Busking sucks. Standing on cold streets, feeling exposed,
putting up with smart ass comments from passing strangers for hours, before
finally sifting through the lolly wrappers for the chump change to buy your
next burger. It’s not a great gig, but you would earn more from a day of that
than you would from a year on Spotify.
I’ve said before we aren’t in this for the money, and it’s
probably just as well, because earning a living from music these days is nigh
on impossible unless you are ‘lucky’ enough to become a puppet of some
multi-national entertainment corporation. The Covid pandemic has exposed this
more than ever. With musicians unable to work live they are relying on
streaming and vinyl/CD sales to get their chips. With CD sales evaporating and
vinyl still a bit of a luxury item, that leaves streaming as the main source of
‘income’.
Hands up all those who think musicians must be creaming it
in this brave new world of instant access music. Not so fast. Here’s some basic
facts to help you make your mind up. Spotify’s average payment per play on its
service is $.0038 USD. That’s 0.38 cents. That means an individual artist on
that pay would need to have around 3,000 plays to earn one hour’s worth of the
minimum wage in Britain.
So for a 40 hour week that would be 120,000 plays or 6,240,000 plays to earn
the minimum wage for a year. For one person. Building that kind of following
without live promotion is impossible.
At the same time, Spotify has tripled in value during the
Covid pandemic, and its founder is now a certified billionaire. The gap between
business owner and ‘employee’ has never been so stark since the days of cotton
production in the slavery days. Streaming services basically say take it or
leave it, since they hold all the aces. And it’s true. What else exists at the
moment?
If it continues this way real music (as opposed to corporate
product) is going to be another 21st century extinction.
The kind of absurd inequities highlighted in music are
playing out all over the world in almost every industry. The flip side of
globalisation is that it benefits the few on an international scale, while
leaving the vulnerable exposed to the shifting sands of local exploitation.
What do you mean you want a living wage? Get it from someone else – I need to
build a tennis court on one of my super yachts thanks and my private jet needs
upgrading. I can go to another country and find cheap labour if you want to
make a fuss.
Revolution is never pretty, but the appetite for it will
continue to grow as the 21st century progresses. Then we’ll see how
much sway the mega corporations have over individual governments. Will
governments repress their own people to stay onside with the billionaires club?
Of course they will. You can bet your last wooden nickel on it. But the same
tools that make the mega corporations powerful can be used against them to
deflate their power. People have to organise themselves to create their own
global communities outside of governments to compete as a way of avoiding messy
and violent show downs with the powers that be. Access to technology hasn’t
been limited. Yet. And there are some vastly clever people out there that can
do it.
So where does all this leave your average musician right
now? There is a ground swell of protest from established artists who are sick
of being exploited, and there is an appeal to the parliament in Britain
to try and get some kind of regulation in place. That’s fine if it puts
pressure on the corporations, but it isn’t going to hit them where they live.
They are exploiting musicians, so if there are no musicians left, what are they
going to do? As I say, musicians need to start working together to claim some
kind of territory for themselves. Any kind of alternative streaming service
with a fairer payment system will do the trick, preferably owned by the people
who are benefiting from it. Sounds like communism? If you say so, but what the
fuck is wrong with people supporting each other to destroy a corrupt and
exploitative regime? It’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees,
and you should never die wondering.
The only problem is that artists of any kind are
historically a selfish and bitchy crowd with no desire to help anyone except
themselves. So on top of a commercial shift we are also requiring a complete
cultural shift. And given how the covid pandemic has exposed the weaknesses in
human nature, you would need to be a massive optimist to see the light emerging
at the end of the tunnel. The times we are living through are tough, but tough
times lead to the strongest solutions and those who can adapt best will
eventually win out. It will be interesting to see what that looks like, and
that alone should be enough to keep you looking ahead.
If you feel like chucking us a fraction of a cent or two,
you can find our releases listed top right. I’m saving up for some new bass
strings in 2023.
It’s been a couple of months since the last post. No excuse,
just having a break to focus on the new normal of a covid world. The last
couple of posts focused on politics, so I’m back with a post on music for a
change. They say in politics you have to swallow a few dead rats. I’d say that
politics itself is a carcinogenic dead rat that is force fed to the world. You
don’t need politicians when you can think for yourself. For our own survival as
a species we need to develop contempt for those narcissistic power grabbers and
as individuals we need to build our own relationships with the world and the
universe in general. Which is my lateral segue into the subject of this blog:
Jimi Hendrix.
My guys and me love Jimi Hendrix, but for different reasons.
They love his mental freedom and the way he was able to transcend the world in
a way that messed with time. I love the fact that he could meld electronics and
space together and make it sound like it came from the dirt. I’ve already
touched on this in a previous post, but on this one I thought I’d list a
random selection of reasons why he was more than just an uber-guitarist. He was a
man out of time that killed fashion and shredded showbiz. He defines words like
“rock”, “cool”, “psychedelic” and “freak”, but he was also none of these. He
defied labels. He knew a label was trap. He wanted to be a gypsy and his desire
for freedom eventually killed him. Or rather, the world killed him because it
couldn’t contain him.
My own experience of the Jimi effect came in a land a long
time ago, when goths were treading the boards pretending they ruled the cool. I
was chilling in a room at a party when a couple of gothic wannabe posers came
in and acted like they owned it. They viewed everyone with smug contempt then sat
down, scanning the room for hip artefacts they could connect themselves to,
when their eyes landed on a poster of Jimi up on the wall. It was a good
poster. Jimi in full flight at a concert wearing his nineteenth century
military waistcoat, his guitar upside down in his left hand, eyes closed, mind
elsewhere. The goths stared at it for while, taking it in. They looked
impressed and asked their host “who is the left handed guitarist up there?” I
thought they were taking the piss, but no, they had no idea who Jimi Hendrix
was. But they knew he was something special. Something they couldn’t classify
into cool or not cool. Something that represented a lot of familiar things but
in a way that’s unfamiliar.
I have the same problem trying to define him, so I don’t
bother. I relate to what he represents instead. He represented the freedom rock
stood for. He blew away all the bullshit inherent in human society – religion,
politics, race, culture. He was a primal force that linked us back to a time
when the rhythms of the earth defined our lives and gods were elemental forces
that could could be conquered through the power of soul. He was also a lot of
fun. Bob Marley is the only other musician who has the same presence, but where
Bob represents the bonds that make the people, Jimi represents the people that
make the bonds.
Presented below is a baker’s dozen of Jimi moments that
define his intangible power. They are listed in no particular order and are purely
personal to me. There are 100s of other moments that could be put up and they
would still resonate in some way. I haven’t bothered putting in links to most
as you all know what to do and there are likely to be multiple sources for most
anyway.
1. The Stars That Play With Laughing Sam’s Dice. Let’s start
with the greatest B-side ever recorded. In the world of recorded music there is
nothing else like this. Maybe Funkadelic’s “Wars of Armageddon” is a close
relative, but it lacks the fire and intensity of this. The title is one of
those barely concealed 60’s references to acid (Laughing Sams’s Dice = LSD,
geddit?) and it sounds like it had a part to play - but no amount of acid could
induce the combined humour and abandon of this track. From the second he starts
soloing you are on a wild ride. Intensity, feedback, backward tracking, it’s
all chucked in. The only trouble with it is that it has a thin sound as it’s
likely to have been done on a 4-track tape (!). That aside this is pure 60’s
madness that will never be repeated. Ever. The kiss off “I hope you’re enjoying
your ride, I am!” pretty much says it all.
2. Gloria. Taking it one step further is a studio outtake
that manages to even beat Laughing Sam. Gloria was the Them track that pretty
much every garage band in the 60s cut as a single (either that or Louie Louie).
Here Jimi does his own take on it, out-garaging every garage band in the land.
The rhythm track sounds like something an R’n’B inspired punk band like
Slaughter and the Dogs or The Saints would have produced with dirty bass and
nasty guitar sound. Over the top of that Jimi ad-libs a ribald tale of sex and
drugs that has the whole band as the butt of the joke. This is no Top of the
Pops material (eg “I said hey girl what’s your name?, she said it don’t make no
difference anyway” “I said Hey Gloria, get off my chest”). But what clinches
this track as defining rock’n’roll is some of the most searing guitar playing
ever caught on tape. It outdoes Laughing Sam because he crams the intensity of
that track into half the number of bars then lets his band mates take solos to
finish it off. Eight minutes later you are left exhausted but happy. Like a
good shagging. Which is what rock’n’roll is all about.
3. Monterey 1967. Probably a bit obvious, but you can’t ignore
it. This is the gig that exploded Jimi onto the international stage. Loaded on
coke and grass he is having a ball and blows the audience away with the
intensity of “Can you see me?” and “Rock me baby” before ending the show with
his fiery guitar sacrifice at the end of “Wild thing”. Watch the movie and
check the audience reactions. The flip side of this gig was that it cemented
his label as the ‘wild man of pop’ in the press - something he would have to
work hard to shake for the rest of his short life. It also took him far away
from his roots into the white dominated hippie culture, something that impacted
negatively on his later work when he self-consciously tried to win back an
african-american audience.
4. Hush Now. This is a single recorded when he was a side man
for low rent R’n’B star Curtis Knight in 1966, but released in 1967 when Jimi
had already left for England. Pre-fame and anonymous, the wah-wah guitar
throughout this is all Jimi. He was the one person who pioneered the effect to
the fullest extent and at times he makes it sound like a human voice doing
backing vocals. Incredible and utterly alien for the time. No wonder it wasn’t
a hit.
5. LA Forum, 26/4/1969. This gig exists as a soundboard quality
bootleg and captures one of the wildest shows of his career. The audience is
worked up so much that there is a near riot going on at the end with stage
invasions and police threatening to pull the plug. Noel Redding is at his grumpiest
while Jimi is coolly detached, gently admonishing the crowd while slyly taking
their side. Just before the last jam on Voodoo Chile he plucks his guitar to
make it say “fuck you motherfucker, fuck you too” in response to police threats
to stop the show. Worth the price of admission alone.
6. Red House. His most famous blues track, if only for the
closing lines “If my baby don’t love me no more, I know her sister will”. The
version recorded on the UK release of “Are You Experienced?” is so funky it’s like
a dance track. It wasn’t included on the US release because the Reprise label
decided Americans don’t buy blues. As a sly jibe to them the UK release
includes a trail off conversation between Jimi and the studio engineer. Jimi:
“How was that?”. Engineer: “Yeah that’s cute that one. You should put that on
an album”.
7. Are You Experienced? Jimi’s first album is so beyond mere
classic status it’s almost criminal. There is only one average track on it,“Remember”,
and even that would cut it against any other R’n’B track released in the 60s.
In amongst this company the title track manages to stand out as something utterly
unique. Well actually that and “Third Stone from the Sun”, but that’s another
list. “Are you experienced?” features a drum track played backwards to produce
a ghostly shuffling beat and a guitar solo also backwards tracked to
mind-melting effect. Jimi’s party trick with the solo was that he learned to
play it live in a way that matched the backwards track on the LP. The best
recorded live version was captured on 10 October 1968 at Winterland, available
on the Jimi Hendrix Concerts LP.
8. Oakland Coliseum 27/4/1969. This is an audience recording
but is high quality and quite amazing for the time. Recorded the day after the
LA Forum show, this is another incredible gig. The year 1969 was Jimi at his
peak and he seemed to be on a roll on this tour. No riot this time, but the
highlight comes at the end when he does a 15 minute encore jam on Voodoo Chile
with Jack Cassidy from the Jefferson Airplane joining on bass. One of Jimi’s
few failings musically was that he underused his bass players. They were told
to stay deep in the pocket so he had a reference point when he needed to get
back into the song. He didn’t syncopate the bass with the guitar to build a
groove, or allow the bass to drive the changes. That is rectified in this jam
as Cassidy takes the lead in places and sets up some playful interplay with
Jimi’s barely controlled soloing. Awesome. The reactions of the guys nearest
the tape deck say it all. One extra bonus – one of the bootleg versions of this
concert has a photo taken from the crowd showing the thin blue line of police
lined up along the front of the stage, keeping an eye on the crowd. All except
one are white and are dutifully staring ahead. The lone african-american cop is
looking over his shoulder. He’s watching Jimi play instead.
9. Hear My Train a’Comin’. His best blues track. Never recorded
on a commercial release in his lifetime, it’s never-the-less one of the high
points of his live shows during 1968-69. Lyrically it sounds like a classic
delta blues track, but it has a deep groove that could only come from the late
sixties. The “Film about Jimi Hendrix” released by Warner Brothers in 1973 has
a solo version of the song performed by Jimi in a TV studio, played on an
acoustic 12 string guitar. It’s the only time he was filmed playing unplugged
and is mesmerisingly good. By way of contrast, the encore version he plays
during his three night stand at Winterland from 10-12 October 1968 is loud,
deep and funky. It’s also found on the Jimi Hendrix Concerts LP. When he gets
through the story of loss, despondency and revenge to the line “if you make
love to me one more time little girl, I might even give a piece to you” the
hairs invariably stand up on the back of my neck.
10. Drivin’ South. This is an instrumental track released on BBC
Sessions. It’s Jimi at play, running through a kaleidoscope of blues styles at
break neck speed. The drumming from Mitch Mitchell as always matches Jimi’s
skills, but on this he is almost the star as he drives the changes with funky-as
breaks. As the liner notes state: guaranteed to get you a speeding ticket.
11. Lulu Show, 1969. This was recorded on live TV just before
the BBC six o’clock news. Jimi obviously missed the memo as he first of all
stops playing “Hey Joe” and launches into an instrumental tribute to Cream, who
had just broken up. As he jams on “Sunshine of your love” the producers wonder
what to do. The news can’t wait for this wild haired guitar freak can it? Jimi
relishes the confusion and keeps going, leaving poor little Lulu wide eyed and
gobsmacked. Mitch and Noel just keep their heads down and ride it out with quiet
smiles on their faces, having seen it all already with Jimi by then.
12. Stockholm 9/1/1969 2nd Show. The first show
played at the Stockholm Concert Hall that day was a weird live practice session
with no real highlights. The band hadn’t played together for weeks and it
shows. The second show was a different shade of blond altogether. The opening
track is “I don’t live today”, which usually appeared much later in the set.
It’s a heavy track to open with and it must have left the audience wondering
what they were in for. After lots of improvising during the freak-out section,
Jimi enters the closing jam on a mission. He hits an escalating scale of
sustains near the end that build in tension and intensity before releasing it in
a myriad screed of notes at the highest end of the fret board. Anyone in the
crowd on acid would have felt like their head was about to explode at this
point. He ends on a whammy bar effect that would have made them feel like they
were sinking into the ground. Brutal. Other worldly. He then goes into a
pulverising version of “Spanish castle magic” to really finish them off. This
gig also features some of his most lateral between song comments, dedicating
“Spanish castle magic” to the “little band of gypsies of there in the amen
section”, before apologising that the show might be a bit loud. This isn’t
entertainment, it’s a primal experience.
13. Rainbow Bridge. This is a documentary movie and cash-in LP
from Jimi’s 1970 concert on the island of Maui in Hawai’i. The music is
forgettable and badly recorded for a commercial album, but the doco is
unintentionally hilarious. It’s full of period pseudo-guru crap with commune
living hippies spouting shit about stuff they don’t understand, but which will
ultimately get them laid. Free love in full cynical action. Just when you can’t
stand it any more, Jimi arrives and sits down in the corner getting quietly
pissed on beer. Once he’s settled in he sets about mercilessly taking the piss
out of the pseuds, whilst unsubtly hitting on the female host of the
documentary. His blunt honesty is like someone opening a window to let out the
cabbage smoke. The concert itself is okay, but by this stage of his career it’s
clear he is only just keeping the evil influences of half-baked counter culture,
murder politics, race war and money men at bay. Within months it would all be
over.
And that’s it. I haven’t even mentioned Woodstock as that
was a musical low point despite the whole “Star spangled banner” Vietnam protest
and his subsequent Dick Cavett interview in which he described it as
“beautiful”, or other random tidbits like how he lost the original master tape
for “If six was nine” at a party because he got so loaded he forget he had it
with him. It’s safe to say there will never be anyone like him again.
I play a little bit of guitar but I won’t be using this post
to plug it. I have a go and play what I feel, and that’s what I learnt from
listening to Jimi. Our releases are listed top right anyway, as you no doubt know
by now.
As interested observers of the human species, my little guys
have recently pointed out the stunning similarities between the events that
created Easter Island and the path the USA is currently on.
Most people are familiar with the statues of giant human heads
that dot the landscape on Easter Island (Rāpanui). Full of mystery in their stony silence and ‘how the hell did they
get there’ mystique, the statues (moai) actually have a reasonably traceable
history and purpose for being. The fact that they were carved and erected by
people without modern engineering equipment is still gobsmacking, but this post
focusses on the why rather than the how.
I know you are already thinking what this tiny historical
landmark has to do with the USA in 2020, so let me alert you to some parallels that
stand as a warning to others to avoid going down the same path.
The original inhabitants of Rāpanui voyaged there from
earlier Polynesian cultures in the Pacific, in the same way that all the other
island groups in that Ocean were settled. Over time though, that ancestral origin
became a myth and the inhabitants of the island became unaware of anything
beyond the horizon. To them, Rāpanui was the world. Anything beyond was treated
as unreachable. That made them very insular, entirely focussed on the
trials and tribulations of surviving on a tiny island in the South Pacific with
few natural resources. Competition for superiority became rife. They divided
into warring factions and elevated their ancestors to divine status. The moai
were carved and erected to keep their ancestors alive and to give the warring parties
strength. It’s worth pointing out that the moai don’t face out to sea as you
might expect, they all face inland. Inward looking in other words.
The effort the people of Rāpanu expended on war and worship
eventually consumed them, so much so that when voyagers from South America
arrived there, the few locals that were still alive were in a pitiful state.
They were enslaved and taken back to the mainland and the island became a
Chilean outpost with no remaining indigenous culture, other than the ominous silent
presence of the moai.
So based on our knowledge of the Land of the Free, does any
of this sound familiar? Let me point out a few things.
Apart from the cosmopolitan coastal states, most Americans
have little to no knowledge of the outside world. They are indoctrinated from
birth that the USA is number one, and anywhere else is a curiosity at best and
largely irrelevant to their life, apart from the places that are demonised as
an enemy that will infiltrate society given half a chance – eg communism, islam
and other forms of capitalism. Anyone with half a brain can see that this is
not a healthy outlook, and one that can be easily exploited by someone with a
warped vision that can manipulate those fears for their own benefit. Someone
like Trump for instance.
Trump has been and will continue to be a massive divider. As
a textbook narcissist his agenda is Me First and who gives a shit about
anything else. The deaths of 250,000+ of his fellow Americans from Covid-19 doesn’t
register. They can’t give him anything. They are an inconvenience. Most of them
were probably old Democrats anyway. An early example that should have given
people a clue to his state of mind were his comments as he watched the Twin Towers coming down during
the 9/11 attacks in 2001. He is quoted as saying that at least the Trump Tower
had moved up the rankings of tallest buildings in the city now. Like that was
his first thought. Never mind that a couple of thousand people had died in the process.
The fact that he will soon be declared the official loser of
the 2020 election is not going to stop his hunger for power and adoration. This
guy isn’t going anywhere, so put the corks back on the champagne. The ‘Me and
My Peeps vs Them’ culture he has created over the last four years is going to
continue and you can bet he will be back in 2024. His tactics follow the narcissist
playbook. Deny reality, promote yourself as the answer to all things, spread
misinformation about your opponents, resort to bamboozling word salads instead
of coherent arguments, perpetuate lies until they become accepted as the truth.
All of this and more has been the case, and it will get worse once he is free
of the responsibility of office.
Narcissists create a dog-like devotion in their followers.
They are literally capable of anything to support their idol. Tearing apart the
fabric of society and the democratic principles they were raised to uphold? Not
a problem. If the Don says they are corrupt, they need to be torn down. Just
make him President for life already then we won’t need fraudulent elections,
right? When Frank Zappa wrote “It Can’t Happen Here” in "Help, I'm a Rock" in 1966, he was talking
about the spread of 1960’s counter culture. He might as well have been writing
about the Proud Boys in 2020, but for very different reasons. Taken to its
logical extreme you will see domestic terrorist groups emerging forwarding
Trumpism, subverting democratic processes, bullying and intimidating their perceived
enemies (real or imagined) and eventually escalating the tensions into a second
civil war. After that, all that will be left will be fragmented pockets of
civilisation and some fabulous monuments to a bygone era. Like Mount Rushmore, with
or without the Don’s orange face on it.
There are already two America’s existing on the same piece
of ground. How they sort out who has what will destroy them if they don’t wake
up and smell the shit. Religious freaks think Trump is a biblical figure. He
may well be the Great Deceiver. But I reckon he’s even more dangerous than that,
because he’s real.
->=O=<-
If you are a supporter of truth and freedom go through our
releases top right ==> They don't lie.
We can get past this nightmare called 2020. We are here for
you.
