Some Came Running

Encounters with Great Recordings of the 20th Century, #5: A Tribe Called Quest, "Midnight Marauders"

Now that Rolling Stone magazine is in the news again, and again for a not-great reason, it seems an opportune time for me to own up to something in a more cohesive way than I've done in the past, which has been in dribs and drabs on social media. As most of you are aware, this week sees the publication of a literally jaw-dropping interview with RS founder or co-founder and longtime publisher and editor Jann Wenner. Ace interlocuter David Marchese did the honors for The New York Times Magazine, and it's clear in one of the exchanges, in which Wenner opines that Black and female musical artists of his era were simply not articulate enough for him to bother interviewing back in the day, that Wenner is blithely stepping straight into a trap that Marchese hadn't even set for him. 

Wenner's glib, smug, not-even-confession sits alongside other gobsmacking glib, smug shrugging-offs of various journalistic malpractices. This doesn't speak well of Rolling Stone's ostensible legacy, and here one is semi-obliged to mumble about how that's a shame becuase Rolling Stone did publish a lot of great writing and that is certainly true. But it's because of Wenner that the existence of RS will always have been at the very least a mixed blessing and if he wants to drag the rag's rep through the mud by freely admitting that he actually let his interview subjects edit their Q&As before they went to press, that's entirely on him.

I did a bit of writing for Rolling Stone in the early 1990s. When I visited the office, I always slumped, and tried to steer clear of the boss man, because I figured that having made his allowance for the great David Fricke, he didn't want to see any other unusually tall people in the office. (And indeed, aside from David, there weren't any on staff as far as I could tell.) A couple of great things about RS when Wenner ran the place: it paid well, and it paid on time. Always. For a freelancer, that's huge. 

I was a journeyman front-of-the-book writer who never broke into features despite the encouragement of editors like Barbara O'Dair and Bob Love. I did obits on the likes of Albert Goldman, Michael Clarke, and Harry Nilsson (who should have been memorialized by Dawn Eden, who did the last interview with the man and who I tapped as a source for the piece). I contributed capsules to packages like "The Hundred Greatest Rock Videos of All Time." I interviewed Yoko Ono for her Off-Broadway musical, New York Rock, a misbegotten project in which one might nevertheless see the seeds of Rent. And, for editor Anthony De Curtis, I did one record review. And here my tale of woe begins.

I haven't yet read Joe Hagan's Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, but I've dipped into it more than once for research purposes and it appears to be lively, dishy, entertaining, well-researched, comprehensive, and right-minded. Hip-hop is mentioned precisely once in the book, and early on, in the prologue. Like so: "Success would blunt Wenner's feel for the culture and sow the seeds of his decline. He missed the rise of MTV and hip-hop, and later the Internet, cultural revolutions he experienced like a well-heeled uncle squinting toward Manhattan from a ski-slope in Sun Valley, where he began wintering in the 1990s." Oh that reminds me, another piece I did for Rolling Stone was based arounf the premise of Rock Stars Give You Advice on How To Buy A Computer, with Henry Rollins averring, "Even if you think the computer you're buying has plenty of memory, you're going to need MORE" and stuff like that.  One can infer, from the new Wenner interviw and also from a lot of other things, that Wenner had not just a blind spot as far as hip-hop went but was probably openly hostile to it. Nevertheless, the music editors at the magazine made good-faith efforts to cover it even when they themselves weren't entirely enthusiastic about it. Remember, these were the days before Tom Petty enlisted Rick Rubin as a producer, the days when Petty would vehemently drawl, when asked about sampling, "It's stealing." 

Long story short, record reviews editor De Curtis, a good critic (albeit one of old-school taste) and a kind, pleasant guy, assigned me to review Midnight Marauders, the third studio album by A Tribe Called Quest. I don't recollect the conversation, I can't remember if he offered me a choice of records to write up. I do remember having been enthusiastic about Peoples' Instinctive Travels and the thing that was getting called "Alternative Hip-Hop" in general (especially De La Soul's Three Feet High And Rising). I felt these records were encouraging in a larger cultural sense in a time when I, a Delicate White Person In His Early Thirties, was increasingly discomfited by what he saw as aberrant elements emerging in hip-hop, as in the anti-semitism expressed by Professor Griff of Public Enemy or the unapologetic misogyny of some of the raps on Ice Cube's Amerikkka's Most Wanted. Put another way, I took the whole "D.A.I.S.Y. Age" business far too much to heart. 

My really dumb two-star review of Midnight Marauders now sits behind a paywall, and I'm not going to pony up to read it in its entirety again. Nor am I going to go fetch my DVD-ROMs or whatever they are of "The Complete ," which probably don't even work on my current computer anymore anyway. All I need is to read the lede of the review to cringe: "'Can you envision/A brother who ain't dissin'?' asked A Tribe Called Quest's Q-Tip on the rap group's  1990 debut album, People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, a breakthrough in what became known as Afrocentric hip-hop. It was a refreshing idea then, and Quest pulled it off with panache; their raps were gently wry, while their jazzy jams proved that dope beats don't need sledgehammer impact to kick ass." You see where this is going: straight to hippieville, really. Which is putting it kindly. De Curtis might as well have asked David Van Driessen, the wet-noodle teacher on Beavis and Butthead, to write up the record. In my eagerness to tsk-tsk the group for what I took as untoward aggression, I failed to hear what the beats and rhymes were actually doing, which I won't try to describe here (I've done enough damage!) but will say I have come to understand as being legitimately great. Instead of appreciating that at the time, I instead wrote the thing that I have come to hate, as both a critic and a reader. That is, A Concern Troll Review.

As I mentioned, the review is behind a paywall now, but during the early days of Rolling Stone Digitizing Its Content, it was not behind a paywall, and about eight or nine years ago, every coupld of months or so a bunch of folks would find it on the RS site, just sitting there, and would find me on Twitter to tell me what an imbecile I was. It was a lot of work, composing individual apology tweets saying I Was Wrong and that Indeed Midnight Marauders Is A Great And Landmark Hip-Hop Album. From hereon in, this post will serve as my all-purpose mea culpa. In the words of maestro Lou Reed, "Shows just how wrong you can be."  

Encounters With Great Recording Of The 20th Century #4: Lou Reed, "The RCA And Arista Album Collection" (Released and acquired October 2016)

For Scott Lemieux and Brian Koppelman.

I was a very poorly socialized child. After my incredibly obese toddlerhood, I assumed the more or less regular dimensions of a boy. But I had issues. I had not started speaking in English until well after I turned three (up until that point I communicated with my mother in a made-up language) and once I began attending school, teachers noticed some problems, including a lack of physical coordination that suggested to them that I was “spastic.” My inability to connect with my peers led me to act out (not vandalism or anything, just spending entire schooldays speaking in a fake British accent) and I was submitted to a bunch of physical and psychological tests and assigned to a social worker. I mention all this not to elicit sympathy but to demonstrate why, as the early 1970s and my early teens rolled around, I was completely ready for Lou Reed. 

I’d been reading about him and his work in Creem and Rolling Stone for a little while when Berlin came out in 1973, when I was going on 14. I think it was the first Reed album I bought, and I got the relatively deluxe first pressing that came with that fancy libretto printed on very thick paper and illustrated with photographs depicting scenes in the album’s loose narrative. I was of course intrigued by the whole thing but also vaguely disappointed—where were those guitars I had heard so much about. Then I got Transformer, and there they were, and there they were too on White Light/White Heat, so shit started working out.

Lou Reed’s was the first rock show I saw by myself, early October 1974, at the luxurious Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey. Up until this point my dad had been pretty generous with his time and disposable income, indulging my Teenage Lust For Rock by taking me to shows. We had seen Ten Wheel Drive at Creskill High School and then he offered to take me to a show in “the city.” I thought about Zeppelin at the Garden, but blanched at the thought of sitting through “The Lemon Song” with my dad (I imagine there would have been plenty more to blanche at), so I settled for Delaney and Bonnie at Carnegie Hall, which my dad dug because he liked King Curtis. (We had no idea at the time that the guitarist in that band was Duane Allman.) As far as Lou Reed was concerned, I was on my own. My folks dropped me off outside the venue and told me to be outside again at 11:30, no ifs ands or buts. 

It was an evening of discovery for me in many ways. On the line to get in, many dirty filthy hippie types chatted. “What do you think of the new album,” one asked a companion. “I don’t know. I haven’t gotten into it yet.” That was the first time I’d heard the phrase “gotten into it.” (The new album was Sally Can’t Dance, a record that vexed Lester Bangs mightily.) Inside the hall, I was distracted by the smell of pot and the sight of young braless women in diaphanous tops silhouetted in the entrance to the ladies’ room. I hated openers Hall and Oates, who were flogging their own “concept album,” War Babies and who, to my mind, WOULDN’T GET OFF THE STAGE. (Years later I experienced a similar irritation when R.E.M. opened for Gang of Four at the Ritz, and I have to admit that I never quite got over it.) Reed’s set was perfunctory, even the distasteful theatrical bits—this was the tour on which he simulated shooting up during “Heroin.” Near the end of the show some schmuck screamed “’Sister Ray’!!!” to which Lou replied, in the evening’s sole bit of stage patter, “Go fuck yourself.” I had to leave before the encore.

I remained a Reed devotee, to the extent that I actually became a professional rock critic. And as a professional rock critic, yea, even well before I achieved that status, I hewed to the standard critical line that John Cale was a better, more ambitious, more interesting overall solo artist than Lou Reed was. While all the time really just wanting Lou Reed to make great solo albums.

Eventually the rock critic paradigm broke down. Exhibit A, 1984 saw the release of Lou Reed’s New Sensations and John Cale’s Caribbean Sunset. But I’m not here to re-litigate an old and probably boring case that’s among other things unfair to both Cale and Reed. Rather, I’m here to offer a unified field theory of Lou Reed solo albums, which is that they are all great and that while one might contain better “material” or “songs” than another, each one is an incredibly valuable component in a life’s work that is in fact best considered as a life’s work.

 The thing that turned me around is not a 20^th century release but rather a 21^st century collection of 20^th century recordings, that is, the box set Lou Reed: The RCA and Arista Recordings. I sprung for it on release, in October of last year, and I went through the 17 discs in chronological order at home, but it was really through spinning its 148 songs with my iPod on shuffle and discovering, to my surprise, that I did not feel like skipping a single one. Even the songs I didn’t like were telling me something, something worth hearing, something worth weighing—about Reed, sure, but also about the city that we shared. The world we shared. And so on. I came upon songs that I had slept on—“High in the City” from New Sensations, “My Old Man” from Growing Up in Public—that suddenly struck me as no-qualifications great. I got out from under the influence of Peter Laughner with respect to Coney Island Baby. And more. And found each song was best experienced in the context of the other 147 songs in a way that I’ve never experienced with another artist. Good, bad, very bad, or indifferent, the work creates a world unto itself.

 Of course I am hardly the only person to perceive this. Alexis Petridis, in his very astute December 2016 review of the set, cites a Reed quote in which the artist likens his run of albums to a book: “Every record a chapter … Listen to it in order, there’s my great American novel.” Petridis then outlines the narrative, which sees Our Hero “crashing into frustrating dead ends.” Indeed, or maybe even driving into walls at full speed with eyes wide open. The only mistake Reed made in his self-assessment, and I can’t blame him, is saying “great American novel” rather than “great American autobiography.”

Reed’s greatest glory as an artist also happened to be his Achilles’ heel. To go back to Cale for a minute, Reed’s former Velvet Underground bandmate was, like so many rock artists, adept at pulling off personae, from the refined classically-trained artiste of Paris 1919 to the studio-rock renegade of Slow Dazzle. And, of course, in the many phases of Cale’s career his persona would at times directly reflect the perilous state in which he was himself living. But Lou Reed, no matter how many looks he tried on, no matter how many story-songs about other people he wrote, could ultimately never present as anybody but himself. (This comes out not just in the overt content of the songs but in the way he strains and shifts his vocalizations, his disinclination to follow strict rhyme schemes or adhere to meter, his phrasing either slack or micro-beat accurate.) And very often his self was of course his own worst enemy. When the work reflects this, as it has to, it reflects it in ways that can be mortifying, exasperated, embarrassing, but when you are fully committed to getting through these patches, you don’t feel these things in a way that’s detached from Reed, you feel that way with him. Dylan’s “I Threw it All Away” could be this set’s theme, except that for every willful perverse loss there follows some kind of corresponding gain. Without the tossed-off cynicism of Rock and Roll Heart you won’t get the buckled-down complexity of Side A of Street Hassle. Without all but giving up guitar completely for Growing up in Public (a bid for Bruce Springsteen/Billy Joel style credibility that Reed had to somehow know was the last thing he wanted or needed), you wouldn’t have the triumphant picking up of the guitar, alongside Robert Quine, on The Blue Mask. And in spite of all these contrasts there is, if you listen with a certain ear, no actual diffusion from the whole. Whether this makes Reed actually unique among rock artists I can’t say. But it certainly makes him massive, and always massively moving.

Encounters With Great Recordings Of The Twentieth Century, #3: Art Bears, "Hopes and Fears;" Fred Frith, "Guitar Solos" (Release dates May 1978 and October 1974, respectively; date of acquisition, circa November 1978)

As I may have mentioned somewhere, or as you may have been able to infer somehow through my writing, as a teenager I was a fairly religious reader of the rock and roll magazine Creem. By religious I mean that I would read each issue cover to cover at least twice each month. Even the column by the British critic and sociologist Simon Frith, whose work I considered relatively dry—Creem was, you may recall, the magazine that published a Lester Bangs profile of Lou Reed titled "Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves."   That having been one of Bangs' more restrained pieces. Anyway, there was one column Frith wrote in the wake of the rise of the Sex Pistols and The Clash, about the reaction to punk from more established rock musicans of the progressive camp, both musically and politically. Specifically, musicians involved in the loose-knit organization Rock In Opposition. One of whom was Simon Frith's brother Fred Frith, who was at the time still a member of the group Henry Cow. Simon's lead sentence in the column was, and remains, one of the best of it's kind I ever read. It was: "The greatest guitar player in the world is my brother Fred." What a bold thing to say, and what a cool thing to be able to say. I wondered if it was true, or even arguable. But recordings of Fred Frith's music were thin on the ground in Lake Hopatcong, where I was living at the time. I was in my late teens, about to graduate high school and enter college at the time I read that article. I'd heard of Henry Cow and of Frith before. I remembered several years before reading an item in Melody Maker about the recording of the Henry Cow/Slapp Happy hybrid album In Praise Of Learning. I'd seen Frith name-checked on the back cover of Brian Eno's Another Green World. But I had not heard the man play guitar.

Some months later I entered college, and some months after that I read, in the Village Voice, a review of Hopes and Fears, an LP by a group called Art Bears—not "The" Art Bears, but merely, Art Bears, which will make sense later on in this piece—by Michael Bloom. Bloom was one of a handful of regular/occasional contributors to the Voice rock music section who championed what you'd call art rock (Jon Pareles and John Piccarella were the others) and his writing on the album I recall as being highly evocative. (The group, as it happens, was born out of a conflict within Henry Cow, at a point when Frith and drummer/lyricist Chris Cutler were interested in exploring song forms with vocalist Dagmar Krause, and other factions of the group more insistent on longer compositions and such. The band split up, but not before fulfilling gigging obligations and making a final instrumental album; all of the members of Cow as it was constituted at the time of the split contribute to the Art Bears' record.)  And by November of 1978 I had moved out of my parents' house and into an apartment in Paterson with a college roommate, had gotten myself a kind of punk-rock girlfriend who worked in the typesetting department of my college paper, to whom I had lost my virginity and everything, and one night I and the punk-rock girlfriend had gone to either the Rockaway Mall or the Garden State Plaza and visited the Sam Goody's record store and I found not only the very intriguing Hopes and Fears but also a copy of the Fred Frith solo album Guitar Solos, and I bought both. 

I was quite eager to hear them right away, so my punk-rock girlfriend, who also had HER OWN CAR, drove me back to the place in Paterson, where my roommate, a Beatles aficionado among other things, had a reasonably good stereo hooked up in the living room. I am not sure if he was in the place when we got there. Anyway, we got there, and the first record we put on was Hopes and Fears. And again, I did not hear Fred Frith play guitar. 

Rather, I heard the astringent voice of Dagmar Krause, accompanied by funereal woodwinds, singing, in strong tones with an occasional slight fluctuation that seemed pitched somewhere between deliberate vibrato and near-voice-crack, the opening lines to a song by Hann Eisler and Bertolt Brecht: "In such a country/and at such a time"—and then the voice, seemingly an alto exploring the outer end of her range, shifted to a plaintive falsetto—"there should be no/melancholy evenings/even high bridges/over the rivers/and the hours between the night and morning/and the long long winter time as well/all these are dangerous." She went on: "For in view of/all the misery/people just throw/in a few seconds' time/their unbearable lives away." The song is called "On Suicide." The next tune began with some highly-fucked up keyboard tones, an electirc organ with some serious contact trouble maybe, and ominous drumming, a stark piano figure; the chorus, such as it is, has Dagmar, ending each word with a repressed sob, stating, "There are no questions just demands/oh give me the order and I'll cross the border/I don't want to be where I am." On the next song, "Joan," there is finally some GUITAR: a soaring four-note riff with a martial drum figure behind, and Dagmar asking the question "Was I a witch?" Yes; the song is a musical contemplation of the Maid of Orleans. It is only on the fifth song on side one that we approach anything like "rock," and that is because the song, "In Two Minds," the text of which applies a Marxist and possibly Lacanian analysis to the topic of teen alienation and concurrent mental illness, or, more to the point, "mental illness" ("as parent secretly conspires with parent/to discredit conscience and reject all criticism/as a shameful sickness"), is in part a pastiche of/homage to The Who's "Baba O'Riley." It was a little after this point that my punk-rock girlfriend and I, who considered ourselves adventurous, open-minded listeners—because a big part of being punk rock was being adventurous, and having an open mind, we reckoned—determined that as intrigued as we were, we had no idea what the hell we were listening to. I think that my roommate, who had either been there the whole time or who had turned up shortly after we put the record on, had compared Krause's vocal stylings unfavorably to those of Yoko Ono. 

So maybe we'd better put on Guitar Solos, because on a record so titled, the artist making it is clearly out to show his stuff, and in a relatively direct way. And, we recall, the guitarist's brother has proclaimed the guitarist the greatest in the world. (Doesn't seem, on the evidence of Art Bears, on whose record he also played keyboards, like a very showy guy, though. In the experience of the American rock fan, shit-hot guitarists tended to dominate their combos with shit-hot guitar playing, c.f., Eddie Van Halen, and Frank Zappa even.) Certainly the minimal liner notes, which specified "all music heard as played," and, even more scintilatingly, "the middle part of 'No Birds' was played on two guitars simultaneously" promised a show of some kind of virtuosity. 

And the opening cut, "Hello Music," while decidedly offbeat and not all that "rocking," did not/does not disappoint. A two-bar two-chord vamp (later, on exploring a guitar myself, I figured out he wasn't really playing chords, just barring and unbarring a fret) followed by a four-note cascade at a VERY lively speed, followed by dashing runs with wryly discordant intervals and all manner of harmonics sneaking in on the sidelines. It was kind of hard to believe Frith was doing all this without overdubs—still hard—and again, I later found out that he'd modified his guitar in all sorts of unusual ways, adding for instance a neck pickup and using a stereo volume control. The guitar hence emitted sounds from all sorts of places at once, at different speeds. Combined with an exceptionally dextrous playing approach—as I believe I've said elsewhere, Frith plays guitar with his entire body, really; more than any other guitarist I've seen, he makes his instrument an extension of his being—he makes the six-string sound like it's a hundred-string. He ends this particular demo with a bright and cheerful traditional major chord, a punchline that's simultaneously sardonic and entirely devoid of cynicism. The rest of the album is somewhat less immediately jaw-dropping, except when it is even more  so. But Frith is concerned here with improvising first, and blowing your mind with technique maybe tenth. On the evening of the first hearing, it was an easier LP to relate to. Even the Beatlemaniac roommate allowed that Frith knew his way around the instrument.

These two records changed my life. They changed how I hear, they changed how I process music. I went back to Hopes and Fears many, many times and still do. I went from not quite understanding it to feeling a deep concordance with it, and it led me to much other great music. Its philosophy and aesthetic corresponds to my own, and when it doesn't, it challenges my own, and stretches it. I think that's what music, that's what art, are for. Guitar Solos remains a pleasure and a marvel, on the same plane of listening. I thank Fred Frith, who I continue to think of as the greatest guitarist in the world, and Chris Cutler, and Tim Hodgkinson, and Georgie Born, and the late Lindsay Cooper, for having made this music. 

Here's Cutler on the origin of the band name "Art Bears:" "I took the name Art Bears from a sentence in Jane Harrison's Art and Ritual......'even today, when individualism is rampant, art bears traces of its collective, social origin,' p 241. But not too much should be read into this." 

I've mentioned before that my late friend Lee Lipsenthal took to calling the Art Theater on East 8th Street "the Art Bears Theater." 

Encounters With Great Recordings Of The Twentieth Century, #2: Roy Haynes/Phineas Newborn/Paul Chambers, "We Three" (Release date, likely early 1959, date of acquisition, some time in 1990)

I have no problem admitting I'm a Phineas Newborn dilettante. Even Stanley Booth, the author of the thorough, admiring, and extremely painful appreciation of Newborn that was my first exposure to the great pianist, wrote in that account that shortly before he met the man in the early '70s he "knew almost nothing about Phineas Newborn except that he was a jazz pianist whose records I'd seen reviewed in Down Beat in the '50s." 

Booth's piece, entitled "Fascinating Changes," first appeared shortly after Newborn's death in the spring of 1989, in a quarterly musical supplement that was then being published in the Village Voice, in the days when someone of Stanley Booth's caliber would permit his work to be printed in the Village Voice. It is reprinted in Booth's 1991 collection Rythm Oil, an absolutely essential book for anyone with even just a passing interest in music, the United States of America, and good writing. In the book Booth prefaces the piece thus: "This piece was written before Phineas Newborn, Jr., died, but it ran in the Village Voice as one more obituary. I don't like it, as a poet once said, but I guess things happen that way."

Booth's account was of an extremely troubled, perhaps mentally ill individual, more or less at sea, who plays piano like an angel. It is an angry piece that weaves in threads of family history, Memphis history, observations on the various natures of the music business of the time, the vicissitudes of jazz critics (which Booth has very little patience for; after quoting a review of a Newborn set by one John Mehegan which takes it to task for a lack of "real jazz feeling," Booth writes "The absurdity of a white piano teacher from New York telling Phineas Newborn about real jazz feeling is delicious." 

In any event, after reading Booth's article, I was kind of haunted by the oddity of the character that Booth had made out of Newborn. Booth's perspective was not that of a clinician but as a kind of privileged observer, and the mysteries in his story and Phineas' story are kept mysteries, and among the most troubling of the mysteries surrounds a beating that Newborn suffers at unknown hands for unknown reason not long after Booth first meets and hears the pianist. Booth also conjures the sense of a world that most of us will not,  can not, ever know, and does this with some wry pique, as in this digression from a reasonably suspenseful and worrying narrative in the piece:

Leaving the Dickensons downstairs with Fred, who was saying, 'I have seen the time I could call six and have it come up, tell the dice what to do,' Susan and I went up to my office, sat on the couch and passed the time until we heard footsteps on the carpeted stairs. I looked around the door-jamb to see who was coming up and spied Fred on the landing. 'Where Junior?'

Insufferable Yankee editors have explained to me how offensive it is to quote Southerners speaking as we speak. Fred said Where Junior not because he didn't know it's correct to say Where Is Junior but because he knew I knew there wasn't time to say Where the fuck is Junior?

And of course I needed to hear some Phineas Newborn music. A little easier said than done. I was living in Manhattan at the time, in Murray Hill, and as far as I knew, the record store with the best-stocked jazz department at the time was J&R Music World downtown, then an altogether dustier and more cramped environment than it is today. Oh, yeah, and almost entirely vinyl. And even there, Phineas Newborn records were thin on the ground. So thin on the ground there were no "proper" Phineas Newborn records, that is, no solo piano recordings or accounts of him leading a group. No, there was only one record I could find featuring Newborn, this trio set on which drummer Roy Haynes is the first player listed and hence often credited as the leader, although it's not a "Roy Haynes Trio" record; We Three, originally released on Riverside's "New Jazz" imprint, as far as I can tell. 

It's not a record with any kind of agenda; it feels as casual, maybe even "tossed off," as any record featuring three instrumentalists as accomplished and distinctive as Haynes, Newborn and bassist Chambers could be. Its opening cut is "Reflection," a tune by Ray Bryant, another underappreciated pianistic master of the Memphis baroque, but the first voice you hear isn't this session's keyboardist; no, the tune begins with the sweet thunder of Haynes' floor tom, I believe, rumbling with the clarity and crispness that has ever been the defining feature of his style; then the piano comes in, a bouncy, Latinish right-handed melodic theme with some unexpected forward somersaults,  backed by a tricky hi-hat pattern (Haynes takes his own sweet time here before giving the snare one of his inimitable smacks) and some sneaky scale-climbing from Chambers. Then it's off to the races for Phineas, whose runs have an incredible fluidity and playfulness but also what I myself always took for not just real "jazz feeling" but real blues feeling. There's masterful technique here but also a bedrock love of the forms and conventions of what they're playing; call it authenticity, or organic-ness, or what you will; this is "down home" music in a very deep sense. It's also music that's mind-blowingly virtuosic in ways that you'd never necessarily process unless you were sitting down trying to process it, and the music always feels so good that you're hardly ever inclined to devote your listening time to parsing in that way. The album's centerpiece is a ten-minute-plus tour-de-force workout of Avery Parrish's  "After Hours," which Newborn opens with  a simultaneously knotty and very lowdown iteration of the theme, runs off a bit like it weren't no thing, twinkling the high notes multiple bars before breaking off with an exclamation point or a wink. Then he'll slow down and breathe in and out a couple of cool chords. The bassist and the drummer provide what appears to be mere comfortable, confident support, pick up the tempo to take things for a stroll, and on it ambles; it isn't until you really start picking the thing about that you notice in sections of the jam each player is in a different time signature; it's all so in the pocket you'd never suspect a contrivance of that sort.

It's all just pure pleasure as it fills the room, and I guess that's why this apparently not particularly historic session has grown through the years into one of my favorite, if not my absolute favorite, records. I don't entertain the whole "desert island disc" question all that often, but when I do, We Three is always a very strong candidate. I've never been in a situation or mood, good or bad, where putting the thing on didn't do something to improve things. I've listened to a good deal more of Phineas Newborn's music since then, and of course Haynes' Out of the Afternoon, an actual historic session featuring Roland Kirk on reeds, Tommy Flanagan on piano, and Henry Grimes for heaven's sake on bass, is and ever shall be an all-time fave too, and I don't suppose I need to start on Paul Chambers' other work (played bass on Kind of Blue, you know...three years prior to this)...but still, We Three has a big hold on me. It's a remarkably joyous record without being particularly sappily demonstrative about it; and of course it only represents a particular moment of creation, an afternoon in Hackensack, N.J., at the home studio pioneering jazz recordist Rudy Van Gelder. (Who set down this producer-free session impeccably, of course.) Chambers was all of 23 years old at the time; in 1969, after struggles with alcohol and heroin, he would die of tuberculosis. Newborn was 26, and just a couple of years away from his first stay in a mental institution. Haynes was the eldest of "we three," 33; he turned, if I can believe my eyes, 86 this year, and is still playing; he made an appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman in June of this year. 

Encounters With Great Recordings Of The Twentieth Century, #1: Pere Ubu, "The Modern Dance" (Release date, January 1978, date of acquisition, some time around January 1978)

For Chris Wells.

Many were the times during my childhood and adolescence when, due to my consumption and enjoyment of certain particular pieces of popular or, I should more accurately say, in some cases, semi-popular music, my parents were forced to conclude that I had gone completely off the rails, and/or was gay. Listening to the Beatles' "Within You, Without You" on some kinda outdoor hi-fi setup over in a corner of the backyard one summer night in '67, I overheard one of the adults hanging out with my folks at the patio proper exclaim, "Sounds like Chinese funeral music," and saw my mom kind of shrug and roll her eyes and make this "what are we gonna do?" gesture. One afternoon a few years later, I brought home a copy of David Bowie's Aladdin Sane, which my mom politely requested to take a gander at; and when she opened the gatefold sleeve (see right) and got a load of the air-brushing at Bowie's crotch cleavage, she had her very first stroke.

But it was when I first played Pere Ubu's debut LP, The Modern Dance, on the Radio Shack stereo system of my family's home in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, some time in the winter of early 1978, that the determination was made by certain of my kin that I had finally and definitively lost my mind for good.

It was an album whose prospect I found highly intriguing, despite being rather suspect of the album's front cover artwork, which didn't look particularly punk rock or even post punk rock to me, as in, what's with the dude in the ballet slippers. I had not heard the Cleveland, Ohio-based bands independently released singles but I knew their work was rated highly by Robert Christgau, whose Consumer Guide I had been avidly obeying via the pages of Creem from 1974 on, at least until I found a Jersey drugstore that sold The Village Voice. There was also the matter of the band's name, which to me was redolent of Surrealism and French cinema, two of my major enthusiasms at the time. So having found this sort-of major label debut (the record was on Blank, a "New Wave" offshoot of Mercury contrived by Cliff Burnstein, later a cofounder of the very heavy management firm Q Prime) in the racks of a Sam Goody's either in the Rockaway Townsquare Mall or Garden State Plaza, I don't remember which, I was extremely eager to get an earful of its sound, which the aforementioned album artwork and minimal sleeve notes (band members' names in alphabetical order, no listing of instruments played or by whom) gave very little clue about. Pretty much no sooner did the needle lock into the groove than I was greeted with a high-pitched electronic shriek, implacable in its insistence, not coming up right into your face per se but calmly, inasmuch as it could be calm, asserting itself as a fact, the same way your dentist's drill does. Alongside the shriek was a semi-mechanical sounding tapping or clicking. And for several seconds it's just that—the shriek and the tapping. And it seems, the first time you hear it, like an eternity. 

In fact it is only about three seconds before the electric bass guitar comes in, plucking bent doubled notes that just hang there before the electric guitar comes in with a kind of mutant Chuck Berry chording and then the whole band kicks in and chugs away—the shriek having dropped out—on the monumental riff of what is "Non-alignment Pact." All right then—rock and roll! Only then the singer starts in, with the shriek returning to buttress his fat-toned near-hysterical whinging about heads of state and whatnot. Even ignorant of any visual reference for Ubu lead singer David Thomas, he sounds like you'd imagine the grown-up Norman, a.k.a. "Chubsy Ubsy," of Hal Roach's Our Gang shorts, would have had he grown up, done a few substances, nursed a particular emotional petulance, and founded a band. By the end of this particular number, Thomas works himself up into such a frenzy over, one eventually learns from parsing the lyrics, his alienation form the fairer sex, that he actually sounds as if he's barking his frustration. The other people in the house weren't the only ones shuddering at this; I have to admit I did, too. The remainder of side one proved similarly...odd. The title track boasted another killer riff, this one propelled by that least punk-rockish of instruments, an electric piano; but the bizarre radio wave and conversational-snippets noise below its surface, the percussive hammer hitting a railway tie, and finally, the bizarre middle-eight (such as it was) with a noisy push-me/pull-you slide guitar solo by Tom Herman whose halts and returns were so abrupt that I had to inspect the vinyl several times to make sure it wasn't actually skipping; what was that all about? Then the bizarre horn work of the next track blending in with the atonal-seeming "scatting" of the singer; the horn in question, I later learned, was called a "musette" and was played by either...or maybe by both...Thomas or Allen Ravenstine, whose rudimentary, patch-cord operated EML synthesizers were responsible for the shrieks and hiccups and patches of white, white noise that never left the songs alone. It all came to a climax of sorts on the album's second-to-last cut, which seemed to be an extremely well-recorded chronicle of the singer breaking a bunch of glass ashtrays in the studio while drunkenly mouth-farting while the guitarist tried to piece together a lick and the other band members (Tony Maimone and Scott Krauss were the bassist and drummer, respectively) did...stuff. This "song" was entitled "Sentimental Journey." That thing that everybody's parents once said at some point about the rock and roll, e.g., "This isn't music, it's noise?" That pronouncement literally comes true with this particular piece.

Or at least it seemed to at the time. Even given the ostensible extremes of the stuff I'd been scarfing down in the summer and fall of '77—Ramones, Clash, Iggy and the Stooges (Raw Power but not Fun House, which might have given me a clue re Ubu and noise),Richard Hell and the Voidoids—and even given all that Velvet Underground stuff I had gotten into a few years prior to that, there was nothing that could have prepared me for this. As it happens, my memory of my particular circumstances of first hearing this record are a little blurry; I always associate it with my high school years, but the album's release date puts me in what I sometimes laughingly refer to as my second semester of college. I was attending William Paterson College as an English lit major; I had tried to get into SVU, on account of my best friend was gonna go there, but my parents balked at the cost and the fact that I would have to live in the city. They were going through a rather protracted breakup at the time, one that wouldn't become definitive until several years later, speaking of push-me/pull-you, and one of the end results of this that had the most impact on me (aside from the financial insecurity that eventually dictated that I go to a state school within commuting distance) was the fact that I was never entirely sure which "adult" authority figure was going to be living at our house at what time. So I don't precisely recall whether The Modern Dance gave my mother her third or fourth stroke, or if it caused my dad to give me that look that said "What are the genetic circumstances that led to my fathering an extraterrestrial being?" I do know that after the first audit, I tended to play it only when there was nobody else in the house. For in spite of the fact that it actually even weirded me out a little bit, I was kind of obsessed with it. 

I played it for some of my buddies, most of whom were high school pals. We had formed a band in the late spring/early summer of '77, a very suburban quasi-"punk" outfit we called The Bad Taste Delegation. We covered half of side two of The Ramones' Leave Home on the one hand, and Loudon Wainwright III's "Dead Skunk" on the other. Most of its members were talented multi-instrumentalists largely known to the remainder of the student population as "band fags," and they were largely into "real" music, which largely meant Chicago. Our bass player was such a maven that he once won a block of tickets to a Madison Square Garden show by that band by correctly guessing, from the opening chord, the title track of Chicago singer/songwriter Robert Lamm's three-copy-selling solo album Skinny Boy on some FM radio contest. The guys were, how do you say, mildly intrigued by my musical tastes. "This Costello guy's got some pretty good songs," one of their number would allow. And then wonder, "How can this John Cale come up with something as great as 'Mr Wilson,' and then do this other...shit?" And so on. In any event, The Modern Dance in general and "Sentimental Journey" in particular took the cake for these fellows. "You're not going to believe the thing that Kenny's cooked up now..." And hardly anybody really could credit it.

Even today, the record doesn't exactly sound...cozy. "Non-alignment Pact" turns up in the background of a record-store-set scene in the last third of Olivier Assayas' 1986 Disorder, and it's welcome and bracing to hear and it sort of "fits in" with the rest of the New Wave music on the soundtrack (and given the film's storyline, it also evokes the ghost of Peter Laughner, the songwriter/guitarist who was an Ubu founder and who died of alcoholism/acute pancreatitis in 1977 at the age of 24), but it still sounds distinctive, its irritation factor is still there, there's little that's quaint about it. As much as the music cohered for me over months and then years of listening (and to be quite frank, seven times out of ten when I'm revisiting the record at this stage of my life, I will skip "Sentimental Journey"), there is still something a little scary about The Modern Dance. It would be less than a year before Ubu would release its second LP, the even more monumental Dub Housing, as a U.K.-only Chrysalis issue, Blank Records seemingly having imploded in the wake of Modern Dance's release. By that time I had moved out of my family house and into a place in about the poorest part of Paterson, gotten something like a proper girlfriend, purchased and enjoyed Art Bears' Hopes and Fears and Fred Frith's Guitar Solos, among other seminal works, and taken several further steps leading me from childhood into the fierce order of virility. In March of 1979 I would see Ubu live for the first time, on a bill with The Feelies at Hurrah's. That show was where I first would lay eyes on Robert Christgau, who had written of The Modern Dance, "Ubu's music is nowhere near as willful as it sounds at first. Riffs emerge from the cacophony, David Thomas's shrieking suits the heterodox passion of the lyrics, and the synthesizer noise begins to cohere after a while." My buddy Ron and I couldn't believe that my girlfriend Nicole had actually fallen asleep, her head resting on a speaker cabinet, during Ubu's set—but shows went on very late back in that day. By this time the music was making nothing but sense to me. I was beginning to feel as if I had found a place. I was somewhat mistaken, but not entirely.