Billy Conway

The feeling that death is everywhere around. Yes, it always has been and always will. But never more than now with record global population and a pandemic closing on a two year run. Eliot once wrote “I had not thought death had undone so many.” A line which comes to me often. But never more than now. So much human life run its course. So many bereaved. Death undoing so many right before our eyes, like flipping light switches in long, long rows. Flicker. Gone. Flicker. Gone.

The hot breath of the inevitable fogs our mirrors, announcing its loom; the closing – ever so slowly – of its inescapable knot. This week and even more piercingly today. It lands with the force of the ocean on how everything feels today, here at the bottom, fathomed and fathom-laden.

When I began to write these rock and roll eulogies, it had not occurred to me that someday the loss would not be distant and wholly abstract. The knot would inevitably tighten, closing in, breathing hotter. I learned today that Billy Conway passed. Maybe the name doesn’t ring a bell. But maybe you remember the band, Morphine. They suffered the constriction of inevitability themselves when frontman, Mark Sandman died on stage in Italy in 1999. A sudden, unexpected heart attack took him instantly before the audience even knew what was happening. Billy Conway struck, abandoned, beneath the spotlights.

I’d known them faintly in my teens. I learned how to attend a rock show while a college student in Boston where Sandman and Conway’s previous band, Treat Her Right, played. I saw them at the Rat, and at TT the Bear’s, maybe at the Plough and Stars. Who can remember? One night, I stood right against the stage. A case of beer at my feet. When no one had come for the box – not a bartender or a waitress – I assumed it had been placed there and forgotten; fallen off the back of a truck, so to speak. There for the taking. Surreptitiously, I snuck one bottle. Then another. By the end of the band’s set, I’d drunk four or five. Maybe six. Who can remember?

Sweaty and satisfied with a set fully realized, the four members of Treat Her Right, Conway and Sandman among them, stepped toward me and bent down to retrieve their stash. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that bands got free beer. Prior to that, my concert going experience was limited to posh British super groups at Madison Square Garden where, from the second to last row, one would have no godly idea about the mechanisms of libation and compensation. Treat Her Right readily surmised that roughly 20% of their reserve had been pilfered. Just as quickly, they figured me as the culprit, what with my legs straddling the carton. But there was no showdown, no pretense of intimidation. They sized the situation up for what it was: a penny-poor college kid carping the diem of an untouched case of beer left stranded at his feet. They would have done the same.

I saw Treat Her Right a number of times. Once I saw Billy Conway in the club’s bathroom before or after a show – who can remember? I told him how much I liked his band and I think he recognized me from the case of beer incident. He asked me if I played. I did what an aspirant would do and made it sound like I was well on my way, with a sheaf of songs ready to be recorded and road tested. I just needed a good drummer, I told him. He offered to sit in. Right there in the bathroom – at TT’s or the Rat or that other club in Brighton whose name I can’t recall (who can remember?) – he offered to help me out, to play some drums on my songs in order to set them in motion, to see if they had any life in them. We exchanged phone numbers and I called him. We set a date and he showed up at my apartment with his cocktail drum. Needless to say, between the phone call and the knock on my door, I’d written furiously – six, eight, maybe a dozen songs – who can remember? – desperate to seem like I was a talent-in-waiting, a ship worth jumping to. I might have even thought I could tempt Billy Conway from Mark Sandman and Treat Her Right.  

I don’t remember, but I’m sure the songs were shit. But Billy Conway never said so. I know that I was a shit guitar player and an even worse singer. But Billy Conway never said so. He played along like these were good songs and like I was his equal as a musician. I knew I’d been lucky. And I didn’t have any inclination to test that luck. I never called him again. I kept going to Treat Her Right shows. And Billy always said hi, chatted for a few minutes, asked me if I had my band together yet.

I learned today that Billy Conway passed. He’d struggled with liver cancer and it took him last week at age sixty five. Unlike previous entries, this eulogy is for the man, more than his music. I liked Treat Her Right at a time when I didn’t have my bearings yet. They are not a band I’ve listened to a lot in the years since college. But for some reason today I pulled their first, self-titled LP from its sleeve and laid it flat upon the platter of my turntable. I set the needle adrift upon its grooves. I remembered how kind Billy Conway had been, how generous with his time and encouragement. I didn’t yet know that Billy Conway had passed. I looked him up after the record was finished and learned that just a few days ago he died.

Death is everywhere around. A few days ago Joan Didion died. She was a writer who could slip a blade between your ribs and make you wince yourself alive again. A few days before that Alvin Lucier died. It will take the rest of us another fifty years to catch up with his work of the 1970s and 1980s. Piece after piece after piece reinvented what could qualify as art or music or art-music; redefined what counted as good and great. I knew Alvin too and was changed by knowing him. But that encounter came later, after I had my bearings. Billy Conway pushed me before I had my sails up.

In May, I lost my mom. Hers is the Queen of all deaths. As 2021 grinds into the loam of yesterday, loss piles up like numbers in an actuarial table come to life, each number a glance, a soft-spoken word, a memory sparking in the heart of a son or a daughter, a friend or a fan. Death is everywhere around. Too many to count, even if the newspapers undertake the job. The counting can never be equal to the task. Ostensibly, this is a eulogy for Billy Conway. But it is also a eulogy for 2021, or more precisely for what 2021 has taken from us. So many lost. Who can remember?

We. That’s who.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"When I Unplugged, I Connected to the Truth," by Tom Morello
The New York Times, November 17, 2021

If there is anything that one learns from the day-after-day experience of being alive (and I’m not sure there is anything truly to be learned, but if…) it is that everything is in relation to everything else. Duh-dum! That doesn’t mean that these relations are easily discerned. It doesn’t mean that X relates to Y in a simple, straightforward, 1:1 way. Hardly. Sometimes the nature of the relation does not emerge for weeks or years or even centuries. Sometimes it does not emerge at all. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not there. It’s there, friends and comrades, as sure as the nose on Tom Morello’s face. We should not expect to find cause equated with effect in the manner of a Hollywood production. I do not believe in god. But I do believe that shit moves in mysterious ways.

 

For instance, Tom Morello now writes a regular column for the New York Times. Okay. Whatever. But hold on, this anointment is a relation too. It confers upon Mr. Morello (as the Times themselves would refer to him) an authority. Thus far, he has chosen to apply this authority to his experience as an arena rocker and his convictions as a political activist. I don’t see any reason why any of us should expect this to change. Both the Times (they are a-changing) and Morello seem content to justify their relation along these lines of intersection: music and politics. Of course, neither the Times nor Morello invented this relation. It is old, old, old. But it owes its present day currency to the legacy of the 1960s: to Bob Dylan and Woodstock and the mindset that we now derisively refer to as “Boomer.” When we picture the March on Washington, or the Vietnam War, the killings at Kent State, or even the election of Richard Nixon (even he has soul), we hear the tunes: the opening harmonic pizzicatos of Stephen Stills’ “For What It’s Worth,” the swirly, modal exotica of the Doors’ “The End,” any of Dylan’s zeitgeist anthems.

 

Enter Morello, who wears his punk rock, power chord bonafides on his tattoo sleeves. He comes on like the new man, post-Boomer, enlightened in a particular way that we will soon stop calling “woke.” His band, Rage Against the Machine, was hardly flower power and something happening here that ain’t exactly clear. Morello’s music – from his band’s name on down – has always pointed its finger at the clarity of the something happening. Rage Against the Machine believed that they were engineering a relationship that was, against all odds, simple, straightforward, 1:1. But the universe doesn’t play like that. Rage Against the Machine were always exactly as straightforward as the machine itself. Point at the thing and call it “the thing”: product, slave, White, capital, nation, Christ, freedom, hot dog. But, again – it bears repeating – the universe doesn’t play like that.

 

Remember back in 2012, when then-Vice Presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, claimed (confessed?) to listen to Rage Against the Machine while pumping iron at the Congressional gym? Ryan was the Speaker of the House, and the up-and-coming hope of the neo-con branch of the Republican Party family tree. The very same New York Times called him “perhaps the most influential policy maker in the Republican Party, its de facto head of economic policy.” He no longer holds public office. In 2019, he joined the Board of Directors of Fox Corporation and started the American Ideas Foundation. (A Wikipedia search yields the following message: “Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for American Idea Foundation in Wikipedia to check for alternative titles or spellings.”)

 

At the time (2012), Morello responded to Ryan’s professed affection for his band in the pages of Rolling Stone. “Rage’s music affects people in different ways,” Morello wrote, “Some tune out what the band stands for and concentrate on the moshing and throwing elbows in the pit.” Morello suggests that “what the band stands for” is a simple matter, straightforward, 1:1. But his nearly simultaneous acknowledgment of differing affect pre-empts the simplicity of what (or how) anything stands for anything else. Not to mention Paul Ryan. Morello’s columns for the New York Times evince his ongoing belief in this simplicity of relations.

 

At this point – although I feel that it ought to be taken as given – I should stress that any criticism herein is directed not at Tom Morello, the human being. I have never met Mr. Morello and have no reason to doubt his sincerity or the goodness of his heart. He appears, from what I can tell, to be continually on the right side of both issues and history. All indications are that he fights the good fight. Criticism, as it arises here, is directed instead at a set of presumptions – aesthetic and ideological – that despite Morello’s apparent decency, infect his positions and opinions as expressed in the “paper of record.” Whether such criticism is merely nit-picking or of some degree of greater importance will, of course, be for you, the reader, to decide. This too is a matter of relation, of differing affect, and is far from simple.

 

Hand in hand, then, we cross intrepidly into the breach.

 

Morello’s piece, dated November 17, is titled “When I Unplugged, I Connected to the Truth.” Already, in the conversational title, we’re up against it. Immediately, we recognize the big claim lurking, impossible to solve in a newspaper column. What truth? Whose truth? Is there, in fact, a truth; a truth we can reliably call “the truth,” Mr. Morello? The problem that seems to rise above the level of nit-picking is that, whether we’re talking about politics or music, we have some obligation to start from the understanding that there is no universal telos. All roads do not lead to Rome, nor Ryan, Republicanism, or Rage. There are lots of roads. They lead to lots of different places. And while all places may not be equal, none of them is “the place.” Morello’s essay hangs on a distinction between what he calls “roof-rattling, gut-trembling rock ‘n’ roll” – meaning electric guitar music – and acoustic folk music that Morello releases under the name The Nightwatchman. Morello’s assertion is that as the Nightwatchman, he began “to unearth who I really was as an artist. […] The four Nightwatchman records were an unveiling, and probably the truest expression of self in my catalog.”

 

The acoustic music is the truth to which he connected. The nature of this truth is that it lies buried in “dark existential ruminations, a purging of, or at least a wrangling with, demons I had not been conscious of.” Morello narrates his transition from “affable, reliable, cheery rocker,” to someone newly able “to peek into my own soul.” Carefully pursuing Morello’s claims, we can reasonably conclude that, for Morello, "the truth" apparently resides in the individual soul. Yet, wouldn’t we be justified in anticipating that Paul Ryan would also claim the existence of something called “the truth”? That he would locate it in the individual, and more precisely in that individual’s soul? Does not the conservative wing of the Republican party stake its strategy and its ideology (another relation) on just such an individual truth of the soul? Let’s zoom out – the big tent to which political parties love to allude: Does not America itself stake its identity on this individual truth of the soul?

 

Wouldn’t the political program conjured by Morello – a politics of workers and prisoners, of women and BIPOC communities, of migrants and Group of 8 protestors – wouldn’t such a politics live not in the individual soul, but in the collective will? Wouldn’t such a politics reject any notion of a definite article-“truth” in favor of a dozen or a hundred indefinite article-needs, -wants, and -helping hands? After the brief, energetic blossoming of flower power, so many of the movements' leaders – from Jerry Rubin to Eldridge Cleaver – embraced a philosophy of self, abandoning the collective struggle to which they had dedicated their youth, in favor of answering the individual mandates of capitalist self-realization. We’ve played this game before. It hasn’t gone well for us. Remember Ronald Reagan? It ain’t just nit-picking.

 

The narrative of Morello’s essay starts from the heights. Morello is already and unquestionably a rock-god, firmly entrenched in some Z101-all-the-hits-from-yesterday-and-today-Olympus. Upon stumbling on an unnamed (why unnamed?!) kid playing his acoustic guitar at a teen shelter open mic, Morello experiences his road-to-Damascus epiphany. This kid’s out of tune guitar and shaky voice is more real than the amplified, inflated arena rock that Morello and his bandmates are touring. Somehow, Morello fails to realize that the exaggeration of his electric music is a product of its, and his, relation to capital. He writes that he took up acoustic music “in defiance of good sense and commerce.” The market demands the bluster of Rage Against the Machine. Only such bluster can fill the arenas. Only such bluster can accompany the workout regimen of the United States Speaker of the House. (Pelosi’s probably rocking Slipknot as we speak.) Morello is deaf to this truth: thousands of rockers less fortunate than he, sing their truthful souls, their soulful truths, every night in basements and garages and seventy-five person capacity venues from San Diego to Halifax and beyond. Some are desperate to answer capitalism’s call and to land where Morello has landed. Others, however, play for wholly different reasons – reasons they probably can’t put a finger on; reasons that have nothing to do with truth or even with reason. They get together with others, unsure of what they want or how they’ll get it. They flail and flounder until something emerges from their erratic efforts. To their wonder, even if to no one else’s, this something takes on form and verve and occasionally meaning. It is not “the” or even “a” truth, but it is something, taking place where nothing had previously taken place.

 

Tom Morello, is this not your political vision? Is this not how we build movements and deconstruct the enmity and malice of the way things are? Is this not how we rage against the machine? The amplified song that is just now – this instant – bubbling to the surface in the collective awareness and abilities of four kids in Fargo or Talahassee or Searchlight, Nevada. This is a new node in a network of relations. Maybe they were inspired by the Sex Pistols or, like you were, the Clash. Maybe it was Creedence or Patti Smith or Bikini Kill or Billy Eilish. Maybe one of them is reading the Autobiography of Malcom X or Rimbaud or Angela Davis. Maybe one of them will see The Battle of Algiers at a friend’s house next week. Who knows?! Maybe one of them will read your column in the New York Times and tell her bandmates about what you said. Maybe they’ll get what you meant. Maybe they’ll get it all wrong and make something better than you or the Clash or even god ever could.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes, dir. (2021)
Well, there are now two entries in Todd Haynes’ filmography that begin with “Velvet.” As it’s been 23 years between 1998’s Velvet Goldmine and the just-released documentary, The Velvet Underground, I look forward to 2044 and the third entry in the Velvet Trilogy: an interactive, VHR (Virtual Hyperreality) bio-genetic-fan-fiction in which the viewer can become a member of 1980s post-psychedelic trio, Velvet Monkey, alongside indie stalwart Don Fleming, or – if they advance to the second level – of 1990s power pop duo, Velvet Crush, joining Ric Menck and Paul Chastain.

Haynes‘ new film rushes in where angels fear to tread. If Brian Eno’s apocryphal saw about only a hundred people buying the first Velvets album but all of them starting a band is correct, then surely it’s even truer that while only one director made a feature length documentary about them, every person who saw it became a critic. Like any good art, the Velvet Underground is a different thing to anyone who hears them. Each of us feels that they were a band made specifically for us. So how can one film speak to every viewer, every listener?

To his credit, Haynes ignores this problem. He’s made the film that he wants to see, the one about his Velvet Underground. Also to his credit, he devotes more than half the film’s running time to the scene out of which the Velvets emerged. We get a lot of our information directly from the mouths of people like Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Amy Taubin, Danny Fields, Mary Woronov, and Jonas Mekas, to whom the film is dedicated. There is also a lot to look at. Haynes raided previously unraided archives to kaleidoscopically cobble an image of images: not today’s “picture-in-picture,” but experimental cinema’s “picture-on-picture.” Perhaps the most effective technique in the film is Haynes’ use of Warhol’s screen tests of the members of the band. As Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Mo Tucker are introduced into the narrative, the screen splits, with the new figure’s screen test occupying half the picture, while the other shuffles through home movies, experimental b-roll, and archival footage of New York in the sixties. At one point, Reed’s face lingers (or looms) as Cale is introduced. Reed’s impetuous mug hangs around until the reel runs out, overtaken by film leader. Haynes’ doc pays homage to Mekas and other downtown NYC artists by making a kind of pastiche tribute of and to their innovations. Superimposition, split screen, quick cutting, and fast motion are used to disorienting effect, mimicking the experience of 60s happenings and Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

The Velvets, of course, were part of the EPI, its soundtrack and, to some extent, the eye of its storm. But only to some extent. With the EPI, Warhol created an experience without a center and therefore without edges, borders, or ends. The Velvet Underground were a disquieting element, immersing the entire space in the sound of one thing chafing against another, generating a friction that threatens (and perhaps only threatens) to ignite. When Warhol witnessed the Velvet Underground at Café Bizarre grinding their way through “The Black Angel’s Death Song” (despite being warned by the manager not to play it) and then starting it over again, he heard this friction. Language against noise. Order against chaos. Stasis against progress. The clock against eternity. The Velvet Underground were capable of conjuring a kind of anti-teleological magic. Their miracles had no source, no master plan or master planner. They delivered no tidy moral-of-the-story. In place of the modernist compulsion to shed light on a subject (or an object) and thereby to understand - to define - what it is, the Velvet Underground flooded the visual field with white light, casting everything in equally blinding relief. This is not merely an inversion of the worldview that modernism inherited from Judeo-Christianity, in which every effect has a cause and every cause is a lesson and every lesson is god. This is not democracy’s teleological recourse to freedom. It is not the law’s recourse to justice. It is not capitalism’s recourse to profit. The Velvet Underground abandons the miracle. They pursue, instead, the epiphany of the epiphenomenon. “Some people work very hard,” Lou Reed sings, “but still they never get it right.” You can’t plan to have your mind blown.

The first half of Haynes’ documentary situates the Velvets in a time and place in which their sound was sound and their sense made sense. With John Cale emerging from daily ninety minute drones with Conrad and Young, “Black Angel’s’ Death Song” is so commonplace as to merit no particular attention. Lou Reed, frack to Cale’s frick, is portrayed as the contradictory character he was. But the film does pull a few of its punches. Reed comes off as driven but not quite the egomaniac that he often was. He is clearly difficult, but the film stops short of showing us what a schmuck he could be. Every biography has to selectively edit, deciding which, of the many stories that constitute a life, to tell. Haynes’ film does not mention Lester Bangs and his decades-long running antagonism with Reed. There are a few stories there worth telling. The film is long on declarations of innovation, but short on explanations as to how this innovation was achieved. Jonathan Richman is the closest thing we get to a decoder of the band’s methods and madness. It would have been nice to hear from a few others who could speak to Reed as a singer or a songwriter, to Morrison as a guitar player, to Tucker as a drummer. The remarkable fact that Tucker played without foot pedals, with her bass drum turned horizontal, goes unremarked. Most unfortunately, we aren’t treated to significant insight into how the band worked musically with and against each other to produce their unprecedented sturm und drang. 

The film would have benefited from a section dedicated to “Sister Ray,” from White Light/White Heat, the second Velvet Underground album. No song better exemplifies what the band was capable of. For seventeen and a half minutes, the band is locked in mortal combat – with each other, yes – but more crucially and more vigorously, with the moment. They know that this is it: the one chance they’ll get to commit this song, this thing, this something-happening, to tape; to lock it down for the eternity of a vinyl groove and to do right by it. We can also hear each of them wanting to do right by themselves. There is Cale’s organ climbing up on its shipmate's shoulders to get its own gasping head above water. But there is also Mo Tucker, ratcheting the tempo, like the captain/the engineer/the pilot/the driver in the climactic scene, pushing the boat/the train/the plane/the car to the brink in order to escape or save the day or both or something else. The laws of narrative demand that the machinery fails. The engine blows in a billowy flash and the gears claw each others’ insides and the whole careening carcass comes to rest in a heap of failed intentions. Yet, as every script confirms, all is not lost. The denouement must still arrive, if by other means. Somehow, the effort continues by alternate energies, by reinvigorated will.

“Sister Ray” follows the script. But what’s truly revelatory about the song as it appears on White Light/White Heat is that, despite ourselves – enlightened modern listeners though surely we are – we don’t realize that we are watching that script. We don’t know, or else we’ve forgotten, that the laws of narrative apply to this particular experience. The Velvet Underground disabuse us of our expectations. They suspend the suspension of our disbelief. Here, in this specific universe – the one in which the Velvet Underground are building their ship inside the bottle inside the crate inside the hold of the ship submerged in the ocean in a diorama built inside a bottle in the hold of the ship – here in this specific universe that is “Sister Ray,” we have no right to expect release, but only tension and tension and tension in this ever expanding universe without end.

So, when, at three or four different moments, the band sounds as if that’s it, that’s all they’ve got, only to churn back up, to rise like a fallen monster/boxer/drunkard back to their feet, we are truly surprised. Surprised that there is more noise, more friction, to be extracted from the information as it scrapes against the boundaries of the apparatus. “All the needles are on red.” It’s the opposite of “We’re trying to get a light on him.” There’s no “him.” There’s only “it,” that which is happening. And the light is not external to it, but activated by it. Likewise, there’s no “we.” There’s only “it,” that which is happening and of which we are a part. And “it” is never complete, never finished. As information and apparatus merge, as content and form conflate, subject and object fold together into an indiscernible entity, less spatial than temporal; an it-that-is-happening.

Like I said at the start, everyone who watches Haynes’ film will have their own critiques. No Bob Quine?! No Patti Smith?! No Laurie Anderson?! Some may even argue that, despite the film's conclusions, Loaded is a good album. The point is not to quibble but to keep the conversation going, allowing the film to be a catalyst for thoughts and figures it doesn’t include. With that in mind, we should thank Todd Haynes for not totally screwing this up (the way Jim Jarmusch did with the Stooges film, Gimme Danger). In the end he paints a pretty invigorated, nervy, indignant picture of a pretty invigorated, nervy, indignant group at a pretty invigorated, nervy, indignant time. His skittery forms follow his skittery figures and in the process a film emerges which is about its subject while also being a kind of echo of its subject; an inheritor, a descendant. 

There is an amazing bootleg of the Velvets known as “The Legendary Guitar Amp Tape.” At a show in Boston, somebody apparently shoved a portable tape recorder into the enclosure of Lou Reed’s amplifier cabinet. From that vantage, subsumed by the maelstrom of feedback and fret noise, we hear things that are always there in the Velvets, if never quite so apparent. To borrow an observation that Lester Bangs made of the Stooges, the Velvet Underground “work deftly with musical ideas that may not be highly sophisticated (God forbid) but are certainly advanced.” Approximately twelve minutes into “Sister Ray,” Reed’s amplifier assumes the identity of a natural disaster. An erupting volcano, a mudslide, a tsunami – something going where it isn’t supposed to go. It is hot and heavy and hungry. Things in its path are devoured. Thingness itself is swallowed whole by what is happening. What is happening? “The question can be modulated in any tone” (Jean- François Lyotard). Whatever it is, it cannot be represented by a dot on or between one of five lines. Rather, it quivers in the oscillations of the hand, the string, the current, the speaker, the room, the bodies, the land, the minutes, the edges of each frame that might be used to quantify what it is that is happening. Haynes film quivers sympathetically with this energy. It, too, happens.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lee "Scratch" Perry

Where to begin? Where to end? Not necessarily in that order. Empire is all about knowing where you begin and end. Euro-Christian notions of progress, of historical development: Alpha to Omega. Yet so few of us live this way. We stumble from pillar to post, from post- to pre- without plan or premonition. Sometimes the means justifies the means. So Lee “Scratch” Perry – the Upsetter – brings the horns back again. He sets the hum that wasn’t supposed to be there against the skanking upbeat that was, justifying nothing but having done it. Mean means. Means mean.

Every form is a philosophy. European music insists on rational permutations of an initial theme; on compositional complexity and resolution. Such music lords over its listeners and its musical others, driven by its need to express superiority. It recognizes that superiority is a fiction like any other and exerts it in form: political form, cultural form, legal form, economic form.

In Kingston, in the late-1960s, Lee Perry and King Tubby and a handful of others began to strip the vocal tracks from popular reggae records, pumping up the rhythms and taking liberties with delay effects. They called these new mixes “versions.” The style that emerged – treating the fundaments of a song as a tabula rasa – became known as “dub.” (For a definitive account, see Michael Veal’s Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae.) The blank canvas became, not a space for adding new materials, but a space of subtraction. What is already there is the material and carving it away reveals eddies and ripples hidden beneath the vocal melodies or the organ chords. Something altogether new is discovered in the tangles of the strands of canvas, in the muck of the gesso. Such music has no need for any notion of superiority. It is but a version, a derivative of another thing, equally strong, equally meaningful, equal.

In the ruptures and corruptions of the smooth surface of the steady rhythm new things grow and glow like lichens in a sun-deprived crevasse. One accepts as rule of law that nothing rises to perfection, but that flaws are points of departure, new possibilities hiding in the folds of the canvas. As one pearl of Kingston wisdom puts it: “Every spoil a style.”

No one understood this better than Lee Perry. In his hands, a bad electrical line buzz could become the basis of a new song. When he felt burnt out, he burned his studio – the Black Ark – to the ground – presumably to find something new in the absence he was creating. He produced many of Jamaican music’s most important sessions, including early recordings of Bob Marley and the Wailers and sent those recordings – without the band’s knowledge or consent to Chris Blackwell at Island Records in London, thereby launching Reggae’s biggest star. He also produced the Congos’ great Heart of the Congos, possibly the highpoint of Rastafarian-influenced vocal group reggae – a record of recurrent epiphanies and lasting effects. Perry’s music launched a thousand ships. His use of the studio as a musical instrument in its own right, not merely a capturer, but a creator of sounds, is now taken for granted. But it wasn’t when he started fucking around and fucking shit up.

One of my favorite Lee “Scratch” Perry tracks is “Corn Fish Dub,” as it appears on the album Super Ape. The song seems to emerge out of a fog that is half-physical, half-mental. A distant guitar echoes into itself like a dream that can’t decide to get started. Against that, vocals drift in absentmindedly. Then a muted bell is struck, its attack truncated. Sometimes, it rings out on the one, resonating and echoing: raindrops on the trembling surface of a pond. Other times, the bell swallows itself at its inception and disappears into the space it has engineered for its own pulse. A recurring descending chromatic guitar line gives the song the faintest of shapes. But mostly it is an atmosphere, the bell a firing-synapse across the expanse of mental space and time. Into that flexing envelope everything is swallowed and from it everything is regurgitated, both beginning and end. All revealed as equally origin, equally destination, equally contingent, equal.

Perry’s brand of magic realism was heavy on the magic and light on the realism. His own music lives on a surreal plane with spaghetti westerns and Japanese b-monster flicks: worlds in which the mundane bends around Morricone twang and warbling theremins. These worlds are unheimlich – unhomely, uncanny – doubles of our world with a few of the screws removed, ropeless pulleys, unkiltered pistons chafing against time, yardarms fallen to the dust amid sheltering puffs. Everything could be true. But no more true than what we – on a daily basis – take to be true. The rules of music and manners are not much use here. And Scratch ignored them both with equal insouciance. He was a mischief-maker extraordinaire; a true trickster. The kind who realizes that only the trick is true. We rarely honor our debt to the trickster, the holy fool. He’s dismissable. We can take what we need from him, but leave him safely behind, obscured by madness, smoke, magic. Scratch won’t go away that easily. His music is his remains and in it multitudes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charlie Watts

Conflicted is the only way to feel about the Rolling Stones. They’ve now spent forty years as a satire of their first fifteen. It would be easy to write them off. But those first fifteen years produced so many moments in which their workaday methods produced little fission miracles. It’s no more and no less than honest to scratch one’s head and ask “why?” about everything from Tattoo You onwards. The tours especially are exercises in embarrassment. Not just Mick’s tights or Keef’s pirate cosplay, but the spectacle, the rehashing, the nostalgia trip(-up). The real crime is that all they had to produce was fumes and that they obliged. They became a multi-national corporation whose product was a knock-off of the product they used to make. They plagiarized themselves on a conveyor belt of plug n’ play records and misdirection theatrics.

Charlie Watts sat behind it all, gazing down like the chief executive whose fashion he adopted. He avoided the rough and tumble of the factory floor, choosing to frame the fray within the boundaries of his modest kit. On some level, Charlie was the only thing that allowed the Stones to retain some small room legitimacy. You could still imagine him on the bandstand at the Checkerboard Lounge or even perched on a corner stool at the bar. The same imagining could never apply to Keith or Mick.

But, truth is, Charlie was a jobber. He just wanted to play. When he joined the Stones he was also a member of numerous other bands. As Ben Sisario reported yesterday in the New York Times,

“I used to play with loads of bands, and the Stones were just another one,” he told The Observer, a British newspaper, in 2000. “I thought they’d last three months, then a year, then three years, then I stopped counting.”

Charlie could have been just as happy (but a lot less wealthy) playing in a jazz trio at Ronnie Scott’s. He bred prizewinning Arabian horses. This fact says a lot about who Charlie was: He collected vintage cars even though he never learned to drive. Even though Mick and Keith courted him like starstruck suitors, he was lucky to catch on with two such manic, motivated drivers. He wasn’t so much their motor as their mechanic, keeping the machine musically and emotionally humming.

So I feel honest acknowledging that I’m conflicted too about Charlie. I admire the commitment to the cause, even if his commitment always seemed easier than Mick’s or Keith’s who each could have managed without the others. I appreciate the simple core that Charlie insisted on maintaining at the eye of the musical and theatrical storm, while also feeling that he was rather dull as a drummer. Sure, there’s that slightly behind the beat thing that everybody mentions. But he certainly didn’t invent that and one feels that a whole bunch of other drummers could have done what he did and most of us would never have noticed. He has, in fact, missed out on a healthy handful of sessions over the years and most are unaware or unsure if what they’re hearing is Charlie. (E.g. Is it Charlie on “Gimme Shelter?”)

Still, he rolled with the Stones and that is no small feat. Putting up not only with two boundless egos, but also shifting with his bandmates’ whims from blues to riffs to psychedelia and eventually a stilted, percolating disco. My favorite Stones’ stuff is the bootleg compilation known as Sympathy for the Disco, outtakes from the late-70s. Only one track is harvested from the 80s, 1981s “Come On Sugar.” It’s the last thing the Stones did that still suggests searching and yearning for something new – or more precisely, some new configuration of the parts they pilfered from Black music. What makes Sympathy for the Disco so good is how wrong they get it. If it’s the disco they’re aiming at, they land curled up in a shopping cart outside in the parking lot, having been thrown out by the bouncer after six too many Wild Rose shots. These tracks are disco-adjacent and skewed by the Stones’ obscenely rich, British, princes-of-perversity sensibilities. The misfire makes this music utterly unique, unlike any funky White weirdness being produced by post punk kids in New York’s No Wave at the same time.

Charlie’s playing is great throughout but never more so then on “Come On Sugar” where his contribution is primarily a heavy kick drum shadowed ever-so-slightly-later by an enveloping hi-hat closing around the beat like an oyster shell around a pearl. The snare drum intervenes like a curse, damning the unreachable trapped within. It’s inspired even if it’s just the work of a guy who’d play whatever you put in front of him.

In the 1989 film 25x5, Charlie is asked about the previous 25 years touring with the Rolling Stones. “Work five years, and twenty years hanging around.” It was the work that mattered to him. But he was willing to hang around waiting for someone else to count off. It’s telling that the Stones will now tour without him. They’re still counting off, even if Charlie’s done working.