Like A Naughty Schoolboy

I was just thinking about one of my pet peeves the other day, and it's that people think that "The Eton Rifles" is actually about Eton School and its braying inmates' barracking of the Peoples' Right To Work march. I suppose it's because there's always been a certain kind of writer who thinks it's clever to make out that Weller is rather dim and a bit humourless and literal. But what the song is actually about is how hard it is to present working class protest; the difficulty of maintaining commitment, of keeping people motivated, especially in comparison with the way the well-drilled Ruling Class appear to effortlessly display a united front.

The difference is in the disparity of self-interest. The Elite's class interests generally coincide with their individual self-interest, whereas for the working class, especially those with ambition, class interests and self-interest are often divergent, and it's frequently that those who make the most noise, who whip up the most protest, do so in the knowledge that the most convenient way for them to be silenced is to be welcomed into the fold. Watching those who you trusted the most, who showed the greatest capacity for leadership, whose rhetoric had the most fire, quietly sell out at the first opportunity is always a bitter, deflating experience.

And that's where we come to the song's other message; the necessity of having to dust yourself down and start again from where you've been abandoned. Because some of the lads said they'll be back next week, and Eton School won't be there forever, whatever illusion of permanence it likes to spin. David Cameron flattered himself when he thought that Weller was singing about the likes of him.

Actually, while I am in a musical mood I have to say that another great record from the 70s (though rather different from those posted below) is Armand Schaubroek‘s pretty extraordinary, epic “Ratfucker" a claustrophobic, gummy, misogynist peak into a decaying mind stuck in a collapsing city. As a portrait of the urban and psychic malaise of 70s' inner-city America it is a kind of sonic analogue to something like William Lustigs’ Maniac or Nightmares in a Damaged Brain. And someone has kindly posted it on youtube in its entirety. Enjoy

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At some point in the last ten years as crate-digging, re-discovering lost classics and forming alternate canons reached a pitch, several rock albums/bands from the early ‘70s were held up as being just as good if not actually better than Sabbath etc. Pentagram were one such etc, but personally I think they are a bit over-rated. The three bands that really seem to have been unfairly excluded (but have now been brought into the fold) are May Blitz, both of whose albums are also tremendously unrock in fascinating ways, Sir Lord Baltimore, and Leaf Hound.

Phil Zone reckons Leaf Hounds “ Drowned Myself in Fear” is the Holy Grail of Seventies’ rock and he may well be correct, but I thought I would post something by the the other two bands for your (and my own) delectation and I welcome any corrections/ invitations to explore further in the comments’ box below.

(or any additional posts in this thread by fellow bloggers.)





Update!

Phil also nominates this;



Further update and riposte.

Phil also points out this.


and I remember this...




that's a lot of wah-wah.

Perhaps the Most Perfectly-Titled (If Not Perfect) Song, Ever

I remember Tom Waits saying in an interview many years ago, "A lot of music sounds better when you're hearing it on a shitty speaker from several blocks away."

This is one of those songs. It's a song that's followed me throughout my life. A number of times over the years I've heard it off in the distance while it was pumping at some party from a block (or two, or three...) away. You know it as soon as you hear it, because it can't be mistaken for any other tune. The beat and the voice -- that voice -- always carry strongly. What usually doesn't carry is the dubbed-in party chatter that undergirds the track, which doesn't matter because the song usually generates its own party noise whenever it's played -- the sort that travels clearly with the rhythm in nighttime air. Each time I hear it, it prompts the same immediate compulsion -- to leave my apartment or the low-key party I'm attending, follow the groove to its source, and see if the dancefloor at the gathering in question has the same come-one-come-all policy that the song compels. As you'd expect, this usually happens in the middle of the night or in the earliest hours of the morning.

And I mention it now, because it happened again last night.

At any rate, perhaps the weirdest time this ever happened was about four or five years ago. It was about 11 AM and I was standing on an El platform on the south side of Chicago, catching a northbound train to make the 60-block commute to work downtown. And there it was -- that song, bumping away somewhere nearby. Actually, it was a house remix of the tune -- a remix that managed to build on the quasi-Latin groove that fueled the original (rather than, y'know, squashing it). The song caused a few of us on the platform to turn in its direction, quickly tracing its source to an aged three-story townhouse located about a block away, where it sounded like a party was going on.

Broad fucking daytime. Not even noontime, yet. On a weekday. Who knows how long that party had been going on. An hour? Maybe ten? Whatever the case, the song soon ended and another began, at which point a pair of police cruisers came rolling up in front of the place with their blue lights blazing atop. From our elevated vantage point, we saw the back door to the place fly open and a number of the party's attendees -- all young and able-bodied -- come scrambling out into the rear alleyway, taking flight in every direction. Those of us on the platform who'd watched the whole thing transpire turned to look at each other, exchanging variations on the same slightly bemused, arched-eyebrow expression. Each of us had turned to look, to follow the sound. Maybe we'd each had the same urge upon hearing it. No matter, our existence dictated that we had other places to be. And even if we'd gone with that impulse, it was clear that we'd have arrived too late.

White Riot

If there’s one cultural milestone that separates the Sixties from the Seventies, I would say that it’s Jefferson Airplane’s "Volunteers", an album that anticipated Sly & The Family Stone’s "There’s A Riot Goin’ On" in two ways - the first and most obvious one being the purloining of the Stars ’n’ Stripes for the purposes of irony; the second, and only mildly less obvious, of announcing the death of the counter-culture. Released right at the beginning of the decade, it is perhaps the last pop-culture statement that can be taken genuinely seriously, being as it is an admission of total defeat; a bloody-but-unbowed acknowledgment that whatever dreams of a better world the boomer generation may have entertained, there was now no possibility of them ever being realised.



It’s an unusual record mainly for its frankness - there is no attempt here to disguise the defeat of the counter-culture in allegory or metaphor, or to pretend that there were never any serious expectations entertained; there’s also no attempt to pretend that the future offers any opportunity to rebuild the movement - it’s either "up against the wall" or a "march into the sea". In its nihilism it is strangely reminiscent of The Pop Group’s recordings at the end of the decade - there’s not only the same sense of hopelessness, but also that feint sense that there was never any hope all along. "Volunteers", its sleeve art especially, crackles with sardonic humour - the mock Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich gatefold sleeve taunting the presumed bourgeois gluttony of the listener; the parody of the archetypal rock festival report on the back cover satirising the already-visible phenomenon of the spectacle.



All pop-cultural rebellion after the release of this record was either phoney and manufactured, which could be graded on a sliding scale from Alice Cooper to The Sex Pistols, or stillborn, as in the case of Crass or the aforementioned Pop Group. Even the Airplane themselves conveniently forgot that they’d recorded it; in the Eighties their dissipated remnants declared that they’d "built this city on rock’n’roll", as though their entire generation had never been motivated by anything more than apple-pie wholesomeness all along. If they hadn’t left the archaeological remnants of their actual recordings behind, you could’ve been forgiven for believing that the whole thing had never happened.