1. LISTEN TO THE VENTURES LIVE IN JAPAN 1965
Seriously, do it. Do it now and do it loud and feel the scales fall from your eyes. Last week I went to see Come in a little bar in London and it was the kind of gig whereby afterwards you just want to PRESS the experience into the HEADS of everyone you speak to as if to say THIS is how you do it, THIS is how you do rock n roll, it’s not rocket science, it’s SIMPLE yet with a simplicity immensely challenging to achieve, and it’s all about the PEOPLE involved and their MOTIVATION. This is also what I feel every time I dip into the Ventures Live In Tokyo 1965, possibly the greatest rock n roll live album ever made and as succinct and mindblowing a distillation of everything that makes rock work as ‘Black Monk Time’, ‘Overkill’, ‘Damned Damned Damned’ or ‘Itekoma Hits’.
The Ventures were Don Wilson, Bob Bogle, Nokie Edwards and Mel Taylor. Only constants in terms of who played what is Wilson on rhythm guitar and Mel Taylor on drums, the other two shape-shifted ‘tween bass and lead guitar. They formed in 58 in Tacoma, Washington, had a massive hit with ‘Walk, Don’t Run’ and truth be told, by 1965 they were on their way OUT, surf music already sounding kind of dated post-British Invasion. The Ventures had by then shifted into concept albums when it came to their studio work (amazing stereo-testing records like 61’s The Colourful Ventures, and 65’s fantastic The Ventures In Space). However, they always remained utterly revered in Japan and this live set from 65 captures shows recorded at Tokyo Kosei Hall on March 5th ‘65.
The audience reaction is absolutely key to why this album is so utterly incredible - total pin-drop silence during the music, no crowd noise, no cheering, no whooping, rather a total focus on what the Ventures are doing. And then at the end of each track applause less like a rock n roll show, more like the hailing of new gods, of a new technological high-point in music, applause almost entirely for EXECUTION rather than anything expressing ‘relief’. If there is catharsis here it’s the satisfaction of seeing and hearing four people lock themselves into a machine - (and the Ventures DO make mistakes here and there, but the way they always, at lightspeed, jump back into step is truly awe-inspiring) - four people for whom music has gone beyond muscle memory and into something more like an actual musculature and skeleton, a living inhabited body..
Here in the West right now, I’ve noticed something extremely distinct to recent years at live shows. One can’t help feeling that audience reaction now is hinged upon shareability, is dependent upon whether a good shot or a good selfie can be ‘grammed, and so consequently audience behaviour falls into categories we might call ‘This Is What You Do At The Rock Show’. You dance a little, you raise your arms, you sit on someone’s shoulders, what you get out of seeing music live is the ability to participate in the lifestyle-choice that is live music (rather than an actual unlearnt and honest response), with all the attendant expected behaviours, clothes, by-rote singalongs (thanks to ALL those lyric vids) and de rigeur responses we’ve been tutored in by ads and the kind of ‘fan-friendly’ biz-borne ‘content’ which lays down those strictures of accepted ‘at the show’ behaviour. Always remember - when a culture says it appreciates the fans, when a culture endlessly talks about understanding those fans, that is a culture - whether football or music - determined to exploit those fans ruthlessly, and strictly demarcate those tokens of participation in a live setting. I have wondered many times in recent years - what did you pay for when you bought your ticket? The chance to hear music or see your favourite performers or rather the chance to tick off ‘the rock experience’ this month, the chance to make a living simulacra of ghastly phraseology like ‘party like a rock star’. There is none of this in the Japanese reaction to the Ventures in 65 but also it’s not a naive, innocent response that we can wryly and condescendingly smile at in the west. Rather it reveals an entirely different way of appreciating music - sure the Japanese are responding to the music’s rhythm, physicality and melody, but there is no idolisation here, no sense that this music is in any way culturally SPEAKING for or to its audience. Rather it’s pure pleasure, pure satisfaction, pure wonder at the hydraulic precision and potency of what Ventures do.
What’s weird seeing video of these performances is that of course the Ventures look as straight as fuck - normcore, smiling throughout, their bodies held in this rictus around their custom-made Mosrite guitars, simultaneous plastered-on grins and utterly painstaking concentration - or is it concentration? Is it simply that when the Ventures plug in and play something is set in motion that they are impelled and compelled to see through once the first note has been struck? Music is like hopping on boulders: stop and think for a moment as a player and it normally all falls apart. The precariousness of what the Ventures do, the detail - the immense almost fractal aliquots of how the vicious cross currents of something like ‘The Cruel Sea’ come together - is always there. They walk a tense tightrope because what they create is simultaneously kaleidoscopic yet geometrically perfect. If any tiny shard of sound falls out of place the whole thump and wow of what they do would crumble. Hence the glassy-eyedness, the FAITH they have to engage in with each other and with their music. Watching them play, it becomes more and more miraculous that these four can create something with so many angles, so many deeply thrilling and satisfying vortices. And yet there they are, apparently humans. But TOGETHER making something beyond human. This is the true startling galdr of music.
Crucially though it’s not the visuals that are important. MAN OH MAN IT’S THAT SOUND. Precise, heavy, just at the edge of distortion, bass right up in the mix but also basslines that have their own trebly melodic undertow to them, Mel Taylor’s always-astonishing drums that snap hard yet roll with a brittle funk, and fuck me the guitar playing c’est INCROIABLE. No need for any phallocentric manoeuvres, in fact the band barely move at all. Just calm measured precision, a devastatingly executed sense of endless melody, enough mutual understanding and intuition to suck in every single unforced error and let it join the throb, the churn, the hit, the fix, The Ventures, in 1965, in Japan. What’s been better guitar music since? The heaviest, funkiest, sharpest drumming, the most astonishing guitar playing you’ve ever heard precisely because of its total leanness and lack of waste. Excess palls quickly. This kind of laser-focused exactitude DOESN’T. This is not surf. This is almost electronica-like in its possibility and micrometry. On the likes of ‘Penetration’ and ‘Out Of Limits’ (Ventures always had the most ruthless and suggestive titles) I swear down you can hear the heaviness and incisiveness of the best punk and death metal. Of course, music is about freedom, it’s also about constraint and discipline and the freedom at the heart of great pop’s message to your soul and body absolutely depends upon limitations, confinements, and what can be squeezed out within those confines. This is the stuff that makes pop a billion times more interesting than more self-consciously outre/ ‘challenging’ (ugh what a hateful thing to want your sound to be) music. Rock music - currently lost in a welter of production, effects, bad-faith, poor motivations and self pity - could do with injecting ‘Live In Japan 65’ into its eyeballs every day for a month and having a serious, serious rethink about EVERYTHING.
2. ONE SONG PER YEAR, FOUR MINUTES TOPS
Time for much more positive discrimination in music. The sprawl of the hip hop mixtape can remain. Music from the Southern Hemisphere, metal, electronica, solo female artists - they can all indulge themselves. But if guitars are being used and the guys are white and the music doesn’t edge into heaviness then it’s time for an embargo. Every rock band should be limited to only being able to make ONE song per year. That song can be no longer than four minutes - and I feel even that’s a little generous. Whatever a band do to con themselves music is a living anymore is down to them but in terms of recording they must be held down to one statement, of no longer than 240 seconds.
This isn’t just to thin the glut. I love the glut. We are - despite the doomy nostalgia of so many old dewy-eyed fuckers (that sea of bald heads you see at ANY ‘returning heroes’ gig in indie or rock) - truly living in a golden age as music listeners. Being paralyzed by choice is a delicious feeling as a listener, and I remain unconvinced that the special fidelity we developed in our penurious youth doesn’t find reflection in that moment now when we decide whether to merely connect with music or to own it again. But rock bands, with their bloated morbidity, have squandered their chance to be a part of this glut. They need their minds sharpened, their songwriting brutally excised down to one song per year. Imagine the shift in sensibility this will entail, to detach rock from the album. The album is broken as a format for rock. Rock needs to reflect its truly itinerant status in this time rather than pretend these unwieldy long-assed documents redolent of a dead age can still resonate. Where we are at with rock is similar to where we got to with the advent of the CD format - all of those awful bands absolutely riding the redbook-specifications to the limit and packing out albums to the full 79 minute margin, employing no concision or editing process on their flabby flatulent egotistic indulgence. (Imagine if all those fuck-awful 90s bands had been limited just to singles. We would know nothing of Smashing Pumpkins bar ‘1979’!) A ban on rock bands crafting anything bar a 4 minute song would be wonderful - not for some imagined return of 7” preeminence, jukeboxes and malt-shops and all those vintage tropes - but for a crucial reinjection of POP sensibility into rock writing.
Remember - pop is not a genre, it’s a WAY of listening and playing. Rock needs again to start working with the same immediacy and addictiveness and crucially the personnel involved need weeding out, exposing and potentially excommunicating. Always be mistrustful of music only made by musicians. Why do so many people mistakenly seek ‘innovation’ in the bad habits and indulgence of goddamn musicians, especially the trained kind, the kind that want to ‘improve’ and ‘educate’ and ‘challenge’ and ‘experiment’ but never entertain? Why is so much music education starting from the fundamentally flawed premise that rock n roll needs ‘musicians’ rather than freaks and visionaries? In all the talk of rock being dead, of the ruins being the only thing left to explore from rock musicians themselves they’re overlooking an obvious truth - with a drop of the shoulder and a check of their blind-spots they’d find there’s a type of music that always forces innovation into new shapes. A type of music that forces it always to a white-hot zenith of creativity - a pathway waaay tougher than experimentation, and to a music way more ferocious in its insistence. Freedom without discipline is the most moribund of dead-ends, ends up sounding like the harshest orthodoxy, and it’s that flabby po-faced preciousness that rockers and their fans always engage in that puts me so massively off. I mistrust these fuckers because I’m sure that POP is where the true innovation is, where people really start wrestling with the battles of sound and song writing that really tear the future a new escape route.
I have always had a colossal mistrust of bands that want to ‘challenge’ their audience. It's too easy. It's too often an attempt by noodling mathemagicians to capture the instinct of improv whilst missing the intent. Piece of piss to plug in, play loud for an hour. Far harder to entrance, capture, edit your indulgence down, and create something that doesn’t simply impress or startle but STAYS, that demands to be heard again and again, that can become an addiction.
For far too long rock has been giving us piecemeal morsels of excess, always traduced from the past, always touching back to previous counter-cultural highs, always missing the obvious point that limitations and constriction equals freedom far more than freedom as a starting point. Rock is not jazz. It requires kettle-leads, an elemental simplicity and space, and should fundamentally create adrenaline. Listen to Bo Diddley, listen to Gene Vincent & The Blue Caps’ ‘Catman’ and tell me that rock has ‘progressed’ anywhere interesting in the past 20 years. It hasn’t. It’s taken the freedom earned by the 60s dive into psyche, or punk’s untrammelled chaos, and pissed it away in a florid, revolting combination of smuggery and virtuosity. Fucking MUSICIANS man, keep them AWAY from music. Just imagine what we’d LOSE with a one-single-a-year diktat. We’d lose ANY idea that stems from indulgence, we’d get band members de-egofied and working on the magical space between themselves because they only get ONE shot at getting heard. We’d lose the fucking solos, get back to rhythms that are danceable (really the only ‘purpose’ for rock that still stands up to scrutiny), we’d lose the beard-stroking fannying about. And with only four minutes to play with perhaps bands would stop looking down the dead-end of what PASTS they can resurrect and start thinking about putative FUTURES for what they do?
I’m not saying it would necessarily create a plethora of amazing music but what it would do is weed out the time-wasters, the egotists, those people who shouldn’t be involved, and who are involved for entirely rascally auteurish reasons. It would return rock to something it has forgotten - immediate and instantaneous delight rather than long-form satisfaction. It would stop bands wanting to ‘get music done’ and make them ‘get music RIGHT’. It would perhaps reconfigure rock bands thoughts about the studio - it would do them good to STOP seeing the studio as a compositional tool and start seeing it again as merely an almost-scientific arena of capture and snapshotting. I am proposing not a new puritanism - (I would rather argue that it’s precisely rock’s indulgence and need for ‘exposition’ of ideas that have become its new puritanical diktats) - but a new INDECENCY, a recalibration of its ambition away from the possibilities of album-length emanation and back towards single-length ODDITY. Because every Friday night, when I want to dream again of what rock can do, I put on ‘Blue Moon (Take 9)’ or ‘Say Man’ or Bob Vidone & The Rhythm Rockers’ ‘Weird’ and think . . . . fuck, we’ve lost EVERYTHING
3. NO PEDALS
Of course, step 2 would send bands back to stages more. Would make them rehearse more. Would tighten them up. But this has its own inherent dangers. We’ve all been there - watching a band come on, or roadies setting up, and you see someone carting on this massive coffin of pedals. It’s a coffin in all sense, a place to hide, and a place where rock dies, a place where a musician can secrete themselves, mask their mealy-mouthed motives. When the amp fell off the back of the van taking Ike Turner’s band to record Rocket 88 it made things fuzzy. When Link Wray kicked holes in his speaker cones it made em rumble. When Jimi pressed down on his wah or his fuzz he opened up new vistas of the cosmos, the oceanic depths and the firestorm out in the killing fields. When I see a guitarist setting his coffin of pedals up in 2022 I get this sinking feeling in the gut that then becomes a ‘walking’ feeling in my feet as I get to the smoking area and fuck off home as soon as possible. Why use pedals in 2022? For the purpose of sound? Chorus, flange, wah, vibe, volume - which of these has not been fully explored and delineated already? Which of these can you use without consciously harking back to a past? There’s a very simple reason guitarists hide behind pedals. To compensate for a total lack of imagination. I can count on the fingers of 3000 hands-out-there the guitarists I’ve seen in the past decade where the belch of muddy, mulchy, depressing sound they send out is intimately linked with the boutique-bullshit they send their signals through, the cloaking devices they interconnect to turn everything into blowsy indistinct cowardly noise.
For me this is deeply analogous to cinema and special fx. Why are the effects of Ray Harryhausen still so much more effective, and affecting, than any number of CGI-borne monstrosities that have bored you to death in recent years? Why does so much contemporary genre cinema seem indistinguishable from their video–game equivalents (I remember accidentally watching the first thirty minutes of ‘Phantom Menace’, drunk at a friend's house post-club and genuinely wondering why no-one in the room had chosen their controller yet)? Unlimited freedom means its exact opposite in these creative scenarios - with an infinite ability to sculpt the signal should we be surprised that human beings, busy, easily distracted human beings, over-egg everything, turn what should be direct communication into so much static and smoke and mirrors? And crucially, watching any Harryhausen scene what is sublime is that mix of struggle and perfectionism, that sense that the creators of these scenes had to work within constrictions and limitations on their creativity, a process through which they had to negotiate a path towards wonder, inevitably a compromise but one that forced thinking and innovation and magic. There are only 12 notes a western musician can play but music technology has put ultimate power of manipulation in the hands of anyone who can play any of those notes. In a world in which anyone can time-stretch just one of those notes into an soporific ambient odyssey it’s time for the toys to be taken away, for rock musicians to stand naked and unadorned and only able to expound the two root basics inherent to rock - melody and rhythm - again. Stop this pasquinade, this deceit, this hinging of creativity on how many doodads and devices you can afford to buy and keep running. If you must use a bit of fuzz FINE I guess (I would miss it - but capos are still CHEATING). But you better be as good as ACDC or the Stooges or the Ventures or get the fuck out.
Of course, unlike my other proposals, this wouldn’t need policing by actual police or enactment through government legislation. This is something that we as punters have a say in. Next time you go see a band, have a look-see at what array of plank-wankery they throw down on the floor before they play a note. If there’s ANY more than one or two pedals, walk out. It’s the caring, and responsible choice. Think of the children. And think of our children’s children.
4. NO MEN
This kind of goes without saying but seriously, men (especially straight men) have blown it. They’ve had their chance. They done fucked up. And they need to fuck off and take their phallocentric insistence on rock as 99% wank, 1% orgasm with them. They could do with a year’s worth of musical cock blocking, of enforced non-participation, to make them rethink. We could all do with a year away from their tormented testosterone,a year to clear the gusty miasmic B.O of their angst to further usher in the female future we should all - as listeners interested in intrigue and delight - devoutly covet. Give all their TV spots, all their social media accounts, all their shows and record deals, to Otoboke Beaver and Big Joanie and bands with girls and women in. And let’s get surprised and delighted by rock again.
On a brute industrial basis this makes sense: women currently make up 15% of songwriters, just 5% of producers. Men, as is their wont, continue to assume and bully their way to every single position of responsibility within the biz, forcing women to seek their own lines of solidarity and loci of resistance. It shouldn’t have to be that way. Sack all those C.E.Os, replace them with women. Make PR, A&R departments overwhelmingly female. At gigs, men should have their own section, at the back, where their groping and cloddish stage-blocking could be kept. Guitar shops and musical equipment stores need similar quotas and reconfiguring. Let’s take the i-pad out of the hands of that smug soundguy who condescendingly mansplains to female musicians sonic-basics as if they’re children, and put it in the hands of women engineers. Turn male editors of female writers into male writers for female editors. What would reparations to the generations of women genii marginalised and shut out by the patriarchally-dominated music industry look like? It can only look like revolution, and revolution, total revolution can be the only starting point. I would argue that this step could push beyond rock, could be equally as effective in all kinds of music. What kind of hip hop would we end up with? What kind of dance music? What kind of DJing, events-management, performance and production would we end up with if we weren’t always tiptoeing around the bruised self-pity of those humans with penises? Much as the summer’s Women's Football Euros provided a tantalising glimpse of a form returned/reinvigorated with possibility again, so music would hugely benefit - particularly guitar-based rock music - if it weren’t endlessly beaten into grisly submission by the endless alpha-twattery of its protagonists. We need to shut out and silence the Kanyes, the Mansons, the Browns, the Sheerans, the bad guys and ‘nice’ guys, the awful aged ‘supergroups’ of agglomerated leathery-skinned protoplasm and designer-shades who all shrivel musical possibility with their dwindling windmilling around the confines of their fart-filled windy souls. Oh what a blessed dawn that would be, to not have a man either talking down to us, or pleading his innocence.
Unlike steps 2 and 3 this cannot be for just one year. The recording industry has been going for 150 years, a blip in the geological timeline of music on this planet, but one whose parochialism still exerts far too strong an influence. Let’s eliminate men from music for five years. They can go fishing, get on with jobs around the house, babysit, do the chores. IF, not when, they’re allowed to return perhaps they will have had a rethink, perhaps they will put their edgelord artistic arrogance towards less damaging artforms - beard-topiary, sandwich-making, joinery. And perhaps if they DO insist on giving music a go again they’ll operate with higher standards, knowing that at any point if they return to their bad habits their instruments will be confiscated and redistributed to women and girls. I realise this might seem extreme. I realise the hypocritical paradox I’m engaged in by proposing this while being in the ownership of a penis. I realise that logistically many men will resist and there may be the need in the case of the more recalcitrant muso-blokes for sustained beatings with pillow-cases full of chairlegs. But it’s tantalising to think about because it’s so self-evident what an enormous improvement this would engender in all our musical cultures. I propose making it so but these are ideas we can enact NOW:
In summation then:
Listen to the Ventures.
Give bands no more than four minutes to grab you and if they don’t, jettison them.
Disdain the craven deception of pedals.
Eliminate men from your listening.
I’m not suggesting anything traditionally ‘radical’.
I’m just suggesting true HAPPINESS. Which is the most radical thing of all.
Merely a proposal. Based on hope and dreams.