely instrumental, opening title-track is a 17-minute side-long opus, all tracks are named after a species of bird, and it’s basically a highly progressive neo-classical chamber trio of Jansch on acoustic guitar (and piano on one track), multi-instrumentalist Martin Jenkins on violin, mandocello, and flute, and Danny Thompson just straight-up beasting throughout on double bass. Waitaminnit… hold the phone… here’s footage of these bad-asses playing Avocet material live!! Sans Thompson, but still…
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Speaking of post-hippie ancient-to-the-future 1970s British folk, and speaking of music so high-lonesome that it stops you in your tracks and almost instantly brings tears to your eyes, how about this track “Parting Glass” by the Minor Birds? I discovered it via the masterful recent Sumer is Icumen In compilation of British and Irish folk (on Grapefruit Records of the UK, not to be confused with Grapefruit Records of Omaha), but it was originally track three on the lone Minor Birds album, self-titled from 1972, both a debut and a swansong, copies of which now go for four figures.
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Gotta love how Mary Margaret O’Hara just strolled onstage at the Le Guess Who? festival in 2017, her first public performance in many years, and started the set by blasting THIS ^ for ten minutes, her and incredible cellist Peggy Lee (not the) working in tandem, blowing minds. There’s also a drummer who knows how to stay out of the way (see, I don’t even know his name), until he knows when not to stay out of the way, and O’Hara’s brother Marcus, who *might* be the best free-improv balloonist of all time, but also knows how to stay out of the way unless he decides to absolutely nail everything to the wall at a brief crucial moment. And just think, their other sibling is none other than Queen Catherine O’Hara herself, what a family! But regarding this video, I love the one YouTube commenter who asks, “What is this called? Is it like a Canadian thing or something?“ The question hasn’t been answered directly by other commenters as of this writing, but the answer is yes. It is a Canadian thing. A thing as Canadian as fuck itself.
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Here I am thinking how great the TLC songs “Creep” and “Waterfalls” both are, and wondering if they were ever the A and B side of a 45RPM single. After all, they were both on the same album originally (CrazySexyCool, 1994, LaFace Records) and they make such a good A side and B side too, “Creep” the dark, insistent, and intense grabber out of the gate, just like it was on the album, and “Waterfalls” the feel-good mid-tempo relaxer. Well, there was indeed a “Creep” b/w “Waterfalls” 45RPM 7”, but it wasn’t released for roughly two years after each song had been an individual hit. This was a 1996 “jukebox edition” released by LaFace, and used copies currently go for about $35 USD on Discogs, not including overseas shipping (none for sale in the US, all in the UK at the moment). There was also a reissue of “Creep” b/w “Waterfalls” just last year in 2020, by European label Be With Records, but even with that one the cheapest current US seller has it for about $23.
‘TIS THE SEASON TLC POSTSCRIPT because this is super fun and only the most jaded (and/or white supremacist!) noise-rock power-electronics troglodyte wouldn’t agree…
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Speaking of theoretical 45RPM singles that may or may not actually be real, how about this personal/spiritual first-person liberation-song split that isn’t real except in my bountiful imagination: “At Last I Am Free” by Robert Wyatt b/w “I’m The Song My Enemies Sing” by Joe Higgs (original ska version on Studio One). Dare I say that Wyatt’s song is a cover version that somehow improves on the superb Chic original, and Higgs’s song just blows my mind every time. I can’t really interpret what the lyrics are saying, but I find them liberating and terrifying anyway, and also Dylan-worthy, even Dickinson-worthy, in the way that certain lines I can’t yet interpret still seem to open up portals to eons of meaning, every time I hear them, or read them, or even just think of them afterwards. It might be one of the most bad-ass songs ever written, despite being (or especially because it’s) set to such a jaunty ska backing.
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And you know, while I’m still mulling Ethan Miller’s concept of a multi-dimensional America and the implied psychogeographical mapping that goes with it, I feel like it’s starting to explain something I’ve been grappling with, which is the way that weaponized conspiracy theorizing and weaponized authority-questioning has morphed from a radical left approach to a radical right approach. The way that an actual pig has now been nominated for president twice, both times as a radical satire and mockery of the American political process, but the first time in 1968 as a nomination by the radical left (Pigasus, pictured above) and the second time in 2016 as a nomination by the radical right. The second pig, as we all know, was considerably more successful. It only took 48 years for this shift to occur… or did it take 48 seconds? A dimensional flip, or side-step? Maybe it takes a person 48 seconds and the aggregate societal change takes 48 years. My mind always goes to Sun City Girls and how in the early 1980s, much closer to 1968 than to 2016, they had started mapping these dimensional side-steps, to mix some of Ethan Miller’s words with some of mine, the danger and doom and beauty and horror and comedy of American multi-dimensionality. Just like any explorer would map treacherous shorelines that give way to beautiful beaches, for all of those that may have to (or want to) follow.