DAY425.
Brian Eno....................................................Ambient 1:Music For Airports   (1978)











I've spent the last two days trying to get my head around this album, but still can't get any love for it.I know he was trying to make music that he would like to hear but holy fuck, air travel numbers would surely take a tumble if you had to listen to this shite at the airport.



Out of the four tracks, there would be there would be the grand total of no tracks that I would like to hear again, the opening track reminded me in part of the opening of "Pictures At An Exhibition" by Mossorgsky, but only in part,anyways this album wont be going into my collection.





Bits & Bobs;




Ambient 1: Music for Airports is a willfully perverse musical statement, one of unlimited contradictions and no small genius.


 Perverse? Well, it's an album that was released in 1978, but largely imagined at the whip centre of anarchy in the UK. At a time when music was undergoing a shift of seismic proportions, when punk in all its raw fury was changing the musical landscape -- when the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks was the most important new record released and when successive seasons of loud, vitriolic punk bands, post-punk bands, and new wavers were preparing to crash the music culture party -- Brian Eno was closeted away dreaming up sounds that were diametrically opposed to that ethos: if the whole point of punk was that it operated at gut level and was impossible to ignore, Eno set about creating music that was fully intellectualized and utterly translucent -- sounds that disappeared completely.



 With the series of 'Ambient' recordings made in the late '70s, Eno was exploring, among other things, the notion of 'passive' music. The sounds on Music for Airports possess an endless mutability of mood, which is to say that rather than inspiring a specific set of emotions, they instead reflect the inherent emotions of the listener. One of the ways we select music to listen to at any given time is by seeking out something that amplifies our emotions, our state of mind. We want empathy, so that when we're feeling spiteful and anarchic we listen to the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen"; or else we play Radiohead's "Creep" because we're wallowing, feeling a lack of romantic self-worth. When we're feeling bloody but unbowed, the world plays "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", or at least many people do. And the nature of these songs -- most songs, in fact -- is that they suggest the same emotions in whatever context you listen to them. Whether you're home alone, or packed like a sardine on your way to work on a rush-hour train, your sense of being as a result of the music is unlikely to vary significantly. The intensity of those feelings might shift, depending on circumstance (you just broke up with your girlfriend, you're more of a creep), but the essential core of that feeling won't change greatly. So it's fair to say that most popular music has a small, extremely finite emotional register, and one of Eno's great accomplishments was to broaden that register, not by suggestion, but by reflection.



 The success of Music for Airports can only be appreciated by listening to it in a variety of moods and settings. Then you are likely struck by how the music allows your mind the space to breathe, and in doing so, adapts itself to your mood. The notion of 'space' is key in these compositions, though it requires a musicologist of considerable virtuosity to break down the precise mechanics of how it works. Perhaps no other artist of comparable stature or impact has taken such a deliberately intellectual approach to music as Eno.



 In his original liner notes, he wrote: "Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."



 Eno's vision of Ambient Music both suggests and accurately reflects the place of fine pictorial art in public or private space. When we hang a painting in a room, we are not focused upon it at every given moment whilst occupying that room. Sometimes we might pause to focus on the picture, seek out new and different ideas from it; other times we may glance at it in passing, or ignore it completely. But even when we block it out of our consciousness entirely, we have a subconscious awareness of it. The room and our feelings within that room would change if it were absent, and this is the effect that Eno imagined for Ambient Music. Present when present; present when absent.



 Eno has largely been given credit for inventing 'Ambient Music', most specifically through the release of Music for Airports. Certainly though, the likes of John Cage, Steve Reich, and Phillip Glass explored similar terrain, and no one person ever invents an entire genre of music by themselves. And with the electronic music explosion of the late '80s and early '90s, Ambient gained a new and unparalleled currency, and by common consensus the greatest Ambient work of that era is Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, a confection produced by Dr. Alex Patterson under the moniker of the Orb.Yet the differences between Music for Airports and Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld are striking. Both are masterworks, yet the former is without question a more purely Ambient Music. By way of it's many samples, Adventures... offers an associative ambience. It encourages your mind to wander (the album is, quite literally, 'a trip'), but also provides suggestive direction as to where you should go. For example, the sampled sound of a car or motorcycle repeatedly passing from speaker to speaker automatically limits your field of reference and association. It grounds you in a contemporary civilization. The area of suggestion may still be vast, but it is clearly finite. In contrast, there is nothing on Music for Airports which is so specific. Not to suggest that one work is 'better' than the other, only to point out an evolutionary aspect of the music.



 One measure of greatness for works of art is whether they meet the goals set by their creator (providing, of course, the goals were meretricious enough to begin with). The English journalist Paul Morley, who has written about as well as one can write about Eno's Ambient works, suggests:

 "...the music can evoke deeply personal reactions in different listeners: a sense of alienation, an expression of pure energy, a feeling of panic, of being wrapped in warm blankets, of flying through heaven or a melancholy made even more touching by it's restraint and control."



 Which, again, confirms the intended effect of the artist. The individual pieces themselves are, by necessity, minimalist in composition (which is not to say that they are simple compositions), and Modernist in manner. But could there be a broader encompassing of emotion from a single source than that described by Morley? It is as though a blank page awaited only a series of authors to write upon it.



 And so to another measure of artistic greatness: how well a work ages. It's here that an irony reveals itself, since to most appearances Music for Airports began life radically out of step with its own time. As it turns out, this was simply a result of it being out in the stratosphere, waiting for time to catch up -- and who were we to know that? Not all of us are born music prophets. All that can be said with any certainty is that having passed its 25th anniversary, Music for Airports, as both an album and a concept, shows little sign of aging yet.



1/1



I had four musicians in the studio, and we were doing some improvising exercises that I’d suggested. I couldn’t hear the musicians very well at the time, and I’m sure they couldn’t hear each other, but listening back, later, I found this very short section of tape where two pianos, unbeknownst to each other, played melodic lines that interlocked in an interesting way. To make a piece of music out of it, I cut that part out, made a stereo loop on the 24-track, then I discovered I liked it best at half speed, so the instruments sounded very soft, and the whole movement was very slow. I didn’t want the bass and guitar – they weren’t necessary for the piece – but there was a bit of Fred Frith’s guitar breaking through the acoustic piano mic, a kind of scrape I couldn’t get rid of. Usually I like Fred’s scrapes a lot, but this wasn’t in keeping, so I had to find a way of dealing with that scrape, and I had the idea of putting in variable orchestration each time the loop repeated. You only hear Fred’s scrape the first time the loop goes around.



2/1


 “2/1” uses six different vocal tracks, sung by Christa Fast, Christine Gomez, Inge Zeininger, and Eno himself. The tracks are cued at specific intervals designed to layer and cascade unpredictably. Eno explained the track in a 1996 talk given at Imagination Conference in San Fransisco:


Music for Airports, at least one of the pieces on there, is structurally very, very simple. There are sung notes, sung by three women and my self. One of the notes repeats every 23 ½ seconds. It is in fact a long loop running around a series of tubular aluminum chairs in Conny Plank’s studio. The next lowest loop repeats every 25 7/8 seconds or something like that. The third one every 29 15/16 seconds or something. What I mean is they all repeat in cycles that are called incommensurable – they are not likely to come back into sync again.




So this is the piece moving along in time. Your experience of the piece of course is a moment in time, there. So as the piece progresses, what you hear are the various clusterings and configurations of these six basic elements. The basic elements in that particular piece never change. They stay the same. But the piece does appear to have quite a lot of variety. In fact it’s about eight minutes long on that record, but I did have a thirty minute version which I would bore friends who would listen to it.




"1/2"



Like “2/1,”, "1/2" uses vocal tracks, layered with particular time offsets to make organic, unpredictable compositions, but this time piano tracks are added to the mix.



"2/2"



“2/2” was performed with an ARP 2600 synthesizer and is the last piece of this album.




1/1

 
This is the first of four tracks on Brian Eno's rather unusual album, Ambient 1: Music for Airports, the first album by any artist to be explicitly labeled "Ambient music." It was intended as a sound installation to calm people's nerves at airports, after Eno spent time at Cologne Bonn Airport in Germany and found the piped-in music to be "nervous" and "tingly." The album was briefly installed at LaGuardia Airport in New York in 1980.


 
In an interview with Complete Music magazine in 1982, Eno referred to his ambient output as "bisexual." He points out that there is a "correspondence between raspiness in voice and male dominance in society," and that he'd been moving away from coarse vocals to choral voices.



 
Eno used a series of tape loops to create these sounds. "A whole series of very long tape loops, like 50, 60, 70 feet long," he told Interview magazine in 1978. There were 22 loops. One loop had just one piano note on it. Another one would have two piano notes. Another one would have a group of girls singing one note, sustaining it for 10 seconds. There are eight loops of girls' voices, and about 14 loops of piano. I just set all of these loops running and let them configure in whichever way they wanted to, and in fact the result is very, very nice."
 

PatReilly wrote:

Afraid Ambient 1: Music for Airports is a pretentious pile of shite, underlining what can go wrong with someone's head when they have become sought after as a producer. Eno began to think he had something, but his efforts as a musician, without guidance and input from folk who can actually play meant the resultant output, to me, was an empty mess.

I also think that at the time folk who despised the advent of punk music would have accepted any direction which gave them relief from the young upstarts who were taking over music: this helped Eno's cause.

I concur

DAY 430.
The Germs.......................................................(GI)   (1979)











Sid was self destructive, Johnny was snotty,Rollins was furious, and Johnny and Dee Dee were cartoon-like, Darby Crash was all of these. A charismatic and confrontational frontman, many took him to be barking mad. Many happened to be right. But his oddball lyrics and unpredictable and incendiary stage show helped stamp The Germs as one of the most influential punk bands ever


As much as a commanding figure as Crash was, The Germs were not just all about his self-lacerating hi jinx. Guitarist Pat Smear (who later went on to join Nirvana) co-wrote everything and was responsible for some of the biggest pure punk riffs of the time.



Falling behind here, will try and get at least half done today, and the rest by tomorrow night.

Last edited by arabchanter (14/10/2018 10:34 am)

DAY 427.
AC/DC........................................................Highway To Hell   (1979)











This album was the opposite of the last one, I wasn't looking forward to it, and I really thought I wasn't going to enjoy it, but not for the first or the last time, I thought wrong. When an album opens up with a track like "Highway To Hell" it tends to grab your attention, now as most people who have read my slaverings will tell you, I'm no' the most guitary loving fella you'll ever meet, but AC/DC's music has something about it that drills into your head and you find their music stuck in your head a tad longer than you would normally want.



All the tracks are high energy with some great ear worm riffs, but my favourites would be "Highway To Hell," "If You Want Blood (You've Got It)" but the stand out fir me would be the underrated "Shot Down in Flames," they really did have some crackin' intros that even if you weren't sure about them you would probably say "I'll just listen to this one" and then you'd do the same with the next track.



Anyways this album will only be getting downloaded at the moment, the only reason it wont be going into my collection at the moment is purely down to finance, I've spent a bit too much lately and there's only so much I can sneak past "her who must be obeyed" without war being declared, so this album won be going into my collection (just yet)





Bits & Bobs;



The Young Brothers and Bon Scott were all born in Scotland. They formed the group after moving to Australia.


 
Bon Scott died on February 19, 1980 after a drinking binge the previous night. A friend named Alistair Kinnear took him home, but Scott passed out in the car. Kinnear couldn't move him, so he drove home, reclined the passenger seat, and covered Scott with a blanket. The next day, Kinnear found Scott motionless and drove to the hospital, where he was declared dead. The coroner's report stated the cause as, "Acute Alcohol Poisoning and Death By Misadventure."



 
Three teenagers were crushed to death at their concert in Salt Lake City, Utah on January 18, 1991, when the crowd rushed to the front to get the best seats. The band did not know of the deaths, and played on to avoid further problems. They were devastated when they found out some fans were killed.


 
Bon Scott's real first name is Ronald. When he moved from Scotland to Australia, they made fun of him by calling him Bonnie Scotland, which shortened to Bon Scott.


  
George Young, Angus and Malcolm's older brother, was in the popular Australian group The Easybeats. He produced most of AC/DC's albums.



 
They sometimes had trouble getting into their own shows because they looked just as scruffy as their fans.


 
In 1989, the US military blared AC/DC music at General Manuel Noriega's compound in Panama for two days straight. The dictator surrendered.



 
Angus performs in a schoolboy uniform. This tradition started soon after the band formed when Angus would go directly from school to band rehearsals.



 
A staple of their live shows in the late '80s was a bit where Angus would get on the shoulders of a roadie who would wander into the crowd while he played. Returning to the stage, Angus would then mount Bon Scott, shredding from his frontman's shoulders. The downside to this bit came if Angus didn't get a good saddle - he was known to yell "Me balls! Put me down" if he got pinched.



 
Brian Johnson raced cars as a hobby. He used to be a paratrooper.



 
There is an AC/DC tribute band called Hayseed Dixie that plays their songs in a bluegrass style. There is also an all-female tribute band in Seattle called Hell's Belles.



 
Before donning his trademark schoolboy uniform, Angus Young performed in gorilla, Zorro, and Superman outfits.



 
Malcolm Young claims he gave up the lead guitar position in favour of drinking.



 
Before joining AC/DC, Scott was in bands called The Spectors, the Valentines, and Fraternity. Brian Johnson was member of hard rock group Geordie.



 
A 1976 review of AC/DC's first release in Rolling Stone declared, "Hard Rock has unquestionably hit its all-time low." They didn't appear on the cover of the magazine until the October 30, 2008 issue, but in 2003 Shania Twain wore an AC/DC T-shirt (and not much else) when she made the cover.



 
Malcolm Young was originally in a band called The Velvet Underground (no relation to Lou Reed's band).



  
You will not hear any effects on any guitar during a performance, which is rare for bands today. Angus and Mal use Marshall stacks; typically 100W super leads live, and JTM45s in studio.




AC/DC's lyrics usually deal with some combination of drinking, sex and rock. They never play ballads and steer clear of any political songs.



 
On May 26, 1988, the Australian postal service released "Australian Rock 'N Roll" stamps featuring 12 artists, including Angus Young. On his schoolboy backpack you can read, "It's a long way to the top."


 
Dave Evans recorded the band's first two singles, "Can I Sit Next To You Girl" and "Baby Please Don't Go," before leaving to join Newcastle glam rockers Rabbit. Unlike AC/DC's grungy image, Evans dressed more glittery, which was a source of conflict. Evans' last gig with the band was in September 1974. Bon Scott was his replacement.


 
After being put off for several years by their signed band, AC/DC, one day the producers of Atlantic records visited the studio where the band was making their fourth full album Powerage. The producers put their foot down on the band and told them they must come up with a ballad for the album. All the current bands at the time were climbing the charts with rock ballads and Atlantic wanted to cash in.



The band told the record company that they honestly did not know how to make ballads. They said they wouldn't know even how to begin crafting such a song. The producers brought in an expert to sit down with the band and the expert said all they needed to do was think of the last time a girlfriend they had did them wrong and then just write about it.



The expert also said that the guitar players should not play over the vocals during the verses-to let the vocals be the center point of the song. This, they said, would constitute a proper rock ballad. AC/DC said they would give it a shot, and after a few weeks the producers visited the studio to listen to the band's first ballad. After the song ended the Atlantic producers just looked at each other and shook their heads. They told the band to go on with it and walked out.


 
Both Malcolm and Angus dropped out of school at age 14 years and 9 months, which was the earliest they were legally allowed to do so.


 
Their two biggest albums were released in consecutive years with different lead singers: Bon Scott on Highway To Hell in 1979 and Brian Johnson on Back In Black in 1980.


 
They have a street named after them in Melbourne. In 2004, what was Corporation Lane was renamed ACDC Lane.


 
Though AC/DC was considered pioneers of heavy metal, they didn't consider themselves such, but preferred to be called rock and rollers.


 
In the rider for their 2008 US tour, the band asked to have three oxygen tanks and three masks at the venue. We're not sure which three members needed the O2.



 
Brian Johnson customarily wears a newsboy cap on stage and frequently off. He explained why : "The first band I was in was called Geordie in the early '70s. We had about three or four hits and people just assumed you were an instant millionaire and it wasn't the case at all. We didn't make much money at all and when it all finished I was worse off then when I went in so I had to get a job quick so I took the first thing I could find as a windshield fitter on the freeway. I thought that's a good idea because nobody will see me but just in case I pinched me brother's sports car driving hat and I pulled it tight over me eyes so nobody would recognize me and say, 'Weren't you the lad that was on television?'"


 
AC/DC are one of the shortest bands. Malcolm Young is 5' 3", Angus 5' 2" and Brian Johnson towers over them at 5' 5".



Ronald Belford Scott was born in Forfar, Scotland 9.7.1946 and lived first five years of his life in Kirriemuir. In 1952 family immigrated to Australia, where Bon formed his first bands during the early 1960’s. He replaced Dave Evans as the lead vocalist in AC/DC in October 1974, and already by then Bon had over 10 years of experience touring and recording with various outfits.



 Bon’s voice and personality seemed to fit perfectly with Australians. Guitarist Angus Young remembered him later:

“He had a bottle of whisky and some dope, and he polished it all off. I said to Mal, “If this guy can walk, let alone sing, this is going to be something, but he walked on and just ripped it up.”





The band’s remarkable journey from those early beginnings in Scotland to stadium-filling titans of rock is fastidiously chronicled in a new book due to be released this autumn.



 High Voltage: The Life Of Angus Young is the first biography of AC/DC’s lead guitarist and only remaining original member. Its author, Jeff Apter, believes the story of the man he describes as the “face, sound and sometimes the exposed backside” of the band is worth telling in detail.




 Young, perhaps best known for the schoolboy outfit he wears on stage, is a fiercely private individual who has cultivated a caricature persona, but at heart, Apter points out, he is a product of working-class Glasgow.


 Indeed, the city features prominently in the book, with particular focus on the band’s live shows, the first of which took place in April 1976 before just 150 punters at the student union of the old Napier Technical College in Sighthill.


  Three months later, after several other warm-up shows, the band embarked on its 19 date Lock Up Your Daughters tour of the UK. As Apter points out, it kicked off in Glasgow’s City Halls, which felt like a “homecoming” for the Young brothers and a “reminder of where they’d started out”.


 With tickets priced at just 50 pence – stubs from the tour now fetch hundreds of pounds on online auction sites – Apter said that there were numerous familiar well-wishers on hand to greet the brothers on their triumphant return.


 “To the others in the band, it seemed as though Young family members were coming out of the woodwork,” said Apter. “The backstage area at the City Halls was positively bursting with Angus and Malcolm’s relatives, all speaking with pea-soup-dense Glaswegian accents.”


 But it was a concert two years later that would strengthen the bond between AC/DC and Glasgow, and in the process produce one of the most acclaimed live albums ever committed to record.


 “I think that together with Thin Lizzy’s Live And Dangerous, AC/DC’s If You Want Blood You’ve Got It is one of the best rock concert records ever released,” reflects Russell, whose autobiography, The Godfather Of Rock, features several anecdotes about his interviews with AC/DC and bands such as Metallica and Iron Maiden.


 “At the time,live albums did not always sound particularly live, with parts recorded in the studio and other parts dubbed on. But on AC/DC, you can hear the chants of every person in the crowd, it’s absolutely electric.”


 The gig in question, which took place at Glasgow’s Apollo venue in April 1978, captured the band at their peak, with Scott in particular at his best, though at one point he is said to have run backstage to have a drink, only to take a wrong turn, ending up locked out on Renfield Lane while Young battered away at an extended solo.


 Unusually, the show also saw AC/DC play an encore, with the band members returning to the stage wearing Scotland football strips. A video of the gig, which has never received a commercial release, was screened during an exhibition devoted to the band at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. The concert has, in short, become part of rock folklore.


 “The Apollo held about 3,500 people, but I think over the past 40 years I’ve spoken to between 50,000 and 100,000 people who claimed they were there that night,” jokes Russell.


 Young and his bandmates are only occasional visitors to Scotland these days, although Hampden is a regular stopping off point whenever one of their gruelling world tours grinds into motion. Such gatherings are considered special not only by the fans (their last show at the national stadium sold out in less than 60 minutes), but the band themselves.


 At every Scottish concert, Young shakes up the set-list to perform a number entitled Fling Thing.


 Originally recorded in 1976 as a B-side to their single Jailbreak, the track is based on the traditional ballad, The Bonnie Banks O’ Loch Lomond. Although the song is ostensibly a showcase for Young’s lead guitar skills, the appreciative Scottish crowds always provide accompanying vocals.


 For all the props and pyrotechnics that feature in an AC/DC show, Russell believes the band’s success and longevity is down to old fashioned songcraft. “It’s the simplicity of AC/DC’s songs that makes them so popular,” he said. “They’re very well written, well sung, but never complicated. It’s just good rock and roll and you see that at its best when they’re played live.”


 It has been two years since the band last visited Scotland and many fans now wonder if they will ever return. In 2014, Malcolm was forced to retire after being diagnosed with dementia. The same year, the band’s longstanding drummer, Phil Rudd, parted ways with the Youngs after a series of run-ins with the police over drug offences.


 Last year, Brian Johnson, who replaced Scott as the vocalist after his death in 1980, left the band after doctors advised him he was in danger of going deaf, while bassist Cliff Williams retired after deciding the recent upheaval had left AC/DC a “changed animal”.


 The succession of line-up changes, however, has not put paid to AC/DC’s future, nor its ties with Scotland. Malcolm’s replacement, Stevie Young, is not well-known, but when the band could have had its pick of some of the world’s best session guitarists, his hiring demonstrates the continued importance of the Young clan’s birthplace to the AC/DC story.


 Stevie is the son of Stephen Young, Angus and Malcolm’s eldest brother, and was part of the family’s mass exodus to Australia in 1963. However, he and his parents only stayed there for a few years before deciding to come home again, and Stevie grew up in the Borders town of Hawick, where he enjoyed modest success in local groups such as The Stabbers, Prowler and Tantrum.


 But whether Stevie gets the chance to again line up alongside his Uncle Angus is in doubt. No replacement for Williams has been announced, and it remains to be seen whether Axl Rose, the Guns N’ Roses singer who stood in for Johnson during the group’s Rock Or Bust world tour, will return.


 In the meantime, Scottish fans must make do with the annual BonFest music festival, a popular event in Kirriemuir celebrating th elife and career of Scott, and irregular appearances by veteran tribute acts such as Volts, Live Wire and Hells Bells. Such is the demand, some of the doppelgängers sell out 1,400 capacity venues.



 While many fans hope the real deal will eventually return, Russell is of the view that after a 44-year run, Young, 62, should consider calling it a day.


 “My personal feeling is that Angus should now say, ‘I’ve had a great career, I’ve got plenty of money in the bank, and I don’t need to do it any longer’. However, if he wants to do it, then it’s not my business to say he shouldn’t.”


 Whatever the future holds, Russell believes Glasgow – and Scotland – could do more to recognise some of its most famous sons, perhaps with the help of the old water tower that loomed over Angus Young’s childhood home.


 The structure still stands at the corner of Cranhill’s Stepps Road and Bellrock Street. Despite suggestions from some in the city council that the band’s logo – or at the very least its famous lightning bolt – could be painted on it, there is no permanent tribute to AC/DC in Glasgow.


 “You walk through George Square in Glasgow, and there are some statues of politicians and generals that no one nowadays has ever heard of,” says Russell. “The Young brothers have done more for Glasgow and Scotland, so it would be fitting to see a statue of Angus doing the Chuck Berry duckwalk, maybe with a traffic cone on his head.”





Here's a good article about Bon Scott;

  Peter Head remembers an unexpected visit from Bon Scott, one evening at his home in Adelaide. As Head tells it, Scott turned up unannounced on his doorstep. The two men had been friends since 1970, when they had both played in local bands in the thriving Adelaide rock scene. Nine years later, and Scott had become a major star as the bare-chested, full-throated, heavy-drinking singer with AC/DC, Australia’s biggest group. The band’s latest album, Highway To Hell, was in the charts, but Scott was taking time out to catch up with some old friends. “He bought the drinks all night,” says Head. “He was happy, but said he wanted to settle down and have kids one day, even though he had finally found a band that allowed him to make music, make money and have fun. We were woken up the next morning… I was in bed with one woman and he was across the room with another. He leapt up saying, ‘Oh shit, I’ve got to catch a plane,’ and ran out the door. That was it.”



  This was the last time Head saw his old friend alive: within months, Scott was dead. The singer, who for years had taken any job going just to stay afloat, died just as AC/DC, the band he joined in 1974, were on the verge of international success. With Scott as their singer, the band had gained a reputation as the ultimate party band, writing songs that were innuendo-laden and musically forthright. But that was only part of their story: a product of the raucous Sydney pub scene in the early ’70s, AC/DC’s early output shared common ground with Creedence, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Stones. Then, in February 1980, as they prepared to record Back In Black, Scott died from alcohol poisoning in the passenger seat of a Renault 5 outside a flat in East Dulwich. “The way Bon lived, it wasn’t a surprise,” says AC/DC bassist Mark Evans. “But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t an awful shock.”



  “We all miss him terribly,” Angus Young told Uncut. “It’s rare that you come across someone in your life with such a big character. He’ll always be with you.”




Given Scott’s reputation, it’s notable that nobody seems to have a bad word to say about him. “He was a fantastic guy, a real human, so different to what people thought,” acknowledges Peter Clack, one of AC/DC’s early drummers. “He was honest, sincere, unpretentious, no-bullshit, hard-working.” John Bisset, who knew Scott in the early 1970s, agrees: “He was spiritually mature. I don’t know where it came from, maybe the family.” Meanwhile, Murray Gracie – guitarist in Scott’s first band, The Spektors – remembers Scott as “a very respectful son. His parents came to a lot of shows, and we’d rehearse at their house.”



 Ronald Scott was born in Scotland in 1946. The family moved to Melbourne in 1952, before settling in Fremantle, on the opposite coast. The Spektors were formed in nearby Perth in 1964. At first, Scott played drums, but began alternating singing duties with frontman John Collins. “We were two bands in one,” explains Gracie. “We had Bon, with his cheeky grin and missing teeth, who would sing the non-chart stuff – Them, The Pretty Things, the Stones – while John was into The Hollies and Bee Gees. Bon could occupy a stage and make the words mean something. He’d do these slow numbers and the girls would go crazy.”



 Gracie says Scott was “just another teenage kid”, but notes he once spent time in a youth detention centre. “It was for ‘carnal knowledge’,” confirms Gracie. “Underage sex. That doesn’t even exist anymore. Bon had front, but he wasn’t an aggressive tearaway. Alcohol is what got to Bon. Even then, he’d get extremely drunk. We played surf clubs and when it was time to play we’d find Bon lying flat, asleep on the beach. We’d cart him inside and prop him in the corner with a mic. He couldn’t play drums but he could sing.”




 One of Scott’s heroes was Stevie Wright, singer with Australia’s biggest band The Easybeats. “Bon modelled himself on Stevie,” says Michael Browning, who later managed AC/DC. When The Easybeats played Perth in 1966, Scott met their guitarist, George Young – another Scottish émigré and the eldest of three brothers. “Bon became friendly with George and they knocked about,” says Gracie. “When The Easybeats went back east, I suspect George and Bon were still in contact.”




 In 1966, The Spektors became The Valentines, a local supergroup formed from three Perth bands. Although they covered Soft Machine (“Love Makes Sweet Music”) and the Small Faces (“I Can’t Dance With You”), they also performed an excruciating version of “Nick Nack Paddy Whack” and did a jingle for Coca-Cola. Scott sang alongside Vince Lovegrove, crooning several songs (“She Said” and “My Old Man’s A Groovy Old Man”) written by George Young and Harry Vanda. “When he sang, Bon took off into charisma-land,” wrote Lovegrove. “His eyes would twinkle, his brows would slightly raise, his lips would purse into an impish grin, his swagger demanding attention.”



  The Valentines split in 1970 and Scott took “a 180-degree turn” according to Michael Browning. He joined Fraternity – a group who were inspired variously by The Band and Vanilla Fudge. “They moved to the Adelaide Hills soon after he joined,” says keyboardist John Bisset. “Their lifestyle was a bit commune-like, but they drank too much to qualify as hippies.”




 Bisset claims to have been surprised when Scott, a former pop singer, joined Fraternity. “It came out the blue,” he admits. “But Bon was able to fit in because he made himself easy to fit in. He wasn’t pushy or arrogant.” Peter Head – pianist with another Adelaide group, Headband – recalls: “Fraternity were intense. They’d argue for hours over one chord. Bon was more easygoing. He would play recorder and sing incredibly well.”



 “We were drinkers,” says Bisset. “We got into marijuana, mescaline and mushrooms, but alcohol was the mainstay. We’d arrive in a town and go to the pub. The locals wouldn’t like the look of us. But we’d get as pissed as rats and clean up on the pool table, and that tended to win them over.” On one occasion, Scott impressed the locals by leaping off a pier into a swarm of jellyfish. “His nickname was Road Test Ronny, as whenever a new drug came out he was ready to try it,” says Head. “Once, I played with him at a nearby jail. Most of the guys were in for drugs, mostly marijuana, and Bon seemed to know all of them.”




 Scott’s wild lifestyle, however, never appeared to impede his performance. “He drank heaps,” agrees Bisset. “He drank until he could barely stand. But he always remained the same person.”


  In May 1972, shortly after Scott married Irene Thornton, Fraternity took their wives, roadies and a dog to London in a bid to break Europe. “We had an awful time,” recalls Bisset. “There were 17 people in one house. We couldn’t drink because we didn’t have any money. Bon made friends with people in London, who plied him with alcohol.” Fraternity became Fang – playing one show in support of Brian Johnson’s Geordie – before returning to Adelaide where, in 1974, they broke up. For the first time in a decade, Bon Scott was without a band.




By coincidence, Peter Head had also left Headband. “I put together a part-time band, Mount Lofty Rangers, with Bon singing,” he says. “We did country music because it was quick, easy and fun. After Fraternity he wanted comic relief.” Scott was also trying to hold his marriage together. “Bon was desperate to make a few bucks,” confirms Head. “He’d do a few weeks of hard work but deliberately choose a job he wouldn’t want to do for the rest of his life. He’d dig roads, paint boats, mow lawns. He worked at a fertiliser company, shovelling shit for 10 hours a day.” Scott even found himself briefly employed by his old friend, Vince Lovegrove, now a rock promoter. “Vince got me and Bon to run around town at midnight,” laughs Head. “We were pasting up AC/DC posters.”



 In May 1974, Scott almost died. A keen motorcyclist, Scott enjoyed a typically carefree approach to road safety. He would ride naked, drunk, up and downstairs to make people laugh. Bisset recalls Scott taking him for a ride one day and driving his bike into a sand dune. “It was a practical joke,” admits Bisset. “He said after, ‘I knew you’d laugh or hit me.’”



 However, what happened in May was far more serious. Before a Mount Lofty Rangers show, “Bon had an argument with Bruce Howe [ex-Fraternity bassist],” remembers Head. “Bon was pretty pissed and stormed off on his bike. Half an hour later we heard he was in a coma. It was touch and go.”




While Scott was recovering in hospital from cracked ribs, a lacerated throat, smashed teeth and a broken collar bone, there were changes taking place within AC/DC. Formed by George Young’s younger brothers, Malcolm and Angus, the band had played their first gig in December 1973, with singer Dave Evans, who also sang on the band’s debut single, “Can I Sit Next To You, Girl?”. But the Youngs wanted to replace him.




 “We were playing Largs Pier, out on a jetty,” recalls drummer Pete Clack. “Bon was in the crowd. We knew he was a fantastic singer so Malcolm, who was the brains, said, ‘I’m going to put it on Bon, maybe he’ll be interested.’ There was an audition and he invited Bon to join. Bon said, ‘Piss off, I’ve got my wife and I’m about to start a job.’ When we got back to Melbourne, Bon called up and said, ‘OK, Malcolm, I’m in.’ It turned out his job was to paint this big rusty ship in the dock at Adelaide. He was on his way in the cold, looked at the ship and said, ‘Fuck this, I’m not doing this for a living’, turned round, phoned Malcolm and packed a suitcase.”




  Abandoning his life – and wife – on the west coast to head east was another bold change of direction for Scott, but Head wasn’t surprised. “He knew he was a good singer,” he says. “When AC/DC came to town, Vince [Lovegrove] organised a jam. Bon thought they were a bit young and they thought he was an old man [Scott was 28, Angus was 19]. But after they’d had a blow, the band knew he was good.”



 The band’s new manager, Michael Browning, recalls his reaction to the news. “I wasn’t sure Bon was right – he was older and had been in the teeny-bop Valentines then the hippy Fraternity. But it worked. Bon took the role on like a character actor. He was the missing link. He made them real.”




 Clack was also impressed. “Bon was charismatic and a tremendous singer. He was an MC, a proper showman, and the music was ideal for that. He’d have Angus up on his shoulders playing these screaming solos, or he’d be up on the PA stack – whatever it took to give people a good time.”



  Scott’s work ethic, humour and experience meshed with the Youngs’ enthusiasm, ambition and talent. The band entered the studio almost at once to record High Voltage. “The brothers looked up to him,” says Browning. “Not because he was older but because they thought he was fabulous.” Malcolm claimed, “Bon was the biggest single influence on the band. We had a real character, with his own style and ideas for lyrics.” Angus has gone further: “I don’t think there’d have been an AC/DC if it hadn’t been for Bon. He moulded the character of AC/DC.” Scott once said “They told me to sound like myself,” and after years of having to rein himself in, it was no small thing.




The band shared a house in a seedy area of Melbourne that quickly became a mecca for party animals. Shenanigans found their way into Scott’s lyrics – comic-book tales of sex and excess, like “Whole Lotta Rosie”, about a Tasmanian groupie, or “Big Balls”, with its touching refrain “bollocks, knackers, bollocks, knackers”. Although AC/DC’s approach was to never take themselves too seriously, Scott excelled at writing about being in a band, capturing frustrated ambition on breakthrough single, December 1975’s “It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock’n’Roll)” – one of the few rock songs to feature a bagpipe solo. “Bon was a street poet – he described it as ‘toilet wall’ poetry,” says Browning. “That was unknown. They signed a singer and got a lyricist, as well.”



 When bassist Mark Evans joined in March ’75, AC/DC were a band in transition. “We did TNT, Dirty Deeds… and Let There Be Rock in the space of 15 months, and there was a big change in that time,” he says. “When I joined they wanted me to wear a red satin suit. I said, ‘If my mates see me they’ll punch the crap out of me!’ Malcolm was keen on T.Rex and took us to see The Glitter Band. We all liked Slade. Later, we got more into Free and the Stones. Bon was nuts about Alex Harvey.”


 AC/DC were regulars on Australian TV’s Countdown – one appearance in 1975 saw them play “Baby, Please Don’t Go” with Scott dressed as a schoolgirl. “We attracted teenage girls at an all-age show or skinheads in a pub,” says Evans. “We didn’t find our real audience until we went to London [in 1976] and began playing to guys with long hair and denim.”

 The band broke attendance records during a residency at the Marquee. In 1977, Let There Be Rock reached the UK Top 20, and AC/DC spent their time between Europe and Australia, with trips to the US in an attempt to crack the market. Bon was still drinking heavily, though other temptations were available.

 “I never saw Bon take hard drugs but he did OD in Australia,” confirms Evans. “He didn’t take hard drugs on a regular basis but he dabbled. It put the wind up [co-producers] George [Young] and Harry [Vanda]. They’d spent a long time round Stevie Wright and he had a shocking time with heroin.”


 All the same, Scott remained a valued part of the songwriting team. “Malcolm and Angus had the ideas,” explains Evans of the albums he cut with the band. “Songs were written in the studio between Malcolm, Angus and Bon. We’d spend a week on backing tracks, then a week on vocals and guitar solos.”

  In 1979, Tony Platt was asked to mix AC/DC’s seventh album, Highway To Hell. At the time, Young and Vanda had relinquished production duties and sessions for the LP took place under the auspices of ‘Mutt’ Lange at Roundhouse Studios in London. “They wanted a solid English rock sound,” explains Platt. “I’d worked with Led Zep, The Who and Free, so I was used to highly proficient bands that lived hard but also worked very hard. The record was made on tea and B&H. The first time I met them, Bon made me a cup of tea. He was superb. When he sang, you believed him. The Youngs ran the band, but Bon was allowed to plough his own furrow. There were stories about him disappearing at the end of one gig and reappearing just in time for the soundcheck at the next. Malcolm once told me, ‘The thing with Bon is, it doesn’t matter what he does, he always turns up.’ You got the impression he was resilient.” Highway To Hell was AC/DC’s biggest album so far. It reached the Top 10 in the UK. Even better, it made No 17 in the US. The band planned to head to the Bahamas to record the follow-up. Bon Scott’s moment had finally arrived.


 On February 20, 1980, Scott was found dead. He had spent the previous evening drinking heavily in the Music Machine, a club in Camden Town. “I saw the guys in Sydney and I was taken aback,” says Evans, who left the band in 1977. “They’d been hit really hard, but the way they conducted themselves and got on with it, I have the utmost respect.” After some deliberation, AC/DC replaced Scott with Brian Johnson, who Scott had once recommended to the band. Johnson’s first job was to record Back In Black – with title, cover and opening funereal bell conceived in tribute to Scott. It went to No 1. “The band had done so much hard work and earned a lot of respect,” explains Evans. “They were primed to go. It all made sense.” The tragedy was that Scott wasn’t around to enjoy it. “Bon had amazing charisma,” says John Bisset.


 “A lot of musicians are arrogant and negative, Bon didn’t have an ounce of that. He was well-equipped to handle fame. He should have gone on for a long time.” Mark Evans agrees, “Everyone loved him. He was a gentleman, fun-loving, great to be around. The public persona was this crazy guy, but that was only part of it. What hastened his departure is that he felt a responsibility to be Bon Scott, to live the rock’n’roll lifestyle he sang about.”




"Highway To Hell"

 

The title is often attributed as a phrase AC/DC guitarist Angus Young used to describe touring in America. There is a much more literal explanation, however. "Highway to Hell" was the nickname for the Canning Highway in Australia. It runs from where lead singer Bon Scott lived in Fremantle and ends at a pub/bar called The Raffles, which was a big rock 'n roll drinking hole in the '70s. As Canning Highway gets close to the pub, it dips down into a steep decline: "No stop signs... speed limits... nobody gonna slow me down."


So many people where killed by driving fast over that intersection at the top of the hill on the way for a good night out, that it was called the highway to hell, so when Bon was saying "I'm on the highway to hell" it meant that he was doing the nightly or weekly pilgrimage down Canning Highway to The Raffles bar to rock and drink with his mates: "Ain't nothing I would rather do. Going down, party time, my friends are gonna be there too."


 
Vocalist Brian Johnson explained to The Metro October 15, 2009: "It was written about being on the bus on the road where it takes forever to get from Melbourne or Sydney to Perth across the Nullarbor Plain. When the Sun's setting in the west and you're driving across it, it is like a fire ball. There is nothing to do, except have a quick one off the wrist or a game of cards, so that's where Bon came up with the lyrics."


 
This was the first AC/DC song to chart in the US. It helped drive huge sales for the Highway To Hell album, which has sold over seven million copies in America. It was AC/DC's sixth album, and their last with vocalist Bon Scott, who died in 1980 from excessive drinking. Their next album, Back In Black, was dedicated to him.


 
Mutt Lange, who has also worked with The Cars, Bryan Adams, and Def Leppard (and Shania Twain, who he was married to from 1993-2008), produced the album. Lange took over after after failed sessions with Eddie Krammer, who had a solid resumé that included work with Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix, but whose procedural style didn't work for AC/DC.



Lange was able to enhance the band's sound without altering their essence. On this song, he added robust background vocals to the choruses - something AC/DC didn't do on their previous efforts. This and other production refinements helped made the song a hit and expand their audience.


 
Recorded in London, Highway To Hell was the first AC/DC album recorded outside of Australia. The album cover had Angus Young on the cover wearing his schoolboy uniform and devil horns. Some religious groups found this quite offensive.


 
Serial killer Richard Ramirez claimed this album compelled him to murder. He believed AC/DC stood for "Anti Christ/Devil's Child."


   
AC/DC performed this at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony when they were inducted in 2003. Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler inducted them, saying, "There is no greater purveyor of the power chord."


  
A campaign to make the this the top song on the UK singles chart for Christmas 2013 resulted in a #4 placing and AC/DC's first top 10 British hit in a 40-year career. The Anglo-Australian hard rockers had previously been the most successful act never to have had a Top 10 hit single in the UK, having achieved a grand total of 30 chart entries, none of which have ever peaked any higher than #12 (that honour went to 1988 hit "Heatseeker").


 
When this song was released, there really was a "Highway to Hell" in America: Route 666. This section of highway ran through Arizona and Utah; it was later renumbered after various ghost stories emerged about unexplained happenings on the road.


 
  
When AC/DC was accused of backmasking Satanic messages on their Highway To Hell record, Angus Young responded: "You didn't need to play [the album] backwards, because we never hid [the messages]. We'd call an album Highway To Hell, there it was right in front of them."












 

Last edited by arabchanter (14/10/2018 10:33 am)

DAY 431.
The B-52's................................................................................The B-52's   (1979)











Fred Schneider, a kind of Groucho Marx meets John Waters, was a bizarre but attractive feature. Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson looked great without pandering to conventional glamour, played guitar and other instruments, and sang as raucously as they wanted to. The groups retro style and new wave dance sound had an extraordinary influence in the 1980s and continues to be irresistible today.

Cannae read much on the phone right now, but went up to visit the Bon Scott statue quite recently.

Never liked AC/DC at the time either! Fan of the Easybeats though.

DAY 429.
Crusaders..................................Street Life   (1979)











I told yiz payback would be round the corner, this album was a bit too much jazz or funk or jazz-funk or whatever the genre fir me, to be honest apart from the opening track "Street Life,"  they all sounded more or less the same, so I'm no' gonna waste a lot of time on this.


Didn't like any of the tracks, the title track 11 fuckin' minutes worth didn't do much for me when it was only single length to be fair, so summing up, it was jazzy and had tracks that lasted from 4:28 up to 11:18, so basically two things I'm no' to fond of, jazz and overlengthy tunes, this has absolutely no chance of getting in my vinyl collection.


Just a wee tenuous link, round about this time there was a band that played the pubs and clubbees in Dundee called Street Life, I'm assuming they took their name from the song, but may be wrong, anyways they were pretty good and the lead singer had a great voice (and quite pleasing on the eye,) I think her name was Lorna and she went on to sing with the jazz-funk band Shakatak, I wonder if she's still a chanteuse?


The last three albums have been pretty guff = payback for the good ones lately.





Bits & Bobs;




Who says that funk and jazz cannot co-exist? Certainly not The Crusaders, who scored a 1979 hit with "Street Life." The fact that it made the R&B, Dance, and Billboard Hot 100 charts demonstrates how one track could become a crossover success. Even more importantly, the song proved to be the launching pad for jazz/R&B vocalist Randy Crawford, who has continued collaborating with original Crusaders member Joe Sample.

Despite the tune's contemporary sound that appealed to disco dancers as well as soul and jazz aficionados, the Crusaders actually date back to the 1950s. In 1954, pianist Sample approached Houston high school pals Wilton Felder (tenor saxophone) and Stix Hooper (drums) to form the Swingsters. After trombonist Wayne Henderson, flutist Hubert Laws, and bassist Henry Wilson joined the group, they became the Modern Jazz Sextet. But when Sample, Felder, Hooper, and Henderson relocated to Los Angeles in 1960, the band changed names once again to the Jazz Crusaders. Signed to Pacific Jazz, the group gained a reputation for their unique blend of jazz, funk, and R&B; however, they were concerned about restricting themselves to playing jazz clubs. Thus in 1971 they changed monikers one final time to simply the Crusaders. While they continued recording, they still lacked a solid hit. Once Henderson departed in 1975, the remaining members decided to change their sound to fit more urban contemporary tastes.



Enter Randy Crawford.

 Crawford, a jazz vocalist who gradually became an in-demand session singer, entered the studio to sing on 1979's Street Life, the album that would become the original Crusaders' final effort. The original 11-minute track featured a danceable groove laden with Sample's patented jazz-tinged piano and a funky horn section. The chord changes seemed more common to jazz than a typical dance song, and Crawford proved she could handle them admirably. Quite simply, "Street Life" largely depends on Crawford's confident performance, one which is never overshadowed by the Crusaders' sophisticated arrangement. The lyrics strip away the glamor of 1970s New York City (or virtually any big metropolis), revealing the dangers of living in the fast lane. "Street life, but you better not get old/ Or you're gonna feel the cold," Crawford warns in a deceptively laid-back vocal. The following lyrics definitely refer to the Studio 54 culture and its perils:


There's always love for sale
A grown up fairy tale
Prince charming always smiles
Behind a silver spoon



 Crawford enunciates each word, highlighting the contrast between an idealized, fairy-tale image of the disco culture and its drug-laden reality. Is it possible to survive? Yes, but only "if you keep it young/
Your song is always sung/ Your love will pay your way beneath the silver moon." Do these words refer to prostitution, or the promiscuous, cocaine-filled disco lifestyle? Clearly the words contain a dark undercurrent, but Crawford's breezy vocals and the Crusaders' irresistible, jumpy groove probably fooled listeners into think that "Street Life" referred to glamor and endless partying.



 After "Street Life's" success, Crawford toured with the Crusaders in Europe from 1979-1980; she then forged a solo career that flourished abroad rather than (inexplicably) the U.S. The Crusaders dissolved soon after, but Sample frequently reunited with his muse. Together Sample and Crawford recorded three albums: Feeling Good (2006), No Regrets (2008), and Live (2012). The last album features a heavily jazz rendering of "Street Life," demonstrating Sample and Crawford's unique chemistry. In addition, "Street Life" has lived on, having been featured in the 1981 film Sharky's Machine and 1997's Jackie Brown.



 No matter the lyrical interpretation, "Street Life" stands as a shining example of how jazz, dance, and soul can combine to create a memorable track.



"Street Life"

 
Crusaders pianist Joe Sample wrote this with the lyricist Will Jennings, said: "The lyrics, all that came right off of Hollywood Boulevard. It's also been used in a lot of rap songs, some samples, they always do the chorus."


 
An inspiration for Sample was the beginner's ski slope at Mammoth Mountain in California. In a Reuters interview, Sample said, "I saw people falling, running into each other... it was absolute chaos. It looked like a boulevard of madness. And I said, 'That's what street life is."'



 
After growing up in East Texas where he taught school for four years, Jennings moved to Wisconsin and then to Nashville, where he became a full-time songwriter in 1971. Teaming with Troy Seals, he wrote 5 songs for Dobie Gray's Drift Away album, which led to a publishing deal with Irving Album Music (now Rondor Music) in Los Angeles, where Jennings moved in 1974. After writing hits for Barry Manilow ("Looks Like We Made It," "Somewhere In The Night") and Dionne Warwick ("I'll Never Love This Way Again"), Chuck Kaye, who ran the publishing company, put him together with Sample. Along with other members of The Crusaders, they wrote songs for B.B. King's album Midnight Believer before coming up with this song for The Crusaders, which proved to be their last hit. Jennings soon began work with Steve Winwood, writing songs for his comeback album Arc Of A Diver. In addition to most of Winwood's solo hits, Jennings also wrote lyrics for movie themes, including "Up Where We Belong" for An Officer And A Gentleman and "My Heart Will Go On" for Titanic. Over the years, Jennings has written with Eric Clapton, Roy Orbison, Jimmy Buffett and many others. He entered the Songwriter's Hall Of Fame in 2006.



 
Randy Crawford was a guest vocalist on the album and sang lead on this. She recorded another song Jennings wrote, "People Alone," for the 1980 movie The Competition and had a series of hits in Europe including "One Day I'll Fly Away," "Rainy Night In Georgia" and "Almaz."



 
This was featured in the 1981 Burt Reynolds movie Sharky's Machine and in Quentin Tarantino's 1997 film Jackie Brown.



The cover photograph was taken at 409 N Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills, California

DAY 430.
The Germs.......................................................(GI)   (1979)












Had never heard of the gems, so this was all new to me. I found this a blistering and ear bashing "how do you do," but in the good kinda sense, I really enjoyed this but with the caveat that it's not for everyday listening, I think it would have to be played when you were in the mood for it, certainly never background music.


Seemingly a very singular approach to their live performances (which I'll try to cover in the Bits & Bobs bit,) which you get a real taste of on the final track "Shut Down (Annihilation Man)" (live) most of the tracks weren't long enough to dislike (which always wins my vote) apart from the final track 9 minutes which was far too long and for me at odds with the rest of the album.My favourite tracks were "What We Do Is Secret," "Strange Notes" and in my humbles "Lexicon Devils" was the stand out track.


Anyways this is a difficult one to judge whether to buy or not, on the one hand I really liked (on one listen) but on the other would I really play it often enough to warrant parting with my hard earned?


For the moment this album wont be going into my collection.




Bits & Bobs;


Poor Darby Crash. First the Germs charismatic and drug-abusing lead singer returned from England a converted Adam Ant fan (very bad form, very bad form indeed), then he had the amazingly bad luck to die in a suicide pact the day before the murder of John Lennon, thus ensuring his death would receive virtually no recognition in the press.



 Fortunately neither his Antdom nor his ill-timed deliberate death by heroin overdose have sullied his posterity, and his pre-planned live-fast-die-young career continues to contribute to what practically amounts to a cult. And I get it. The guy was loony tunes, but he also had charisma. Germs drummer Don Bolles recalls, “With a little more luck and concentrated effort, Darby could have fulfilled his plan to be the new Jesus/Bowie/Manson/Hitler/L Ron Hubbard… he was a natural messiah type, whose heroic consumption of LSD helped make him the most psychedelic prankster I have ever known.”


 Fortunately he started a punk band instead, and not just any punk band. As Germs guitarist Pat Smear recollects, “Whatever we were going to be, we were going to be the most. If we’re gonna be punk, then we are gonna out-punk the Sex Pistols! If we are gonna be the worst band ever, then we are gonna be the fucking worst band ever!” As the lead singer for what I like to think was one of the worst bands in history, those are inspiring words indeed.

  But my favorite Darby Crash story has nothing to do with the Germs, but rather Pop Rocks. Remember the candy that detonated like little hand grenades in your mouth? Well, in We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk, Gerber (aka Michelle Bell) recalls the time she and Crash were walking through a parking garage towards two Persian gentlemen who, faced with a couple of deranged looking punkers, assumed they were being mugged. So they threw themselves to the ground and offered up their wallets. This amused Crash and Gerber so much they figured they had to find a way to up the ante, so Gerber—who just happened to have a pack of Pop Rocks in her pocket—barked, “You will snort the Pop Rocks!” Which the poor pair promptly did. Notes Gerber, “You could actually hear them blowing up in their sinuses!” Leave it to Crash to be a participant in one of the most bizarre crimes ever committed.



 Crash (aka Jan Paul Beahm, aka Bobby Pyn) was born less than a month before I was in 1958. He had a troubled childhood and attended a school that combined elements of est and Scientology, subjects that would lead to his fascination with mind control, fascism, and cults. But he gravitated towards the LA music scene and started a band called Sophistifuck and the Revlon Spam Queens, which might have remained their name except it wouldn’t fit on a t-shirt. Germs, on the other hand, passed the t-shirt test with ease. And if their early performances were chaotic exercises in Dada, they gradually developed into a band that could actually play their instruments.


 I wasn’t a fan for the longest time; the Germs (who in addition to Crash, Smear, and Bolles featured Lorna Doom on bass) simply never struck me as being anything special. But I’ve been converted over the years, in large part due to Crash’s vocals, which in terms of unintelligibility and sheer guttural impact almost equal those of punk rock’s finest demonstration of vocal incoherence, namely Curt Kirkwood’s magnificent performance on the first Meat Puppets album. As I’ve written before, Kirkwood sounds like a lawnmower attempting to unclog itself. Whereas Crash sounds like an animal in extremis, cornered and snarling, ready to fight to the death.


 The Germs were only around long enough to record one studio album, but it’s a doozy. Produced by Joan Jett and released in 1979 by Slash Records, (GI) captures Crash at his animalistic best, slurring his words, spitting out consonants like loose teeth, barking out phrases, and stretching out the occasional word or phrase to the breaking point. On some songs, “Lexicon Devil” for instance, he’s borderline intelligible, while on others (“Manimal”) your guess as to what he’s saying is as good as mine. He’s a caged panther is what it says on the lyric sheet, and like a caged panther he’s not interested in whether you can understand him; he just wants to escape, and then tear you to pieces.


 Crash wasn’t fucking around—although everyone assumed he was—when he established a five-year plan for achieving notoriety and then killing himself. Just listen to “We Must Bleed,” which features a buzzsaw guitar and Crash repeating the title and later the phrase “I want out now,” if you need evidence that he wasn’t playing. It’s a great tune, as is the bona fide catchy “Lexicon Devil,” which with its “gimme gimme this gimme gimme that” gives Black Flag’s “Gimme Gimme Gimme” a run for its money. As for “Manimal,” it’s one of the most feral tunes you’re ever likely to hear, with Crash serving up a growl that goes on and on and on, that is when he isn’t channeling the Devil. He takes on Iggy Pop on Pop’s ground and tops him; Pop never sounded this desperate or demonic.



 “What We Do Is Secret” is hardcore, short and in your face, with the band shouting the title and getting in and out in a mere 44 seconds. “Richie Dagger’s Crime” is another catchy number, with Crash spewing vitriol while the band actually swings. Smear’s guitar riff towards the end is great, and Bolles knocks the hell out of the drums, and the song is followed by the equally cool “Strange Notes,” on which Smear plays some great power chords and Crash spits out the lyrics, enraged. “American Leather” is another winner, with Crash slobbering but at least making the title intelligible. “Our Way” isn’t my fave on the LP; it’s a bit sluggish and Crash sounds like he’s slogging through the thing, maxxed out on Mandrax. “The Other Newest One” isn’t a fave either, due to its lack of velocity and vocal urgency, but it includes a great chorus: “You’re not the first/You’re not the last/Another day/Another crash.”



 “Communist Eyes” is a real highlight, with Darby almost sounding like a traditional punk rocker while the band plays a melody that kinda reminds me of Husker Du to come. “Land of Treason” features Crash spitting out his words like a Sten gun, while the band demonstrates that it has the loud, fast, and furious formula down pat. “Media Blitz” isn’t the best song on the LP, but Darby’s “got television” and the sound bites from various media keep things interesting. “Let’s Pretend” is fast and catchy, and features Crash doing things with his vocal chords that defy scientific explanation, and goes out on a long instrumental riff by Smear and Company.



 Crash’s lyrics on “Dragon Lady” are as indecipherable as the Mayan codex would be to you and I, but it doesn’t do much for me. “The Slave” features some interesting guitar pyrotechnics by Smear and Crash’s usual gargle and is over before you know it, leaving only LP closer “Shut Down (Annihilation Man),” an almost 10 minute death dirge in which Crash makes every sort of noise possible, while Smear plays squiggly guitar figures behind him and Donnie Rose—whoever he is—contributes some cool piano plink and plonk. On this one they’ve entered Flipper territory, and it’s mesmerizing, thanks in large part to Bolles’ drum crash and Smear’s increasingly far out distorto guitar. I love it, because I’m a lover of noise rock and this is definitely noise rock, and top shelf noise rock at that. Would the Germs have done more in this mode? We’ll never know. But I like to think they would have.



 The Germs—live and in the studio—were as visceral an experience as having Pop Rocks go off in your nostrils, and Crash’s caterwaul hasn’t had too many imitators, thanks to the fact that very few people live as close to the life-death divide as he did. I can’t think of a sound as purely animalistic as that of the Germs, except as I’ve mentioned the Meat Puppets on their first album, and theirs was obviously a lark, while Crash was, to borrow the phrase Lester Bangs once used to describe Iggy Pop, “a blowtorch in bondage.”



 Crash was dead set on being dead, but was no idiot like GG Allin. His desperation and rage came from a place that was as intellectual as it was emotional, and in this sense he was like the Dada suicides of the early 20th Century. It’s said that Jacques Vache, Dada saint, killed himself as casually as another man might turn off a light switch, and Crash’s self-murder was similarly matter of fact. He held his life in his hands and simply let it drop, which doesn’t make him a hero but certainly makes him a fascinating figure. Some people simply don’t care much for this world. It bores them. Or causes them too much psychic pain. I don’t know which category Crash falls into (I suspect both), but he was here for a moment and then he was gone, and I think it’s safe to say we’ll never see his likes again.


Another piece I enjoyed; 




He was Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious rolled into one. A befuddled punk prophet with a brilliant mind whose rise was as shocking as his fall. As lead singer of the Germs, Darby Crash presided over the birth of the L.A. punk scene in 1977 and signalled its demise with his suicide three years later.


 His was a vision of chaos that would never come to pass. But in their brief three-year career, the Germs released one fiery punk classic in the 1979 Joan Jett-produced album G.I. and a handful of raucous singles.


 The Germs started out as nothing more than a name scrawled on a ragged, self-made t-shirt worn by buck-toothed Bowie freak Jan Paul Beahm and his rangy mixed-blood sidekick Georg Ruthenberg. Beahm would later rechristen himself as Darby Crash. Ruthenberg would reinvent himself as Germs guitarist Pat Smear. But back then they were just two teenage tearaways from West L.A. who met through a mutual speed dealer and both attended Santa Monica’s University High.



 At IPS, the school within the school that both Beahm and Ruthenberg were enrolled in, the curriculum was based on Scientology training techniques. Language was used as a means to retool potential followers in subtle ways,  implanting a strangulated grammar and lingo specific to members of the cult. Although utterly disinterested in learning during his time at IPS, Beahm became obsessed with the idea of using words to manipulate others, initially drawn to the connections between the Scientology mumbo-jumbo with the discombobulated cut-up phraseology he heard on his favourite album, Bowie's The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars. Could rock and roll, he thought, be used to program and control people just like religion.


 ADVERTISEMENT Beahm and Ruthenberg were also obsessed with The Family, Ed Sanders largely-fictional account of the Manson Family murders. They identified with the killers; inspiring them to bruing their own brand of terror to the high school by roaming the hallways with X’s scrawled on their foreheads with magic marker (in the vein of Manson Family members). “The teachers were attempting to brainwash us, while teaching us brainwashing techniques,” Ruthenberg recalled in Lexicon Devil, Brendan Mullenn’s involving oral history of The Germs part in the LA punk scene. “Meanwhile, we were taking tons of acid and acting out as wanna-be rock stars.”


 The duo were eventually expelled for initiating their own cult within the cult. “We convinced about half the kids that I was God and [George] was Jesus,” Beahm said in one interview, “this one girl almost had a nervous breakdown.”



 In 1975, Beahm renamed himself Bobby Pyn. Ruthenberg became Pat Smear, a moniker he stuck by in his post-Germs career as a sideman for Nirvana and Foo Fighters. Their original choice of name, Sophistifuck & the Revlon Spam Queens, wouldn’t fit on a t-shirt and so exchanged for the pithier and punkier Germs because, claimed Smear in the band’s first interview for LA fanzine Slash (the Rolling Stone of the punk scene), “we make people sick”.


 Rounding out the group were two Valley girls obsessed by Queen; Terri Ryan (aka Lorna Doom) on bass and Belinda Carlisle (then known as Dottie Danger) on drums. Carlisle dropped out before the band had even played a note. She was replaced by a Krautrock fanatic from Phoenix called Don Bolles, who was forced to set up his kit and audition in a pool of beer and piss in the toilets of a basement club in Hollywood called the Masque.


 When they first emerged on the Hollywood music scene, the Germs were considered little more than a joke. Their first gig in May 1977, supporting art school punks The Weirdos at the tiny Orpheum Theater on Sunset Boulevard, was undertaken as a dare. Nervouse as hell, Bobby Pyn landed on stage, and fortified by quaaludes washed down with Cold Duck, a dirt-cheap blend of red and sparkling wine. He looked quite a sight, his torso bound in red licorice whips that promptly melted into a gooey red mess under the stage lights. And to distract attention from the fact that they had few songs to speak of and little idea of how to play them, the singer smeared peanut butter all over his body in a puerile homage to Iggy Pop.


 Their next show at the Whiskey two months later – promoted by record industry ghoul Kim Fowley, the manager of the Runaways – found Bobby anointing the crowd with powdered sugar during a wretched cover of the Archies bubblegum classic ‘Sugar Sugar’. When that failed to get a reaction he would bait them with barbed comments. As word spread that the band’s performances were messy, violent and usually ended in utter chaos, many local venues barred them from playing altogether.


 A rare show outside LA in January 1978, at San Francisco’s Mabuhay Gardens, took place the same night that the Sex Pistol’s final performance at Winterland Arena. With Sid Vicious standing in the wings, the Germs singer knew he had to go . He strode on stage, glugged down a beer and smashed the bottle on his head then etched a bloody circle on his chest with the jagged edge while snarling, ‘I’m Darby Crash. A social blast, chaotic master’. Those were the opening lines of ‘Circle One’, a track off the Germs’ newly-released Lexicon Devil EP, but they also heralded Beahm’s transformation from Bobby Pyn, a bleached-blonde goofball in safety-pinned denim, to Darby Crash, an endearing, leather-clad goon cum death cult leader who cited his forebears as Sceintology-founder L Ron Hubbard, Adolf Hitler, David Bowie and Oswald Spengler.


 Unlike his idols, Darby didn’t bother to manipulate minds in the traditional sense. He simply blurted out ‘gimme’ in a bratty whine – as in ‘gimme-a-beer, a-ride, or a-dollah’ – and someone usually complied. He also encouraged his small coteries of followers, collectively known as Circle One, to wear a a black armband bearing a blue circle as a symbol to identify themselves. Diehard fans went one further, branding their band loyalty by applying a lit cigarette to the wrist bone. It left a neat circular scar. The catch was that these ‘Germs Burns’ could only be administered by someone who had already been initiated by someone else with the same mark.




Relations with his gaggle of female groupies remained strictly platonic because Darby was gay, a fact he kept hidden from even his closet friends and colleagues up until his death.


 Among those most devoted to Darby were a gang of shockingly-attired scream queens, among them Hellin Killer, Trudie Plunger, Alice Bag, Pleasant Gehman, who cohabited at the Canterbury, a decrepit Hollywood apartment building that was a haven for hustlers and heroin addicts. The girls helped facilitate Darby’s lifestyle. They drove him places, bought him food, beer and, most importantly, drugs, without which the tremendously-shy singer was unable to take the stage. But relations with his gaggle of female groupies remained strictly platonic because Darby was gay, a fact he kept hidden from even his closet friends and colleagues up until his death.


 Synth-punk LA stalwarts the Screamers were the only ‘out’ band in an overwhelmingly-macho scene and the Germs singer was terrified that should the truth come out his legion of fans would desert him. Darby went so far to cover up his sexuality that a fiction was contrived for his segment in Decline Of The Western Civilisation Part I, Penelope Spheeris’ seminal documentary on the LA punk scene. At the time, he was sharing an apartment behind Graumann’s Chinese Theatre with a character called Tony Hustler, who would turn tricks in the front room while Darby sat alone in his room out back. When Spheeris came to film, Darby made Tony disappear and drafted high school friend Michelle Bauer to look on fondly while he is interviewed in the kitchen, giving the impression that they were a cosy punk couple.


 “What kind of drugs do you take when you're on stage?” Spheeris asks off-camera. “Anything,” drawls Darby. He is seated at a table, eating a fried egg sandwich that Bauer has just cooked up for him. On the wall behind him is a poster for the London Evening News that reads ‘Sid Vicious On Murder Charge’. “Usually I take speed, or something,” he continues blithely, “and then that gets too nervous, so I do some kind of downers. And then I start drinking.” Spheeris then cuts to live footage of the Germs that confirms how far gone the singer had to be before he could take the stage; he collapses on stage before singing a note and then seems to misplace the microphone. When he recovers it, Darby doesn’t so much sing as bawl and snarl, unleashing a splurge of mangled syllables in a sustained expression of angst and pain, most of which doesn't.


 When Spheeris asks later why he doesn’t sing in to the mic, Darby mumbles, “I don't pay attention. Or I'm too loaded.” He liked to play dumb, amping up his image as an inane monosyllabic punk rocker. But this public persona was belied by the keenly-crafted lyrics to Germs classics such as ‘Forming’, ‘Lexicon Devil’, ‘Communist Eyes’ and ‘Richie Dagger’s Crime’, which seemed fixated on the idea of channelling teenage angst into a more potent form of rebellion, a new order out of adolescent chaos.


 If nothing else, Darby’s apocalyptic obsessions were a clear sign that, as a group, the Germs had a built-in obsolence. He intimated as much in an 1978 interview with Flipside, explaining that “All it was meant to be was a step to go onto to something else.” According to high school buddy Will Amato, Darby considered Ziggy Stardust to be the Mein Kampf of pop. It provided the blueprint and battle-plan for his conquest of LA’s indolent youth. And just like Ziggy, Darby seemed determined to exit while his star was still in the ascendant. Repeated references to his own ‘Rock’n’roll Suicide’ were dismissed out of hand for years by his friends.




At just 22, Darby was being referred to as a has-been. His original following of fun-loving Hollywood punks had been replaced by a contingent of sinister surfer kids from nearby Orange County


 But if there was indeed a plan, it went awry the moment Darby abruptly replaced Germs drummer Don Bolles with the current object of his affections, a snotty young surfer called Rob Henley who couldn’t play to save his life. After firing Bolles, Darby promptly took off for a two month to soak up the music scene in London (on a trip paid for entirely by another willihng female patron, Amber). He instructed Smear and Doom to teach Henley his parts during his absence. But they decided to disband the group instead.


 On returning, Darby’s instinct to self-mythologise went awry. He formed a new band in his image, The Darby Crash Band, but kitted himself out in in combats, face paint and mohawk. What he figured was the height of London fashion was little more than an awkward imitation of Adam Ant’s dandy highwayman. With Pat Smear, the DC Band bombed during their first LA gigs playing a set that consisted mostly of old Germs songs.


 At just 22, Darby was being referred to as a has-been. His original following of fun-loving Hollywood punks had been replaced by a contingent of sinister surfer kids from nearby Orange County, who were drawn to the burgeoning hardcore punk scene by the promise of hard rucking to the kind of aggressive and insistent rhythms that the Germs had pioneered. In order to numb himself enough to face increasingly-violent crowds, Darby’s increased his reliance on heroin. Once he had mainlined on the chaos he caused, but now it was threatening to suck him under.


 In retrospect, it seems clear that his decision to reform the Germs for a reunion show was motivated to go out on a high; and in more ways than one. The show took place at the Starwood Hotel on December 3, 1980 and would be remembered as one of their best. Later that night, Darby’s current confidante Casey Cola drove him to a dealer where he bought $400 of heroin with the proceeds of the show. The couple then returned to Casey’s mother’s house where Darby injected his companion before administering his own fatal fix. When the girl was revived the next morning, Darby was lying dead next to her.



 Shortly afterwards, unfounded rumours began to spread that he had laid himself out in a cruciform position beneath a sign reading ‘Darby Crash lies here’ and the legend of Darby Crash, punk martyr, was tirelessly set in motion. But history would conspire to cloud Darby’s final performance in any case because just twenty-four hours after he died John Lennon was assassinatedand stole all the headlines.


just a wee add on, anyone else think of this 

when they seen the album cover?

DAY 434.
The Fall....................................................Live At The Witch Trials   (1979)












One of the most distinctive and influential British bands ever, The album was an instant success, documenting the beginnings of what became a unique British institution, it remains compelling listening today and has garnered new generations of admirers along the way. Despite a fluctuating membership, The Fall recorded and mixed Live At The Witch Trials, made up of highlights from their early shows, in just two days.

DAY 435.
Talking Heads........................................................Fear Of Music   (1979)











With Fear Of Music, Talking Heads drilled into a seam of paranoia that their first two albums had only scraped at. Talking Heads:77 and More Songs About Buildings And Food were offbeat slices of pop that deconstructed life in culture-like America. On Fear Of Music, David Byrne turned his withering gaze inward, and dissected his own anxiety-ridden mind,

I think Lochee Fleet was part of the Witch Trials 

So many heroes now - Siouxsie Sioux, Ian Curtis, Kate Pierson and Mark E Smith.  But loves the Police first album too.  Wow David Haye played with Crusaders - didnt know that

DAY 437.
Chic..................................................................Risque   (1979)











Recorded over eight weeks in 1979, Risque is Exhibit A in the case against those who suggest there was little substance to disco music. The album is the acme of Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers creative partnership. Backed by a budget of $160,000, it remains a widescreen record with widescreen ambitions.



Re-charged the batteries, and now looking forward to rattling through the backlog after the match.