Dum Dum Girls do Ono

While on the subject (see previous post), here's a band of four young glamorpusses doing a tribute to Ono's legendary Cut Piece (originally performed in 1964 and more recently in 2003).



An even more glamorpuss take on the band can be seen in this video.

A film of Ono perfoming Cut Piece.

A description of the piece:
Ono’s work related destruction to interpersonal, often intimate, human relations. This element was particularly thought-provoking in Cut Piece. Ono sat motionless on the stage after inviting the audience to come up and cut away her clothing, covering her breasts at the moment of unbosoming. Cut Piece entailed a disrobing, a denouement of the reciprocity between exhibitionism and scopic desires [scopic being a belabored way of saying the experience that the subject goes through in its interaction with the other] between victim and assailant, between sadist and masochist: and, as a heterosexual herselft, Ono unveiled the gendered relationship of male and female subjects as objects for each other. Kristine Stiles, 1998

Yoko Oh No

Long before she encountered that Beatle, Yoko Ono blazed a brilliant kind of trajectory of her own. Art critic Peter Frank described her this way:

Well before she emerged into popular awareness as John Lennon's wife, Yoko Ono had established herself in vanguard art and music circles as one of the most daring, innovative and eccentric artist-performers of her time. As one of the founders of the Fluxus movement at the beginning of the 1960s, Ono helped identify and define the playful, subversive, visionary sensibility that has undergirded experimentation in all the arts ever since. Her poem-like verbal scores, her films, and her staged performances anticipated everything from minimalism to performance art, the furthest reaches of new cinema to the most extreme of Punk-New Wave music.

That legacy is mostly pushed aside next to her role as Beatles destroying dragon lady. Of course, this isn't true. That story would be far more complicated. Certainly she didn't deserve much of the grief and slime flung at her, then or now. (Ono addresses this point with her critics in her song Yes, I'm a Witch [1974].) The truth is, she never shaped John Lennon into anything he didn't want to be. (A much stronger defense of her can be seen here.) Granted, she has never been well understood. According to the tattling memoir of a former employee, she may've been more interested in her own musical ambitions than Lennon's. (Ono had already performed at Carnegie Hall in 1961.) Though, for her part, she would give Lennon access to the art world. Where Ono's life or work are concerned it's fair to say that none of it gains much favor with only a cursory understanding. (Like the artist herself, her work is both severely complicated and extremely simple.) What she did have was enough force of personality to be able stand with—with, not behind—one of the strongest artistic characters of the 20th century. (Lennon's first wife Cynthia accused him of an attraction to strong women, and in less charitable moments, having a "mommy complex.") As an artist, in fact, Lennon claimed it was her work that influenced him. (Lyrics for Imagine came as a result of reading her book Grapefruit, he would say.) She made him happy in a way no one else did or could; clearly, he was smitten. But for the legacy of her own work, that may have been better served had she never met him.

(And who hasn't fallen in love at least once in their life with someone their family and friends didn't like?)

In 1970 John and Yoko, along with Ringo on drums and Beatle cohort Klaus Voorman on bass, recorded a group of songs in one improvised session. (One imagines Ringo shaking his head in disbelief from the stool.) With an additional session with avant jazzer Ormette Coleman, the sessions would become the Plastic Ono Band album. Ono's vocals were a series of abstract screams, shrieks, and various throaty calesthenics forged into a kind of vocal tsunami (and a little like the break in Surfin' Bird). In Japanese musical tradition this is very much like hetai, a style born out of Kabuki theater. One critic described her vocals as Zen vaudeville. 

Upon its release the album found little critical support (although, notably, Lester Bangs and a few others would disagree). You can see how Lennon's audience might have thought she was stealing his head. What's particularly noteworthy about this piece, besides Ono, is Lennon's most un-Beatle like guitar playing, a style wild and raging with abandon like Tomorrow Never Knows played through a randomizer. It's easy to see how the collective jaws of Beatles' fans might've hit the floor.

It would be at least 10 years later that some of the material here served as a style guide for a more experimental wave. Upon hearing the The B-52s (admitted Ono fans) even John Lennon was surprised how mainstream her influence had reached.

As it turns out, Ono's life story was loaded with even more tribulation than her singing: Her sensibility and character may be easier to understand once you know that it was forged out of a life of upheaval and coming of age as a constant outsider. The fact that her artwork explores the engagement of both the audience and artist's self-immolation makes much more sense.

The first time I heard Why? I was floored. Even all these years later, it's still flooring—it's music as emotional karate. The fact that John Lennon would embrace this stuff only speaks better of him.

 Maybe Zen slapstick would be the better description.

What I think we should do in life is to keep dancing rather than marching. Yoko Ono, 2009

Just discovered this: Yoko and John onstage with Frank Zappa and the Mothers for an off the cuff performance. May give some hint as to why Yoko wasn't, er, fully appreciated. (Note how some members of the band go Ono at the end.) John is unfazed. Clearly, Yoko is fearless.

Reconnecting with Tissue

Those of us growing up in Southern California during 1978-1983 may remember the Long Beach-based Suburban Lawns. Their rise accelerated and gained certain acutity when Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia) directed their first video Gidget Goes to Hell. A happenstance that no doubt had everything to do with it being aired on Saturday Night Live. Local radio airplay and print attention followed (their Slash cover at right) leading to a respectably successful album (by local band standards). The Lawns are also one of the few bands of the period that in retrospect don't come off as hopelessly dated. (Or, like all of 80s music, for that matter.) To prove the point, check the local bounty of material available at this site.

The Suburban Lawns sound eschewed the trendy posturings of digital synths and de riguer flanged guitars. making the sound practically classic rock by today's standards. And singer/keyboardist Su Tissue herself (nee Sue McLane), with all her quirks, conceits, vocal sound effects and coloratura—a kind of bottled-up Yoko Ono—still sounds innovative. Features that keep the band's sound as perky and collagen fresh as it was when it was recorded. You might think Tissue's vocal stylings were a mirror to her soul as her onstage persona radiated both an extremity of adorableness and a nerd-like unsocialized quality. Clearly, the band was far less interesting when she wasn't behind the mic. (She was a good piano player too.) Her personal style had its adherents: One fan described her as able "to pull off of a remarkable mix of Little House on the Prairie meets the Manson Girls, beautifully." (I don't agree with the sinister angle of the Manson family, but okay.) Google the band now and find a robust amount of ongoing interwebs activity: Their cult is still very much alive. A legacy that's owed all to her.



The band's complete canon included a couple of singles, an album, and a five song EP before the internal momentum fizzled out. The final recordings pointed toward interesting new possibilities, a kind of Cocteau Twins cum slightly funkier Bowie-Eno trilogy direction, but with more humor. Post-Lawns, Tissue continued studying at the Berklee College of Music (after earlier attending Calarts—poor little rich girl) and recorded a short album of ambient instrumental music—30 minutes of slight variations on a groovey piano figure with added layers of ambiance (done in the days before digital loops). It would've made an arresting soundtrack to a wistful French film at a seaside. All of this would've had us hoping for bigger things to come from her. Alas, it was not to be.

A recent interview with former member Frankie Ennui offers some insight. Find it here.
An original pic sleeve of Gidget Goes to Hell is on eBay for $55.

All of these should be long out of print now.
Download:

Suburban Lawns: Gidget Goes to Hell self-issued 7" inch single (1979)

Suburnan Lawns: Baby from Baby EP (1983)

Su Tissue: 2nd Movement from Salon de Musique (1982)

A personal note: Once, I was in a band. We had the opportunity to open for Suburban Lawns at the Cuckoos Nest in Costa Mesa, CA ca. 1981. The Lawns at the time were getting loads of local air play. As was often the case, I'd have school and work the next day (community college, no Calarts for me) so I'd gather up my equipment (an organ and electric piano/harpsichord [pre-digital], a guitar, an amp, cords and sundry other crap that'd require five trips to the car to load) and leave early as was my habit. (During my time we'd play with Jonathon Richman, Violent Femmes, X, The Go-Gos, and other bands long gone from memory. I'd leave before they all went on too. Yeah, I was a fool.) The club was quite packed that night (we didn't often get to play to full houses so it was very exciting—it was the peak of my very, very short musical career). We did very well that night. The audience was loud and enthusiastic and we were beside ourselves. (Our band was also co-ed: two girls and three boys.) Our success had apparently unraveled Ms. Tissue. She paced around the "backstage" loft before going on and talked to herself unconsolably in a kind of repetitive Rain Man way. (This was a secondhand account told to me by another band member.) I could only attribute her reaction to her highly creative and requisitely insecure artistic nature. I never got the chance to see her live but from what I've seen on YouTube, while the band was certainly interesting they could appear a little stiff on stage. As a young man admiring Tissue from afar, she was a nerd's lust fetish of a girl: Cute, physically awkward, unpretentiously brilliant (I'm guessing), socially clumsy, and just diffident enough in ways that young men can ruthlessly exploit (again, I'm guessing). I'm sure I would've loved her. Even now, imagining her in her overripe suburban middle-age with pictures of the kids covering the dust-covered piano she's still the thinking older man's bohemian heartthrob.

Taking liberties with Libertango

Did you ever have to go digging into academic journals for research? Then you know of their prison romance with language: the overuse of overlong words and arcana, words bent, twisted, and hammered into misuse, and language generally used as camouflage. From my experience, art journals are some of the worst offenders of all. (Once, a professor red-inked a friend's paper to "eschew sesquipedalianism." Or said another way: Try using smaller words and bigger ideas. Indeed.) But, if you do have to slog through the art journals in the course of your career then I recommend the Dadaist and Surrealist periods as some of the cleverest noodlings ever committed in the service of Ivory Tower shop talk. A favorite image of mine comes from French poet Comte de Lautréamont AKA Isidore Ducasse: As beautiful as the chance encounter on an ironing board of a sewing machine and an umbrella. For me, a description of how the beauty of words and images of art can, in the best circumstances, make both order and logic irrelevant.

A sewing machine and an umbrella in this case are not unlike the collision between Astor Piazzola and Grace Jones: He being the master of the Nuevo Tango (a mix of tango with jazz) and a demigod of Argentina (so you'll hear in the video below)—and she being the Jamaican-born dance club diva, actress, model, muse, proclaimed friend of Piazzola, erstwhile scenemaker, and general all style bombardier. Libertango is far and away the most most significant tango ever composed, having found its way into about 500 different recorded releases (according to Wiki). This lyrical version, dubbed I've Seen that Face Before, was a hit for Jones in 1981. Well beyond the tango, Libertango is, to my mind, quite likely one of the greatest melodies ever written, anywhere. As a dance, the tango can be like the Kama Sutra on stilts. As a rhythm, its roots are both of Europe and Africa—Africa being the key ingredient to any dance with a sexy wiggle in it. At times the tango takes on a marchy 2/4 beat, but it's a march that walks with a hard on. Though, it's a sexiness that can't be separated from the images of the dance. What Grace Jones did with her version here—the more rigid tango-iness smoothed out, its hide retooled like a vaquero's leather bandolero, and all of it pierced through with an electrocuted club beat—leaving behind a teasing amount of the original melody but with just enough of its own substance to keep things at an intriguing throb. Kind of like the joke comparing sex and pizza: Even when the song is bad it's still pretty good.



Jones was 61 at the time of this performance. Her near golden age voice is still punchy though it ventures closer to Rock of Ages territory than it might've when she still wore a fade. Even still, she seizes the stage with a lusty bravado that her younger peers would have to admire. And fer crissake!, this grandma is wearing a thong!

During her peak in the 80s Jones created a niche for her take on dance club music that drew on slightly more hipster source material—Iggy Pop, Roxy Music, The Pretenders, Edith Piaf—as well as a battery of horny entendre-loaded, synth drenched joints of her own. With her Jean Paul Goude get-ups, iconic style, and ever-present chat show spectacle, she cut a refreshingly notorious figure. If you care nothing for her music, you've still got to admire her durable and unshrinking image.

Here, below, is a more traditional take on the Libertango melody presented in a geeked-up, dry hump musical fantasy. (Here, Yo Yo Ma's even more straight ahead version—minus the hump.) The jagged and yet hypnotic quality of the Libertango melody brings visions of crotch-grinding and high slit leg flashes while still needing nothing of the tango itself to melt all on its own. The song is utterly universal: I can't imagine how anyone, anywhere couldn't love this tune. Just can't. Surrender and just dig it.



That Kama Sutra on stilts in case you need reminding:

The world could not support that many ballerinas: Fleetwood Mac & its footnotes - acid, infidelity, & a little bit of suicide

Mac back before it all blew up

You’ve probably heard about Bob Welch’s passing. For those who don’t know, he was the singer-guitarist-songwriter from Fleetwood Mac’s middling middle period of 1971-74. His greatest contribution to the band may’ve been in leaving it: His departure would unleash the band’s destiny of mega-platinumtude and fertile tumult under the Buckingham-Nicks juggernaut. (A grouping that clearly kicked up Christine McVie’s mettle as well.) Despite all that followed in his wake, Welch would play a significant role in the band’s adolescence. Interest from American audiences spiked during the Welch period, a time when American radio was awash in Jackson Brown, Carly Simon, The Eagles and singer-songwriters peddling squishy introspectives and world consciousness. Perhaps it was the waft of ocean breezes and Ozium shrouded weed Americans responded to in the Southern California-born Welch's voice. (The band's first U.S. gold record Future Games would also be Welch’s—and Christine McVie’s—first with the band.) Or, maybe jaded Americans had just had enough of the blooz and Welch’s folkier version of melodic pop was the sound they were looking for.

Peter Green (née Peter Allen Greenbaum) formed Fleetwood Mac in 1967 after short stints in several bands including replacing Eric Clapton in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. (The Bluesbreakers were another band best remembered for the those who left it.) From Mayall, Green recruited Mick Fleetwood and John McVie. Despite Fleetwood Mac’s considerable critical and financial success, Green’s restlessness would continue; he departed after only two years and eight months. (It's been suggested that Green gave the band its name so McVie and Fleetwood could more easily continue without him.) One might even argue (I would) that those two years and eight months may've been among the most prodigious of any band of that ’67 - ’69 period. To wit: Mac’s sales in the U.K. under Green would exceed The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined (according to the Man of the World doc). Before Green departed (a story now the stuff of legend—think Syd Barrett’s acid bingeing only with cult abduction), he’d record three albums. The records were inspired, if not extraordinary, blues and if that's all they were we probably wouldn’t be mentioning them now. Even when considering the period in the honeyed glow of retrospection, only one of those three albums gets much critical respect today. Mysteriously, much of their best recorded work, certainly their best singles, were left off of the albums; Green Manalishi, Albatross (a rejiggered version of this became Lennon’s Sun King from Abbey Road), Oh Well, Black Magic Woman (a flop for Mac but enjoying the half life of uranium for Santana thanks to Classic Rock radio).  Further proof of the historical myopia we’ve come to expect from record execs.

I happen to be of the mind that Green Manalishi and Oh Well are among the best songs to come out of the sixties. To back that up, you should note that Green’s roster of A-list fans—Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, B.B. King (who famously said Green was the only guitarist to make him “break into a cold sweat”), Joe Perry, Carlos Santana, Steve Hackett (of Genesis), and on and on—are only too eager to issue frothy superlatives for the man. 

Green Manalishi:


Oh Well (original single version):

 

Oh Well live, 1969:


Green going it alone:



In his autobiography Mick Fleetwood admitted that the band probably owed its early seventies existence to Welch. A period featuring a cocktail of strife and drama that’d cast a long shadow over the band with all the usual rock-life trappings—egos, drugs, alcohol, and infidelity—but with the added thrust of short-lived guitarist Bob Weston’s hook up with Fleetwood’s wife. Weston would be sacked and a distraught Fleetwood would force an immediate cancellation of their tour. Coincidentally, Mac footnote Weston died only days after Welch. According to Weston’s obit in the Telegraph, the seventies for Mac would’ve been the stuff of quintessential reality TV: Christine McVie would hook up with one of the band’s crew (the apparent subject of her You Make Loving Fun) and legendary Beach Boy philanderer Dennis Wilson. Stevie Nicks would have her own rock star hook ups and John McVie, less interestingly but thoroughly rock and roll, nearly drank himself to death. Maybe it was all of this darkness the surviving members were trying to forget when they shunned Welch at their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. (Green was there.) Or maybe it was Welch’s lawsuit against the band for unpaid royalties.

The dispute would find closure as Welch took his own life on June 7th. As the obituary in People magazine notes, Welch’s note indicated that suicide was his response to a certain future as an invalid, the result of a debilitating spinal injury. You have to respect Welch for the gallantry of not wanting to be a burden to his wife. He knew what he was in for: He’d just buried his own invalid father only years before. You’d hope an event like this might inspire discussions in our culture about choice in end of life decisions in particular, and healthcare options in general, but that’d probably be asking too much.

Once, Dr. Jack Kervorkian had the compassion and courage to seize the frontier in this debate. He was rewarded with prison. Since then, it seems the subject has been closed.

But I digress: Hypnotized was one of Welch’s best known Mac compositions. The song addresses Welch’s acute interest in UFOs. He would also write a song about the “very true” supernatural power of the Bermuda Triangle and the Air Force’s conspiracy to keep it secret.



After Fleetwood Mac, Welch formed the trio Paris with ex-Jethro Tull bassist Glenn Cornick. Though Paris may’ve represented some of Welch’s best work, the band recorded two albums to little acclaim and lackluster sales. Welch followed with a hot flash of platinum success with his solo album French Kiss, “a mix of hard rock guitar, dico-ish rhythms, and sweeping strings” (according to Wiki). But, the success would be brief: Welch squeezed out one more gold album before dropping off the charts completely and resolutely. 

Hear one of Welch’s best songs from the Paris days, Big Towne 2061, below. (A live rendering from 1979 can be found here.) I noticed the CD of the album was going for $80 on Amazon.



Download: Paris - Blue Robin

As you may’ve guessed, the title of this post was taken from the season finale of Mad Men.

No country for an old broad

We could quibble with her website's claim of "The First Female Rock and Roll Singer," but as "The Queen of Rockabilly," that domain is her's alone. Not even an heir or pretender because few women, now or then, would have the courage to stand with her. (Fewer still were as dishy as her: Dig that waist! It'd probably fit in a napkin ring.) In 2011 at the age of 73, and under the able wing of Jack White, Wanda Jackson returned to reclaim the throne that still sat empty.

The story goes that she planned on a career in country music until her friend Elvis told her she should do otherwise. (Previously, the Oklahoma born singer was a regular on the local Missouri TV show Ozark Jubilee. Sound country enough?) She had a few hits in her time including Fujiyama Mama (which makes sport of Japan's atomic holocausts: "I've been to Nagasaki/ Hiroshima too/ the same I did to them, baby/ I can do to you"—apparently, the Japanese could look past uncouth metaphors; it was a big hit there in 1957), Funnel of Love (dig that crazy deep-fried country cum Middle Eastern sound!), and her one entrée into the Top 40, Let's Have a Party. 

Even on the country stage she was feisty little broad. Check her early TV performances and compare her to the women around her, those in the cowboy boots and fringey over-the-knee skirts. Wanda's dresses are a little tighter, her necklines much lower, her fringe more strategic, and her lips way more red. But all of that was secondary to her voice, a suggestive down-tuned piccolo rasp, half animal growl, half choir girl, and all spunk. Historically, the critics have ladled on the praise thick as Southern gravy for her accomplishments. As a pioneer and survivor she has no peers. But as for her music, survey some of her You Tube output and note that for all her alleged greatness, you might find yourself disappointed in the way of classic material. She covered a lot of songs already made popular by other artists; It appears the men got first pick on all the best tunes. While her treatments are endearing and contain a trice enough edge and fire to be slightly left of the mainstream, even then she was no Brenda Lee.

Below is a performance from David Letterman with "special guest" Jack White: White's enthusiastic spill-over is more than enough to compensate for whatever time has taken from Wanda's rocking chair vintage voice. Jack might've done with a few less Marshalls. His volume obliterates the horns and nearly Wanda's voice too but, granted, the energy he supplies lifts everyone. Wanda is the grandma we all wished we had, even if her helmet of blackened hair looks like it could stop a bullet (applied with a few ozone holes worth of hairspray, no doubt) and that early spunk has all but (understandably) gone matronly. Still, her smile radiates an undimished 14K brilliance and her characteristic rasp is mostly intact.

The hair may be bigger than life, but then, it's not unlike the woman herself.

Download: Wanda Jackson - Funnel of Love

It appears "the nice lady with the nasty voice" will be getting some of her due afterall.

Buck's redux

Jeff Buckley, as you must be aware of by now, was the singer-songwriter with the angelic visage cut from a sugar cube and a voice like Paul Robeson sucking on a roomful of helium balloons. His range skewed high but it was all muscle: It stretched to nearly four octaves and it was delivered with a vibrato with enough fluid energy to capsize the Staten Island Ferry. Buckley drowned tragically in 1997 leaving behind a scant legacy of one proper studio album. Since his death, an unfinished second album and a set of live recordings have been retooled into a vulgar trove of endless posthumous repackagings.

Early on, critics would accuse him of wannabe jazzerism; charges he'd emphatically deny. (According to the interview below, his early critics were not kind. How time changes everything.) Buckley was nothing if not versatile, being equally deft at popping off a classic French ditty, jazz standards, hessian guitar rock, or even tear into a proggy mastadon like Genesis's Back in New York and all done with a punk-like intensity. He was also capable of going to nerdy places even geeks like the Ramones wouldn't touch. (He had the silly-head of a potentially amazing father.) Add to this a curatorial ear for pairing songs to that voice with seamless accuracy: a shrewd genius he was. And a pretty good guitar player too. His voice and a guitar were all he needed to slay you. And that's exactly what he does here.

The stream below is from an early appearance on Liza Richardson's KCRW show. While the date isn't specified it's most likely somewhere between the release of Live at Sin-é and Grace which would put the date at early 1994. Although, when he mentions moving to New York City in 1990 Richardson responds to that date with, "so, a couple of years ago" which would move the date up a couple of years. Regardless, his talent is already fully forged here. And besides being generously goofy he also proves himself utterly unpretentious: He doesn't take himself or his prodigious talent too seriously—amazingly. Remember that shortly after this he'd be lauded and larded with enough hyperbole to jade even the most uncorruptable—by such somebodies as Dylan, Bowie, Plant, Pitt (Brad), and many others. Perhaps his humility came from his teenage years among "the Disneyland Nazi youth" in Anaheim, a place where he never learned to be comfortable. New York would be his Mecca. (Those of us who also came of age in Orange County can surely understand the feeling.)

Listen and hear Buckley bounce from Bad Brains to Billie Holiday with equal authentic certainty. John Cale may've been the first to unearth Hallelujah from it's dusty Cohen cabinet (and gift it to new generations via Shrek), but it's Buckley who'll forever own the song. (I hope to live in a world one day that'll prove that statement wrong but I won't hold my breath.) 

It appears the embed is no longer functional: Go here to hear it.

And then, Scarlett Johansson: You'd have to wonder, what kind of Hellcat is this part time singer who thinks she can strut into Buckley territory and not completely humiliate herself? Do a YouTube search on Hallelujah and find armies of twee mortals who couldn't even begin to tie Buckley's shoe. (The one exception may be k.d. lang.) In any event, in the sub-genre of celebrity vanity projects, for this Hellcat Scarlett Johansson, her's may be one of the best.

Give ScarJo some respect. And, boys, that means with more than just your left hand.