STUFFS & THINGS & THINGS & STUFF (STTS-026)
Velvet Underground & Nico, T La Rock & Jazzy Jay, Cheater Slicks & ARP Odysseys, Hyde Park Jazz Fest 2023, NRBQ, Climax Golden Twins, Neil Michael Hagerty, Max Roach & Abbey Lincoln, Mingus & Dolphy
Had an extended grapple tonight with The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound (1966, d. Andy Warhol & Paul Morrissey). First time I’ve actually looked at it in 30 years, back when it was only 30 years old; now it’s almost 60, how about that? My main takeaway is that it rules, and that it’s essential, while also being very boring, and would be so much better (and paradoxically less boring) if the cameraman wasn’t so goddamn restless and impatient. I realize they were just capturing film to use as a metaprojection over the band during their then-imminent Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia live shows, and with that purpose in mind, they probably wanted more movement and action and less steady portraiture, but as a surviving document removed from its EPI context, this film is pretty frustrating. The cameraperson was Warhol, according to Paul Morrissey (as quoted in Richie Unterberger’s White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-by-Day book): “They just sort of made up sounds, and Andy operated the camera, ‘cause that’s all he ever did,” and it’s not that he doesn’t have a good eye. Warhol in fact has a great eye, but after a static two-or-three-minute opening closeup on Nico while the band is mostly just tuning up, eventually zooming out a bit as they get going, the camera becomes very impatient, constantly framing beautiful shots that I would love to look at for minutes at a time, but only holding them for two or three seconds before whizzing somewhere else in the room, then lurching somewhere else altogether, perhaps lingering too long on some indiscernibly extreme and/or dark close-up, inevitably choosing a wild strobing zoom effect that is really just no fun to watch. Uptight, indeed. But as with all of Warhol’s body of work, even at its most boring, there are aesthetic rewards; one example is how the strobing zoom section at 12m53s can be viewed as another one of his silk-screen portrait paintings a la Marilyn Diptych, but with Nico standing in for Marilyn, and this time on 16mm film, each zoom-jump essentially another side-by-side silk-screen image. There are in fact many beautiful but brief close-ups throughout, of the bandmember’s faces, or hands, or instruments being played, but I have it as the 22m18s mark before the camera finally settles back on an extended static close-up for more than a couple minutes, and even then it’s back to the same opening close-up on Nico, still a very welcome and luminously lit respite from all the instability, which then (suddenly and clumsily) zooms out to a wider shot that keeps Nico but also includes Lou playing lead (ostrich) guitar and Sterling playing (Lou-worthy) rhythm guitar. This shot isn’t terrifically framed or anything, but it’s one of the widest we get in the whole film. You can at least focus on actual people playing actual instruments, and best of all, it doesn’t move for almost 40 whole entire seconds. Before that, when Nico temporarily moves out of the frame, there’s almost 30 seconds of the empty aluminum foil-covered wall behind her, and even that is preferable to Warhol waving the camera all over the place, which he’s back to doing very soon. If you’re patient enough with Warhol’s impatience, among all the lurching and zooming you’ll eventually also discern Cale on viola (switching to his typically shredding bass guitar at some point) and Moe completely locked in on drums behind him.
For some other music from New York City, albeit 21 years later, I’m just now noticing how some of the lyrics to “It’s Yours” by T La Rock & Jazzy Jay are kinda psychedelic/visionary, like when T says “analyzing surmising musical myth-seeking people of the universe/this is yours!/it’s yours!” and especially “Once lyrics are finished the picture is done/the difference is this picture has no sun/but there’s plenty of bright kaleidoscope light/no color supersedes ‘cause the balance is right.”
Before the Cheater Slicks committed to the bassless guitar/guitar/drums trio lineup we’ve known and loved for so many years, they had tried a quartet lineup with a few different bassists, one being Dina Pearlman. Who is Dina Pearlman, you might ask? Well, she is the daughter of Alan R. Pearlman. Who is Alan R. Pearlman, you might ask? Well, his initials (A.R.P.) might give you a clue that he is one of the more important figures in modern American synthesizer development and manufacturing, as the founder of ARP Instruments, Inc. in 1969. Now I have to dig up that massive Cheater Slicks history lesson by their drummer Dana Hatch that was published in Negative Guest List #19, to see if he might at least allude to the connection between the Slicks and Styx (via James Young’s “ARP Odyssey” on “Come Sail Away”). I now have my actual copy of the fanzine in my actual hands, and it turns out she was the band’s very first bass player. As Hatch tells it, “We picked up a bass player named Dina Pearlman and after a month or so, we made a tape. Listening to it, we realized we were heavier than we thought we were and we started getting serious about becoming a real band.” So, if not quite a founding original member of the band, her role was still formative, and it would seem she hung in there for several rather wild gigs and early demo recordings, but alas, “As our music became more violent, our cute, petite bass player became an anomaly. She was a real trooper but just didn’t fit anymore. The brothers gave her the boot and we recruited Allen “Alpo” Paulino, late of the Real Kids, for bass duties. He had a great, heavy sound and looked like a bum, which suited our image, but he never really learned any of the songs.” And that’s it for Dina and the Cheater Slicks; Hatch does not mention her family connection to electronic music history.
I’ve been to the annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival here in Chicago twice, and both times it was absolutely incredible. The first time was in 2017, which I wrote about at length, and the second time was in 2023, now over a year ago, which I want to write about at length but haven’t yet, and frankly don’t think I will. Just haven’t found the words for the richness of the experience, other than this little schedule/map I scrawled on the back of an envelope, complete with estimated walking times in between gigs, pictured above. I’ll write out a semi-annotated version here too: 1:30pm Steve Colson at 915 E 60th, leave early and walk 15 minutes to 2:00pm Tomeka Reid & Junius Paul duo at 5600 S Woodlawn, then 3 minute walk to 3:00pm Jason Adasciewicz solo at 5500 S Woodlawn, then 3 minute walk back to 5600 S Woodlawn for Nikki Giovanni at 3:45pm, but the church was full and they weren’t letting any of the 50 or more people waiting outside come in, which included me for about 1 minute, until I decided to just walk for 15 minutes back to 915 E 60th and get a real good seat for the piece de resistance and evening capper, two sets by the Luke Stewart Exposure Quintet at 5:00pm and 6:00pm at the same Logan Center Penthouse where I had started the day with (half of) Colson’s exquisite solo piano set. Had plenty of time before 5pm, so passed through the midway where all the vendors and art stands were, and not only did the fine folks at Aura Edibles hand me a complimentary vegan 10mg cannabis gummie sample, I also bought an excellent John Coltrane T-shirt for $10. Wish I’d bought two, and wish I could write adequate words about those two sets by the Luke Stewart Exposure Quintet. They were on fire, that’s for sure, Stewart’s bass just driving non-stop for two hours, and drummer Avreeyel Ra kinda riding on top of that, but also pushing hard from underneath sometimes, and then sometimes taking the wheel outright, while also keeping the band hydrated with great splashes of water (metaphorically via periodic cymbal surges). Then the horns of Edward Wilkerson and Ken Vandermark just ripping and roiling and burning away, and jeez the eminent Jim Baker on piano and synthesizer too...
Just in case you think I like everything, I still do not like NRBQ. Especially having just listened to their really annoying pseudo-free pseudo-jazz track “People,” a B-side from 1978. The good news is that I heard this bad song on a very good compilation, Volume 7 of the Slippy Town Hiss Parade CDR mix series from back in the late 1990s/early 2000s, as compiled by Eddie Flowers and included in orders from his Slippy Town record distro website. He probably made a dozen different volumes of these at the time, and they’re all fantastic, wall-to-wall bangers, presumably Eddie just filling up CD-R after CD-R with rips of all his favorite 45rpm singles. I’m the proud owner of my own hand-made and xeroxed burns of volumes 5 through 9, which I think I got from Sir Sienko and not directly from Slippy Town itself (i.e. Eddie), but I no longer remember exactly, and there’s not a whole lot of research I can do, because as of today (December 2024) I can’t find a single mention of the Hiss Parade series on the internet. But it really did happen! This volume 7, in addition to great complete 45s or odd tracks by The Music Machine, The Shadows of Knight, the C*nts, The Screamin’ Mee-Mees, the Urinals, Paris 1942, the Meat Puppets, and Neil Young & Devo, includes one other NRBQ track, the A side of “People” which was “Me and the Boys,” which I do like, not because it’s good, but because it’s terrible, being a sneaky-hot (that spicy odd-time-signature move in the verse!) synth-pop parody song, and because I have personal nostalgic/queasy memories of it being on the soundtrack of some terrible 1980s straight-to-cable teen sex comedy that I watched with a friend at a sleepover. The song was used for an apparently unforgettable ‘cruising the strip in a convertible’ montage, and before it was even over my friend and I were already singing along, making fun of it, changing the words from “me and the boys” to “me and this guy” because, although the song refers to at least three people being involved (me AND the boys, plural), there were only two protagonists in the montage.
Also discovered via the Slippy Town Hiss Parade, this time Volume 8: the self-titled double 7-inch EP debut by the Climax Golden Twins. I’ve heard and have some CGT records, but not this one. Always thought of them as a ‘little brother’ band to the mighty Sun City Girls, and not in a bad way, and to the point where I think CGT would readily agree. Not only were the two groups friendly with each other “in real life,” both were based in Seattle and intrepid record and instrument collectors who made post-everything underground guitar-rock music that vacillated between the chaotic and serene, the ugly and beautiful. Sun City Girls came first, and then a few years later in 1994, Climax Golden Twins released this record, itself a little brother to Sun City Girls’s monumental Borungku Si Derita double 7-inch EP from a year before, packing 11 tracks into four 5-minute sides, but the music not copycat, the band having its own sensibility via odd instrumental No Wave/SST/post-Zorn guitar-band miniatures. (And P.S., also also discovered via Volume 8 of the Slippy Town Hiss Parade, “Lavender Bobby” by Crawling With Tarts is a wonderful little post-punk indie-weird guitar-pop gem.)
Anyone else into Bomb Magazine as much as I was? Particularly back in the early aughts, that brief period where the internet and smartphones had yet to begin their slow phase-out of our collective ability to hold paper publications in our hands and mindfully read them for more than one or two pages at a time? Just came across my own personal stash of 3 or 4 issues, buried here in the BlastiBrary, including the “Number 117/Fall 2011” issue and its interview with Neil Michael Hagerty (from Royal Trux), as conducted by Keith Connolly (from No-Neck Blues Band and The Suntanama). Maybe it’s because Connolly is a fellow musician who knew Hagerty already from recording and touring together, but this is pretty much the definitive (and maybe even the only really good) Hagerty interview about music qua music. He remains fairly obfuscatory and digressive, but it’s still the most up-front I’ve heard him speak about his actual artistic trajectory and how it all went (and goes) down.
Wow, the sleeve art for the The Beatles Sixth Christmas Record (Christmas 1968) is pretty darn psychedelic ^. Is it by The Fool? The internet actually doesn’t seem to know or want to tell me…
Then there’s this YouTube ^. Or all of these ⌄ from Eric Dolphy’s tenure in Charles Mingus’s band. I knew he was in the band, but it never occurred to me to look for this footage, until one day there it was, and in fact quite a bit of it, and I’m finding it interesting to compare and contrast the first film (live in 1964 on Belgian TV, viewable on YouTube only, sorry, please click on the sad graphic below) to the aforementioned The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound (1966, d. Andy Warhol & Paul Morrissey); both black & white films of groundbreaking musical combos in performance, made only two years apart.
Not to mention this Bill Evans beauty, 95 minutes of excerpts from a few different equally exquisite concerts:
Thank you for reading this latest edition of Stuffs & Things & Things & Stuff here at the Blastitude BlastiStack Newsletter. Tune in every month or so for more stuffs, and more things.
…absolute banger of an issue man…thanks for all you do!!!…