Keith Levene (1957 - 2022)
Some people have a hard time squaring Keith Levene’s time in Public Image Ltd. with his declaration that Yes was his “absolute godhead band.” Not me. I hear in Levene’s playing a number of lessons learned from Steve Howe, Yes’s guitarist. It’s possible that I hear these things because, like Levene, I was an enormous Yes fan and an ardent student of what Howe did on and with the guitar. And like Levene, I lacked the skill to do ninety-nine percent of what Howe could do. So I did what Levene did, pursuing not Howe’s technical virtuosity, but his approach to the instrument within the context of a band. Levene listened to what Howe did when the music’s emphasis was elsewhere. He listened to how the guitar enters and exits, how dynamics and attack – rather than notes – can determine whether a part adds or subtracts from the whole. Levene took these lessons and applied them to a band which, on the surface, was completely different from Yes. One might go so far as to say that PiL was meant as the antidote to the bloat of Yes and of prog rock more generally. But PiL was prog in their own way. And, despite common (mostly accurate) perceptions, Yes was capable of some pretty punky noise. (The album Relayer offers a number of bracing moments that sound less like Emerson, Lake, and Palmer than they do [if you set aside the singing] like the Monorchid, the Jesus Lizard, or indeed like Levene’s PiL.)
On their two great albums (Metal Box/Second Edition and Flowers of Romance), Public Image were an unprecedented proposition. Built on awkward, subterranean rhythms anchored by Jah Wobble’s bass, Levene and his mate, John Lydon, could screed and scream and scrape their way across songs. In this regard, PiL was the antithesis of Yes. Structurally, where Yes were constantly moving forward to new themes, creating an illusion of movement from Point A to Point B (and often Points C, D, and E; occasionally to the far reaches of other real and imagined alphabets), PiL modelled themselves on the skipping record, constantly shunting back to Point A. The tacit claim of their music is that the progress of both progressive rock and of Western culture’s mad dash toward the future – toward bigger, faster, and more sophisticated – is a fool’s errand. Just hold tight. Here is no worse (no better either) than being somewhere else. And if we hang here long enough – even though the world may remain the same – our perceptions of it will shift. A secondary claim then arises: since we are largely a construct of our perceptions of the world, when our perceptions change, we change. Fundamentally. I hear no such claims in Uriah Heep, Greenslade, Focus, or Gentle Giant. (Look into the eyes of the dragon and despair!)
Levene’s great innovations in the context of PiL had nothing to do with melody or harmony. His guitar was a great gash; a sandblast abrading and upbraiding the surface of this thing that one might be tempted to call a song. Levene’s guitar was a prybar jammed between the lid and the can, the door and the frame, the present and the future, the right and the wrong. Levene found ways to wrench PiL’s songs into unexpected shapes so that they might careen along trajectories not accounted for by their design. Like Yes, but also like CAN and Lee “Scratch” Perry (the latter two among Lydon’s faves), PiL aspired to the cosmic. Maybe not as overtly. Maybe they wouldn’t cop to it. But their music surely tests the bounds of what earthly music might sound like.
I have a very distinct memory of dropping my young child off at daycare in those early, bleary days of new parenthood. Across the street from the daycare center was a field and forest cut through by power lines suspended from a series of monumental steel towers. It was autumn in New England, a sharp crack of chill in the air. Needing a little head clearing, a little respite from the incessance of a two year old, I walked the path of the towers. I put on my headphones and Metal Box / Second Edition.(I’ve always preferred to think of it as Metal Box, honoring the band’s original intentions when they packed three LPs into a metal film canister so tightly that to extract them for consumption meant risking their destruction.) This album offers sounds as un-pastoral as any I know. It is the embodiment of the towers and the power lines with the adjoining grass and trees photoshopped out. Indeed, in headphones, this album photoshops out the entire world. What’s left are the pixelated ghosts of guitar-bass-drums; the excoriated echo of a desperate howl emanating from a hole in the canvas.
Critics and guitar players of a certain bent sometimes claim that Levene invented what we recognize as postpunk guitar playing. In a song like “Chant” you can hear what they mean. Those wild, dissonant, emaciated streaks refusing to provide a roadmap for the listener’s expectations. Listen in particular to the final thirty-five seconds, when Lydon exits and Levene’s guitar rises to the fore and then melds with surprising seemlessness into a keyboard producing the same incoherence. But there was a lot more buried in Levene’s satchel. On “Memories” (we’re still listening to Metal Box) he offers vaguely middle-eastern figures, passing them through a tightly wound chorus effect that suggests that they are played under water. On “Swan Lake” (known in an alternate incarnation by the more on-the-nose title, “Death Disco”) Levene slathers the song in multiple guitars: one peppers the proceedings with flangey harmonics (a mainstay of Howe’s technique), another introduces a distant melody discharged from the bowels of an enormous metallic tank, a third scrapes gallopingly underneath the erected surfaces, and still another drops low Morricone-twanged punctuations that fall like Google map pins into the rapid and rabid expansions as they taunt disintegration. “Poptones” is in many ways the band’s mission statement. In addition to the guitar, Levene provides the spasmodic drums, overtaken by constant cymbal sibilance, grinding against Wobble’s architectonic bass line which thrusts insistently, even rudely, forward with little regard for anything else in its vicinity. Lydon’s vocals slide across registers: reticent, accusatory, resigned. Meanwhile, Levene’s guitar does something unaccounted for in celebrations of its postpunkiness. He plays a repetitive arpeggio which, if you listen to it in isolation, could be a Steve Howe contribution to one of the codas that Yes often used to close out – and settle down – one of their album-side-length, meandering epics.
For keen listeners, Levene provided just as much to chew on as Howe had provided for him. But in Levene’s hands there was no distracting virtuosity to lure unsuspecting, adenoidal guitarists down the garden path of MUSICIANSHIP. Levene recovered the lost, relegated, ignored, aspects of the music he loved and built a genuinely new music of these discarded parts. That’s one of the reasons that PiL at their best sounded like a teapot repaired by the same bull who’d just rampaged through the china shop. No attempt is made at disguising the sharp edges and protruding seams. These are the marks of actuality inflicted on the surface of the music and its creators. They remain, not as badges of honor – there is no honor in suffering the persecutions of reality – rather, they are left visible as evidence of having simply been part of this sometimes harsh and often pitiless world.
