diamonds...and dust

A good drummer can make an otherwise good band great, and a great band superb. Without Phil Rudd, AC/DC would have been good some of the time and great on a handful of tracks, but they never would have been the consistently excellent band they were up to For Those About to Rock… I came of age musically at a strange time in the history of rock and pop, from the mid 70s through the mid 80s. Hescher rock still had momentum and corporate power behind it, but Punk, New Wave and power pop were increasingly asserting themselves as upstart alternatives to the dinosaur mindset that dominated FM airwaves. I think this more than anything else is why my taste is all over the map. But in my early formative years, I skewed towards the hescher thing, and my idea of a good drummer was Keith Moon, Ginger Baker, Carl Palmer, Bill Bruford, Phil Collins, Neil Peart… These are all great drummers with somewhat varying styles, but they all share a similar philosophy of the drummer’s role, which is to get the drums noticed, to have the drums essentially be an additional lead guitar. The thing is, though, that I’m a guitar nut and don’t want my attention diverted like this. I really don’t want the drums to be the main focus or something I notice more than the guitars. Drums should enhance songs, not dominate them. My ideal drummer is one who provides a rhythm that brings me into the music without taking it over. And this is the very essence of what Phil Rudd does. He is known among drum aficionados as No Phil Rudd because he almost never plays a fill. He doesn’t have to. The sound he gets from his drums is so great that all he has to do is provide a simple, stripped-down beat. It’s the sound he gets from his drums more than anything else that makes him distinctive in spite of the conscious effort he makes to not be ostentatious. I’ve heard his style described as ‘unselfish,’ and I think that’s pretty apt. His job, as he sees it, is to make the song swing, and the one thing you can say about the Golden Age of AC/DC is that the songs really fuckin’ swing. They might be the swingingest band ever, and Phil Rudd is a huge factor in giving the band its jackhammer-like power. …I’ve spoken a bit over the past few posts about bands and their secret weapons. Michael Anthony’s backing vocals were Van Halen’s secret weapon. Malcolm Young was one of AC/DC’s secret weapons, Phil Rudd being the other. Maybe it was inevitable that the two of them would eventually, and literally, come to blows. Sometimes there’s only room for one secret weapon. Bon and Angus are what you notice most when you listen to AC/DC, but Phil and Malcolm turn great music into something really special…

PS – I know I’ve said this before but tonight’s footage reinforces my belief that youtube is the greatest fucking invention since the wheel. Tomorrow I will cut the sleeves off my jeans jacket and get me a balls-out anchor tattoo…

high voltage rock 'n roll

I was surprised a few years ago to learn that AC/DC played CBGB in 1977, right at the highpoint of the punk explosion in New York. This was probably right around the time of Let There Be Rock. They also opened a few shows for Kiss in the same year. I saw Kiss in 1977, on the tour for Alive II, but sadly AC/DC wasn’t the opening act. I have a feeling it’d be really difficult to open for Kiss given the spectacle of their shows, but I’m sure AC/DC would be up to the task just on the basis of the sheer power of the music. Can you imagine a double bill of Kiss and AC/DC? Holy mother of god! …I’m wondering, though, how AC/DC were received by the punk scenesters on the lower East Side of Manhattan. I’ll have to see what I can dig up on the internet. In some ways, AC/DC and punk seem like an uneasy pairing because, even when the punks played at being completely apolitical, the movement represented a critique of the failure of the 60s to achieve a fundamental change in society. So much of punk is about disillusionment with the 60s, whereas AC/DC is about givin’ the dog a bone. But in another way AC/DC fits nicely with bands like the Ramones and the Dictators, the unpretentious side of punk as opposed to Wire, Pere Ubu, the Clash, and Television, among others, each of whom had either artistic or political aspirations, if not both. AC/DC is a throwback to Chuck Berry and the golden age of rock ‘n roll, where the music is nothing more than the soundtrack to having fun and getting laid. The song structures are always very simple and stripped down, but they have unrelenting force and guitars as crunchy as the shattered glass under your boots after a teenage rampage. Problem Child, which features the unforgettable throwaway line, ‘and my mother hates me,’ is archetypal AC/DC. The song’s incredible three-chord riff is quite possibly one of the greatest riffs ever. It’s so great, in fact, that the version of the song on Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap has a little 30-second coda just to emphasize the utter perfection of those three chords. I don’t know why they didn’t include this little nugget on the otherwise identical version of the song that appears on High Voltage. It’s one of those little things that takes a great song and makes it transcendent…

they said up, i said down...

I think AC/DC is the band that comes closest to the spirit if not the sound of classic David Lee Roth-era Van Halen. Each was, in essence, a blues based hard rock band, but AC/DC was more elemental and rootsy, making their biggest impact not with flaming guitar solos, though Angus Young could certainly shred a solo when he wanted to, but rather with bone crushing riffs based on simple, immediate power chords. Yet in spite of this basic difference, AC/DC shared the Van Halen worldview (or perhaps it’s the other way around): Sex; violence; aggression; male hormones run amok; the kind of thing that synchs up perfectly with the adolescent male mindset… David Lee Roth’s persona made Van Halen’s sexual preoccupation a little more complicated than what AC/DC’s traditional Australian ladishness would allow. There was always a vague gay subtext with Diamond Dave, yet I’m convinced the guy was completely straight. I guess it’s just that when you dress a pretty boy up in assless leather chaps and get him prancing around the stage, almost like a Chippendales stripper, it’s gonna seem a little gay sometimes. Bon Scott was, by contrast, a tattooed mutt, back when tats were still badass, and he had bad teeth and not an ounce of sexual ambiguity. …I’d be really torn if you held a gun to my head and asked me to choose between the two bands, but I think I’d have to go with AC/DC. What puts them over the top for me is that there’s two guitarists. I always like my guitar-driven music to have a rhythm guitar. And Malcolm Young is one of the great rhythm guitarists of all time. If Michael Anthony’s backing vocals are the secret to Van Halen’s excellence, the same can be said for Malcolm Young’s rhythm guitar playing with AC/DC, which adds so much to the band’s absolutely devastating sound. Angus and Malcolm often do this thing, like in tonight’s song, where the song opens with a simple three or four chord riff, amd then the second guitar comes in after a few measures. But rather than play a lead, the second guitar simply replicates the opening riff, with the chords maybe voiced differently, so that the two guitars are playing the same thing. You might think doing this is duplicative, but you’d be dead wrong. It makes the riff sound so much ballsier and impactful… On Van Halen records, Eddie plays the rhythm riff and then the lead gets played separately on another track. This sounds incredible in the studio but can’t be replicated live, and I think it’s why, for all the showmanship and spectacle of a Van Halen concert, the band’s live sound was never that good. Eddie had to hold the whole thing together without the benefit of a second guitarist. This was never a problem with AC/DC. As great as their records were, the bricks-and-bats energy of their live sound took their power and forcefulness to a completely different level. I saw them with my brother in 1980 at the Nassau Coliseum. This was probably less than a year after Bonn Scott died. I didn’t own any of their records at the time, but I became a hugely devoted fan after seeing Angus and Malcolm do their thing that night. Again, as was the case with Van Halen, they were so loud, so nasty, so against everything that dogged me in my life at the time – rules, manners and uptight, repressed people – and they did it with such cocksure swagger and flair. It’s no overstatement to say that that concert was a pivotal for me. It opened me up to a completely different way of thinking about things...

it's love in the first degree

I was reminiscing over email earlier today with a friend of mine from back East about how much we loved and worshipped Van Halen when we were kids. I think what I really latched onto, in addition to the killer riffs and great songs, was the sleazy spectacle of it all. They were randy, dirty guys from Southern California, and they reveled in their filthiness. For me there was a forbidden fruit element to it because I was raised in such a proper household. My parents never discussed sex with my sister and me, and they placed a very high premium on manners, propriety, and all that uptight, upper crust shit I hate so much but have had burned into my consciousness forever. And then along comes Van Halen, and they’re just puerile and loud as fuck, but they also have David Lee Roth’s jewy cleverness working for them. Eddie and Alex have never seemed to me like the sharpest tools in the shed, but Diamond Dave more than filled the void with his obnoxiously larger than life rude boy humor and smarts. So yeah, it’s the meeting of aggressive hard rock and sophomoric (yet also deceptively thoughtful) humor that made Van Halen so appealing to me. And what I’ve been telling anyone who’ll listen these last few days is that the allure of Van Halen’s particular brand of sleaze is greatly bolstered by Michael Anthony’s backing vocals. He was the band’s secret weapon. He made everything sound so wonderfully dirty. And his look only added to the band’s unclean veneer. Interviews I’ve seen with Anthony on youtube leave me with the impression that he’s a very sweet, somewhat soft-spoken teddy bear, quite possibly the most reasonable dude in the band, though the bar is admittedly set pretty low. But if you ran into Michael Anthony on the street and didn’t know who he was, you might think he’s a pornographer or a guy who owns a titty bar. And this is good thing. Van Halen are the titty bar of rock ‘n roll. Before you enter, make sure you have plenty of fives and ones on your person. You’re gonna need ‘em…

turns you from hunted into hunter...

I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about Eddie Van Halen. Like most guys of my generation, I worshipped his unmistakably ferocious style of guitar playing when I was a ‘tween. Fair Warning, which I think of as Van Halen at their creative apex, was a huge album for me when I was 13. There’s two things that occur to me with Eddie’s playing. On the one hand, it’s the sound of the adolescent male id, at once confused and excited by a world in which sex is suddenly the prism through which all of life is refracted. But then, on the other hand, his playing also conveys violent aggression and rage. Hearing him play makes you wanna break shit. It’s a cathartic sensation, a purging of destructive impulses that cleanses your soul of all the dark, repressed stuff you walk around with all day long. Eddie’s onstage persona was always happy-go-lucky, more or less, but my impression of him from the admittedly little I know is that he’s a troubled dude, not real well adjusted, maybe even a little trashy in a very particular Pasadena via Holland kind of way. I get the same vibe from his brother, Alex, but you see less of Alex because he’s hidden behind that gynormous drum kit he plays. …Whatever demons haunt Eddie, they definitely come through in his playing. It’s simultaneously beautiful, ugly, ecstatic, painful, pleasing, scary… I was reflecting on this today and decided that an EVH riff is like the ‘go get your fuckin’ shine box’ scene in Goodfellas, the one where Billy Batts gets beaten to a pulp to the music of Donovan and then stuffed into the trunk Henry Hill’s car. Like the scene, the riffs tend to be jaw droppingly dramatic and even operatic. The violence is sublime. You can’t avert your attention even though what you’re hearing is utterly terrifying. If somewhere in the universe there’s a fine line separating sensuality and smoldering anger, Eddie Van Halen straddles it. He almost always tunes his guitar down by a half tone, and often plays in drop D tuning, so the low E string is as low and weighted down as a 15-yr-old’s ballsack. It’s gives him that filthy, nasty, sexy, wet dream sound. For a long time, as my taste supposedly got more sophisticated and refined, I dismissed Eddie as a mere guitar tech, vulgar by comparison with my guitar heroes, guys like Roger McGuinn and Clarence White, Johnny Marr and Peter Buck, Mick Ronson and Bill Nelson. But I’ve reassessed Eddie’s body of work and come to realize that he is one of the most emotionally affecting guitarists I’ve ever heard. I’m not gonna reach for a Van Halen album every day, and I’m never gonna reach for anything after 1984, but when I’m feeling beaten down by life, pissed off, and undersexed, I know Eddie’s playing will lift me up and set me free…

occasional dream, four

Somebody famous, I can’t remember who, once said that if you want to know about the 60s you should listen to the Beatles. I think there’s a lot of truth to this. I also think it’s true that if you want to know about the 70s you should listen to David Bowie. Both the Beatles and Bowie, each in their own time and place, created works characterized by repeated leaps that redefined the era. I’m thinking about this right now in connection with Hunky Dory, which is a huge advance beyond The Man Who Sold the World, one in which Bowie plants an initial stake in the heady and strange moral landscape of the early 70s. Hunky Dory also readies the terrain for what comes next with Ziggy Stardust, though the two records are very different. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that, in more than just chronological terms, Hunky Dory is to Ziggy Stardust what Revolver is to Sgt. Pepper’s. Starting with Changes as the opening track, Bowie offers one of the first real attempts in music to define the 70s as being post 60s. If I had to pick the one moment on the album that most perfectly crystallizes the transition, it’s in Bewlay Brothers when Bowie sings,

And we were gone
Hanging out with your dwarf men
We were so turned on
By your lack of conclusions

Something about the double tracked vocals makes things sound so spacey and weird, and the lines seem to invoke a new era of ambiguity and deconstructed meaning. ‘Weird’ is actually a good word to describe all of Hunky Dory. It is one of the weirdest albums you’ll ever hear. It’s a good weird, to be sure, possibly the greatest, most brilliant weird ever, but it’s also the kind of weird that tends to emerge out of transformative periods when the shape of things to come can only be viewed through a glass darkly…

gimme moore

It’s been almost exactly a year now since Gary Moore was found dead in a hotel room in Spain. The news made me quite sad as he was not only a gifted guitarist but also seemed like a very sweet guy. I never got much into his solo work, not because it’s bad necessarily, more because I simply didn’t get around to checking it out. Maybe some day I will. But he really brought a new and fresh energy to Thin Lizzy after Robbo left the group. Black Rose, released at the doorstep of the 80s, suffers from the creeping atmospheric murkiness typical of the way records sounded at the time. But Moore’s lightning fast playing cuts through the heavy fog like a knife through buttah. Speed guitar is usually not my thing when it’s done as a dick swinging end in itself, but Moore is tasteful and imaginative in his playing and gets an incredible tone out of his Les Paul. His sound has such an incredible bite to it, hard enough to chip a tooth on, yet also intricate and tuneful. They should sell the Gary Moore guitar sound in powdered form. Just add water, drink it down, and presto, you’re able to shred out jaw dropping guitar solos. If only it were that easy. …I remember seeing the ‘Liz perform on The Midnight Special when I was a kid. I had a small black-and-white t.v. in my room, and as the band broke into Waiting for an Alibi with a huge set of dice towering behind them as a stage prop, I was absolutely rapt, on my way to becoming hooked for life. The song struck that perfect balance between being dark and sinister but also irresistibly catchy. It’s also just flat-out ballsy sounding. For me at that age, the dark, catchy, ballsy thing was utterly addictive, offering a kind of rebelliousness by proxy. Hearing the song now fills me with joy, but it’s bittersweet because the perfection of Gary Moore’s playing serves as a reminder that the man left us too soon...

a riff on riffs...

I’ve got just a couple more Thin Lizzy songs I wanna lay on you. The ‘Liz have completely revived my faith in the redemptive power of the perfect riff. Someday soon I think I might do an extended series on the best riffs in the history of rock ‘n roll, from the early days of the Golden Age onwards. As I’ve started to take up the guitar myself over the past three or four months, I’ve become obsessed with the question of what it is that constitutes a great riff. What chords work well together, and what groupings of chords create this or that emotional landscape? But at the most basic level I find myself asking what it is that makes a riff a riff? Is it merely a grouping of chords or notes that have a kind of stickiness about them in the sense that they stay in your brain long after the needle has passed over the grooves? No, a riff is so much more than that, though catchiness is not something to be dismissed. A riff has to be catchy in order to be a riff, but it’s also a very definite statement. When you hear AC/DC’s Problem Child or Van Halen’s Mean Streets, for example, you experience the catharsis of unrestrained fury, and you come to realize how potent it can be, but also how rare. The riff in each case is an instance of pure id and represents a gap in society’s repressive mechanisms, moments in which the workings of the superego haven’t kicked in. …Contrast this unbridled pleasure principle with songs by U2, Coldplay, the Dave Matthews Band, or any other kind of grim corporate sounding music. The mere sound of Bono’s voice is an encapsulation of the reality principle, offering a depressing reminder that we don’t live in a world without rules, restraints, worries, and coercion. Mind you, not all riffs straddle the Angus and Malcolm Young/Eddie Van Halen divide between pleasure and violence, sex and death, but a riff is essentially a catchy, recurrent statement made with a guitar or guitars as the messenger. Sometimes the guitar is both the message and the messenger, a la Marshall McLuhan. Smoke on the Water and More than a Feeling come to mind immediately. But for me the most affecting riffs are ones that transcend the guitar itself and create a narrative, or make a philosophical statement, or engender some kind of deep primal feeling in the listener. And that’s what makes tonight’s riff so fantastic. It does everything a riff can do. It says something about the guitar itself, its metaphysics of pain and pleasure and its ability to transform the former into the latter; it sets a scene, one of danger, and destruction, and tragedy; but the riff doesn’t bum you out because it also lets you know that the protagonist in this story may go down in a ball of flames, but at least he’ll do it in a way that honors his manhood. He’s a loser this one final time, just as he’s been all his life, but he’s a beautiful one at that, and so he’s really a winner in the grand scheme of things…