The Test Tube and the Scale

Because it’s easier for us to carry images associated with the history of a particular music with us in our heads than it is the memory of that music itself, I have a picture of the master vibraphonist disrupting what had heretofore been my mind’s picture of twentieth century African music: Fela, stripped to a pair of white athletic shorts, his powerful athlete’s physique dominating the photographic composition, the metallic brilliance of his saxophone the welcoming nodal point for the eye. A 1977 film about Ceddo resistance to Middle Eastern religious dominance, specifically Islamic, in pre-colonial Senegal, Manu Dibango’s end music relates the unsettling transitional mood of historical inevitability. Born in 1933 in    Doula, the economic capital of Cameroon, to parents of mixed ethnicities, Dibango received a European education beginning when he was fifteen; the Wolof word for “outsiders” is Ceddo. In the film, a Senegalese village is converted to Islam by force following t...

  During the year 1975, while American teenager Garth Brooks split his extracurricular time between sports and family talent shows, providing entertainment with guitar and banjo, former members of Australian country-rock bands Mississippi and Axiom began recording together under the name Little River Band. Prior to his brief career with Axiom, lead singer Glenn Shorrock had performed as a founding member of mid-sixties Australian sextet The Twilights. Influenced by the British Invasion, The Twilights struggled for international recognition but, except for the occasional perk—an invitation from the Beatles to attend studio sessions for the recording of Penny Lane during a prize trip to London, for instance—the group returned to Australia having only absorbed a raw exposure to the briefest flash of a luminescent fraction of the planet’s most formidable pop musical talent. Their final single to chart in Australia, Cathy, Come Home, discloses what is both The Twilights’ strength and we...

  Highly stylized and toned to mock emotionlessness, Gary Numan’s singing voice is the definitive pop expression of twentieth century alienation. A common complaint held by critics of electronic based pop music when it began to chart in the States was against its supposed “inhumanity,” but what was really at issue was the intended discomfort provoked in those listeners   by largely unrecognizable, programmable instruments creating, with artistic     precision, an atmosphere of modern vulnerability and    distrust. That segment of the pop audience decrying the inhuman was only having another facet of its humanity stimulated by what it had never before heard on commercial radio. Texturally, Cars—from Numan’s third record The Pleasure Principle, his first without Tubeway Army—suggests a fantasy of high speed traffic, elegant, and swiftly paced, with a disquieting, erotic undercurrent that satisfyingly retains its synthesizer driven tension throughout. The song...

  Rock and roll history is like a geographical survey of community trends as they went about the cultural business of shaping, through the galvanizing shock of immediate pleasure, our national taste in pop music. Pick up the eponymous Warren Zevon record, and reading the personnel credits will evoke that mid-seventies Los Angeles musical style that was an extension of the Laurel Canyon aesthetic with added barroom truculence for masculine, delinquency cool. Zevon, like Gram Parsons or Lindsey Buckingham, was too sophisticated a musical talent to remain fixed behind one artistic persona for very long; a deeply flawed romanticist, gifted with poetic insight, Zevon burned perilously close to the ill defined borders of pop genius. His early career ballad Carmelita is more than just a clever marriage of singer-songwriter conceits. By fusing the rock clichè of the drug addicted personality to the country and western lyricism of the desperately lonely stranger, Zevon created a new archety...

Shortly after Care Of Cell 44 was released as a single on Date Records in November, 1967, The Zombies broke up. The single sold poorly, which is thought to have added to tensions already at play among group members during studio sessions that summer for the group’s stunning second record, Odessey and Oracle. One notable source of group discord was a disagreement between songwriter Rod Argent and vocalist Colin Blunstone over how another Argent composition might have been sung. The upside of this conflict was the transformative power it endowed Blunstone. An epistolary tale of a romantic partnership interrupted by incarceration, Care of Cell 44 is as conventionally structured a pop song as any to have emerged from the U.K.; three verses, a chorus, and a bridge. The first chorus appears after an eight beat countdown backed by a Pet Sounds-era multi vocal harmony that falls between the second verse’s final line—“and then you can tell me all about your prison stay”—and Blunstone’s thrillin...

  Taken from The Clash’s third record, the towering ice berg London Calling, The Card Cheat closes side three, a four song commentary on the devastating human effects of succumbing to economic stress. Like Bruce Springsteen here in the States, the Clash wrote extensively about the working poor, often producing scathingly original metaphors that lesser talents would have sentimentalized into a meaningless pathos. The Card Cheat begins as a gambling narrative, an unnamed card player attempting the risky move of playing a king of spades that he was not dealt. But this character may also be the failed musician from Death Or Glory, now an enlisted man on the battlefield, being warned of its risks; the real time business of a military detail just another reckless stab at chance, another gamble. He’s also the well dressed, cocaine addled advertising executive on the fifty-first floor, preparing to jump from an office window to his death on the street below. The gambler, it turns out, is u...

The most seductively aggressive guitar riff in the rock and roll songbook. Prior to Sticky Fingers, The Rolling Stones had spent its last two records perfecting those in-studio commercial qualities that ultimately revealed the depth of its genius for levering the tension of American blues onto contemporaneous rock. By this time in its career, the Stones were in command of a musical language exclusive to its talents, its influences drawn in part from the razor sharp contradictions run rampant across the American landscape which they experienced while on tour here, and the gallows humor from this country’s high density concentration of borderline personalities. Unlike the Beatles, who, professionally, could only intellectualize their American influences, the Stones took their investigations of the Yank psyche much further, absorbing them on a cellular level—Keith Richards became the world’s most famous junkie. Another source of excitement you hear in these records is the band’s finite bu...