rockfunkboogie

So doggone funky this Elvin Bishop tune - love the way it twirls and sashays in the gtr-solo-y sections

I expect if I trawled through the Struttin My Stuff album and his other records of that period I might find one other gem at least 2/3rds as groovy and charming

But "can I be bothered?" is the question (so far, the answer is "no")

The references in "Struttin'" to the girl in Atlanta who "ain't nuthin but a Georgia peach"  got me thinking of this other rock / funk / boogie beauty. which starts with the lines  about a Georgia woman suffering from a mysterious ailment and in dire need of remedial rhythm



That drummer with the pointy little beard looks coked out of his mind - unless it's just the itchy-itchy funk that's making him twitch

"Two degrees in be-bop, a phd in swing"

Now what this got me thinking of again is how the date of these recordings / performances - 1975 for both Little Feat on Old Grey Whistle Test and "Struttin My Stuff"  - is just a few years distance in time from punk-funk moves like Go4's "Damaged Goods" or various songs on Talking Heads's first two albums

Begging the question so why was that move such a big deal?  Wasn't it a bit after-the-fact?



I mean, sure, the postpunk rending of funk is "tense and nervous and unrelaxed" -   a different, uptight feel

It's less "black" - more suburban stilted stiff-jointed neurotic white-geek

So more striking - potentially leading to a new sound, new direction - rather than simply replicating (and reinforcing ye olde muso values of slick lickmanship that Old Wave white bands shared with their soul and R&B counterparts)

New Wavers doing it themselves and slight wrong versus  Robert Palmer actually recording with The Meters (and Lowell George)



Still, with Old Wavers routinely adopting funky modes all through the mid-70s , it remains odd that "we like funk and disco and what do you think of that, eh?" was such a powerhouse postpunk rhetorical stance to make

As I observed on an earlier occasion, talking about "nifty groovers"

"You almost wonder what the point of postpunk's vaunted embrace of funk and disco etc was as a gesture -  given that the funk was already so deeply imbricated with mainstream rock music. It didn't need to be added or restored, it's there. "

Take this Al Green cover - for which Talking Heads got a lot of praise and even achieved a modest chart hit in the US -  this is just a standard sort of Old Waver who loves black music move isn't it?

 (A wonderful and clever version of course, with the Jerry Harrison aqueous keyboards)





Robert Palmer learned to do the whiteboy-funky thing in the New Wave mode of doing it eventually






It's not even a question of amnesia of recent musical history - pre-punk seeming on the other side of Year Zero -  because you had Old Wavers doing their funky-disco move at more or less the same time as the New Wavers like Blondie











This one below by Paul McC actually sounds a bit like Talking Heads - or ACR's cover of "Shack Up" (at least until the goofy chorus)




Old Wavers disguised as New Wavers (but still Old Wavers at bottom) doing the funky-disco move



The Blockheads used to be called Loving Awareness!.

Of course the intersection point between rock and disco is the word "boogie" which in music history is polysemous - as I explored in this Guardian blog

Another version of the sublime "Rock and Roll Doctor"  (wish they'd done a whole album in exactly this vein)




Live "Struttin"



Bishop on the box

1978 versus 1978

so close and yet so far from each other



to a kid today they probably sound equally ancient and moldy-oldie, dawn-of-time bizniz

and yet - while rooted in the same stuff, even more apparent on the Costello album before this one - there's a universe of difference between the two

if you were there, then


I mean, compare this - from the Last Waltz




with this



the Old Wave / New Wave divide is wafer thin *

(and the same American crits who gushed over the former, gushed over the latter )





Squeezing Out Sparks decreed 1979's Best Album by the Village Voice's survey of the nation's critics



What a nasty little song!


* Bruce Springsteen is that wafer - old and new, both and neither  - and whaddyaknow members of E Street Band work on a later Parker album

1974

glimpse of the entropic, grinding-to-a-halt vibe of music culture in the mid-70s - the E1 festival of July '74, in Stepney

notable historically for appearance near the end of Elvis Costello fronting his first band Flip City - and essentially doing Get Happy! six years ahead of schedule.

more proof if needed of the secret contiguity and blurring of Old Wave and New Wave

(via Open Culture - and the London Community Video Archive)

More 74-made films from LCVA

side-burned well-spoken activist supports recreation-starved kids in struggle for play spaces!



top of the Poplars




Powis to the people!



power to the Pepys





All the fun of the fair (is this Deptford?)



Oooh a good one from a few years into the New Wave era - what looks like kids in class (further ed college? poly?) pretending to be punx?




And one from '72 on squatting





Verily a trove of verite on the fly lo-fi doccery - urban history as ghostly mirages

1975

a quiet, milky-sounding, swirling slowly to an entropic standstill sort of year

reflected in music-loving Johnny Plee's fave fifteen singles of that year

let the vinyl countdown / slowdown begin!


15




14





13





12




11




10



christ on a bike, never heard / heard of that before

09



the Frampton tune - says John Peel during the December 19th 1975 broadcast -  was his #1 for much of the year -  but then was overtaken by second-half-75 releases....


08



07



only artist to appear twice in this countdown, Joan Armorplating


06




as "Imagine" ends, Peel opines thus: "despite what other people say, I think this has been a great year for records, 1975 - and I think from this point on, all of the singles that I've chosen would actually get into my all-time Top 50"

and unbelievably, the next one is

05




04



pretty cool, that one, admittedly


03




02





01



finally a bit of energy (i'm not counting that Jack the Lad horror of bumptiousness)

apart from that though, you'd never guess that we are just one year -  actually, really just a few months - from punk - Ramones debut, "Anarchy in the U.K.", "New Rose"

The full countdown: 

Peter Skellern - Hold On To Love (Decca)

Laurel And Hardy with The Avalon Boys - The Trail Of The Lonesome Pine (United Artists)

Mike Oldfield - In Dulci Jubilo (Virgin)

Joan Armatrading - Back To The Night (A and M)

10CC - I'm Not In Love (Mercury)

Bob Sargeant - First Starring Role (RCA)
Peter Frampton - Show Me The Way (A and M)
Bob Marley and The Wailers - No Woman No Cry (Island)
Joan Armatrading - Dry Land (A and M)
John Lennon - Imagine (Apple)
Rod Stewart - Sailing (Warner Bros)
Roy Harper - When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease (Harvest)
Jack The Lad - Gentleman Soldier (Charisma)
Millie Jackson - Loving Arms (Polydor)
Be Bop Delux - Maid In Heaven (Harvest)

at Our God Is Speed, Greyhoos chips in with his own thoughts 'n' memories of New Wave

from his selections, this:

fuck me, is that a find or what?!?

The opening riff is pure Franz Ferdinand.

Funnily enough I was just yesterday perusing Chuck Eddy's second edition of Stairway to Hell, his eccentric guide to heavy metal, and in the afterword he lists a whole bunch of records that he's subsequently to the first ed's publication fallen in love with and shoulda included, and one of them is Alice Cooper's  Flush the Fashion.  But i hadn't realised that this was AC's noo-wave-move!

Who else in America, out of the Old Wave, made a Noo Wave move?

Billy Joel, I guess, with much of his Eighties material. Although this track is not sonically a new wave move but more a kind of New Wave acknowledging yet also recuperating / deflating manifesto of catholicity ("music-is-music/there's-only-two-kinds-of-music-good-music-and-bad-music") -- which has in fact becoming the programming policy and raison d'etre of post-Ipod middle-aged geezer targeting radio stations like Jack FM ("playin' ... what we like" said in a voice that sounds like Huey Lewis).

Another one: this album El Loco by ZZ Top was their New Wave move (although hints of it were on the one before, Deguello)

And then they really went for it with Eliminator and the album after that, by which time they often had a sequencer pulse chugging along alongside the drumming (which was already getting straightened out into something pretty metronomic and Billy Idol/Keith Forsey like).

One of my LA radio revelations since moving here was hearing the Cars and realising that not only could they play but that most likely before punk, they were probably playing similar kind of blues-based rock to ZZ Top or Foghat or James Gang... it may even have been a direct segue on Jack FM  from "La Grange" to "Just What I Needed It" that brought it home to me...


Well in terms of Old Wave to New Wave, they weren't Well Known before punk, but Huey Lewis & the News is old old style music given a New Wave-ish production finish and tautness

Didn't the musicians in the News play with Elvis Costello very early on (Clover?)

And then H & the News went back to the roots and did a bluesy album that totally tanked.


Here's another good example -  shameless Rod Stewart

i suppose those aren't really Noo Wave as in skinny tie / Devo-jitters though, more like just trying to do a commercial post-Moroder / synthpop era club-friendly radio-ready please-help-me-keep-up-me-mortgage-payments-on-me-mansion type job (cf the Stones records in the early-mid Eighties)

More troo Noo is Robert Palmer, another bluesy-rock Brit rasper who remodelled his sound, several times...

right up to the point of doing a Gary Numan cover

and then went electrofunk/postdisco

And of course the J.Geils Band, the same Old-to-Noo syndrome...

Oh and classic old-into-Noo is the production job (dry and sparse) on this imperishable tune by all-American heartland rocker Johnny Cougar

i'm sure there's scores more examples...

postscript: how could I forget, Neil Young (Devo fan supreme) and Trans!

Neil's movie that he got Devo to do a scene for

postpostscript: and  I forgot (that i'd remembered, a week or two ago) all about Bill Wyman's Je Suis Un Rockstar, which is Old Wave goes New Wave par excellence, and maybe the most successful, on all levels (middling hit; sounds reet nifty and not embarrassing like yer dad trying to dance to disco) out of all these Old-into-Noo mooves)

what i found out after posting it the first time the other week: he wrote it as a demo for Ian Dury's consideration. But nobody in the Stiff camp would actually present it to Dury! Were they afraid of incurring his wrath? I love this little fact because I once averred that the Blockheads were the best British groove group since the Stones. Ian should have done it, he'd might have arrested his decline as UK hitmaker!

of course there's a most unfortunate resonance to one of the lyrics here -- "they'll think I'm your dad/and you're my daughter" -- given Bill's love life later in the decade