Zappa – Anecdotes and Antidotes in Burgundy

Gones for a Song: Now That’s What I Call The 100 Best Albums!: 91-100

I had so much fun reading Kevin Alexander and Sam Colt’s “Wax Ecstatic: The Hundred Greatest Albums of All Times” posts that I could not stop trying to have a go myself, it’s a slow summer and who doesn’t like listicle. I enjoy writing the “Gones for good” weekly about life in Lyon, but in the summer we get the hell out of the heat, as do most of the other Gones*, and so for a change I thought I would do some album musings. After all, I am one who delights in all manifestations of the Terpsichorean muse. The clever conceit in their approach was to make it personal for each of them without trying to tick boxes.

My choices differ in that they are mine, based on my listening to music as a soundtrack to my life. I kept it simple and only one album per artist, as opposed to it being half Zappa and the Fall. I am not trying to make a case for being genre defining but for each artist I think the choice is about being the most important to their careers, as short as some of them were and for the major artists these are very much my personal favorites based on a couple of simple tests. Can I play it today and still enjoy it? When I compiled this there were some that I thought I had to include then I played it and realized, like some wines, they did not get better with age, or that my taste had definitely changed. If someone like my daughter has just discovered them and wants to check out their music, which one album would I suggest to start with? I tried to avoid recency bias and the distribution to me tends to reflect when I have been more and less engaged with music, due to having kids, living in the boonies or been led down what turned out in hindsight to be bad alleyways. In a vainglorious effort to keep in my ex-wife’s good books, there was definitely a period in the late 90’s when I bought and played more mellow and less interesting music than I would normally listen to.

There are 5 from the 1960’s, 25 from the 1970’s, 16 from the 1980’s, a mere 8 from the 1990’s and 2000’s each, 32 from the 2010’s (thanks to San Francisco) and 6 from the last 4 years.

I wanted to share a simple playlist for each weekly release of 10, so I can do two tracks, 20 songs to share but check out the whole thing, especially the stuff from pre-streaming times when an insane amount of thought went into play order. Spotify has once again shit all over artists with the recent change to royalty payments so I have been encouraged by a post from The Slow Music Movement to try Tidal (yes Pete, I know you told me) and using Soundiiz I am able to replicate all the playlists I made on Spotify, and it even lets me update artists from Discogs, which is massive. If I can solve the Bandcamp log-in problem, I will have that set up on Tidal too. If, however, the sharing doesn’t work without people signing up, it’s fucked.

Number 100: Tim Buckley – Greetings From LA (1972). Buckley was an odd, tortured soul who bounced from one genre to another over 9 albums in, so his fame never matched his talent. Sadly, now known more for being the father of the Jeff Buckley who also died too young. Father died of an overdose at 28 while the son drowned swimming at night in the Mississippi at the ripe old age of 31. Buckley was raised in upstate New York before the family moved to SOCAL where he had aunts who shared their love of blues music. After high school where he was the big man on campus, he went to Cal State Fullerton but dropped out of college after two weeks to be the new Bob Dylan. He played folk which morphed into folk rock as did everyone in 1965-66 and yet he was open to all styles and influences, which in an odd way is the death knell of a popular music career. He had two insanely productive periods when he recorded 4 albums from 1969-70 and then completely different style for the final 3 recorded in 1972-3. Unable to be pigeon-holed it was tough to get consistent support on radio which at the time was the only way an artist made it. He had two well received folk rock albums and Happy Sad was commercially successful at a time when this was hip in a Dylan, Byrds, CS&N way. The third album, Starsailor, had his probably most well-known song on it, “Song to the Siren”. He then threw out two more albums that did meh and got sick of the singer-songwriter stuff, fired his touring band and in 1970 went funky. This lost him most of his remaining audience, and the album that came out of that was Greetings From LA. Sometimes derided as ‘sex funk’ it is a free-flowing upbeat album that shows off his amazing range and the cool large band and is the classic vibe album. The problem was the sexually explicit lyrics, which believe me kindergarteners would sing today compared most mainstream rap, at the time it meant little to no airplay apart from the, at the time limited, FM alternative stations. Warner Brothers in their intimate wisdom deleted it from their catalog in a couple of years later.

Number 99: J.Geils Band “Live Full House” (1972) The “Detroit demolition” crew were the archetypal urban white blues rock band that took the British Blues invasion and instead of being fused with the country blues of Elmore James and Robert Johnson were influenced as much by Motown and Stax as by Muddy Waters. Yes, it has Magic Dick on the ‘licking stick’, or harmonica as us regular folks might call it, and Mr Geils himself could shred along with the best, but they brought more of a soul and hard old school R&B sound than a pure south side Chicago blues sound. They were fun and their two live albums are masterpieces of the genre, this one and the aptly named “Blow Your Face Out”, both helped along with Peter Wolf’s crazy hepcat ad-libbing between songs. Wolf looks as louche as his name suggests, and dated Faye Dunaway as living proof that it was not just bluster, damn he was cool. Further proof of his undoubtable swagger was when he was at school at Boston Museum of Fine Art, he roomed with director David Lynch. The band from Boston were originally called Snoopy and the Sopwith Camels but as J.Geils Band they had a good run as a bluesy R&B rock band before making the commercial cross over in the early 80’s with most people knowing the song “Love Stinks” from the Wedding Singer and their biggest hit “Centerfold” in 1982 which even charted in England. J.Geils in its original blues form was probably the inspiration for the Blues Brothers and so much more interesting than the stuff that probably made them rich.

Number 98: Sparks “Gratuitous Sax and Violins” (1994) The Mael brothers are still today producing original fun pop music having started in 1971 as ‘Halfnelson’. Although SOCAL through and through, UCLA Arts grads the pair, Russell, he of vocal antics and ridiculously black hair, and Ron, he of keyboards and crazed stare over a Gumby mustache, really broke as a band in the UK. Having relocated to London after a couple of poorly received albums, in 1974 they released “Kimono to My House” and the standard “This Town’s Not Big Enough For The Both Of Us” made them popstars. They have released 25 studio albums up to and including last year’s “Girl Crying Into her Latte” which they persuaded Kate Blanchette to star in the video for the title track. They have not only survived they have managed to stay relevant; they are fucking weird, they live in rather strange personal circumstances but they are loved. The Maels write eminently danceable classics and as much as the techno stuff sounds like the straight man’s Pet Shop Boys, they can do way more than irony. Their lyrics are literary, obscure, kitschy and funny, they write clever songs and have played around with most variations of modern pop that has come up over the last 50 years and made it their own. So out of 25 albums where do you start? Here, it is peak Sparks, all puns, starting with “Gratuitous Sax” and ending with “Senseless Violins”. The hits keep coming “When Do I Get To Sing My Way”,” I Thought I told You To Wait In The Car” and the stunning “Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil”.

Number 97: Canned Heat “Living The Blues” (1968) I made a stab at a ‘Best of the Blues’ a few years ago called ‘Cultural Appropriations Poster Child – Blues Rock’, which broke down into the original black blues and the white copyists they inspired, you can check that out here. For some reason I managed to overlook the Heat and in a way this addresses the omission, I had this record as a beat up double album back in the day and played the crap out of the two-sided Refried Boogie, which is a 40 minute live version of a John Lee Hooker riff recorded at the Kaleidoscope Club in LA which they ran and operated as the house band for a couple of years in the late 60’s. It also has “Going Up The Country” which they made famous at Woodstock. The Heat went through numerous changes over the year, losing members to overdoses, fights and exhaustion. John Mayall took the bassist Larry Taylor and guitarist Harvey Mandell for his backing band and writes about the Heat and Bob ‘The Bear’ Hite on the “Blues From Laurel Canyon” album. The best line up is the classic one featured on Living The Blues. Versions of the band toured through the mid 2010’s but the heart and soul of Wilson and Hite had passed years before the death of Larry Taylor in 2017, the last remaining founding member.

Number 96: Electrelane “The Power Out” (2004) The first of several angular arty English bands to appear in the listing – spoiler alert! It has that Stereolab drony sound that apes the best of the Velvet Underground, but it has the gorgeous harmonies that make them so much more interesting than many of the Velvet copyists. The band from Brighton, of course they are, wear their intellectualism on their sleeves a bit with one song in French, one in Spanish and one in German. The latter, “This Deed” using a repeating line the meaning of which I have no idea other than its from Nietsche, has the amusing outro of “Hande Hoch” which every older British kid knows means “Hands Up” from jingoistic cartoon books showing brave Tommies capturing ‘Jerries’. The musical arrangements are always interesting as much as the drums keep the rhythm on track, Verity Husman, who did most of the complex vocal arranging on this album has since had a successful career in Avant Garde and improvised music and playing in touring bands including a favorite French band of mine Francois and the Atlas Mountains, but that’s probably because Francois was based in Brighton for a long time. They stopped doing anything much after the excellent 4th album “Shouts and Calls” in 2007.

Number 95: Warren Zevon “Sentimental Hygiene” (1987) Warren Zevon is known for his wry rock songs, which tell of losers and characters out of James Thurber, he was the original for Stan Ridgway’s late-night tales. His real life as a child in Chicago was like something out of a Thurber story: His father, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine, changed his name from Zivotofsky to William Zevon and worked as a bookie who handled volume bets and dice games for the notorious LA mobster Mickey Cohen. Better known as Stumpy Zevon, worked for years in the Cohen gang, and was best man at Cohen’s first wedding. Warren’s mother meanwhile was a Mormon, so she had enough of the crazy and his parents divorced when he was 16 years old when she moved Warren to Fresno. Somehow Zevon was an occasional visitor to the home of Stranvinsky and he briefly studied modern classical music alongside Robert Craft. Warren is best known for “Werewolves of London” which inspired the movie, and “Lawyers, Guns and Money”, but all his stuff has the common reference points of the ups and downs of life in LA with rock and strong harmonies. He nearly gave up after a crappily received first album and moved to Spain in summer 1975 and sang Country and Western songs in an Irish bar called The Dubliner. Attempting to get him to come home, Jackson Browne wrote Warren a postcard, somehow it works, and he returns in September, rooming with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. The next album gets rave reviews from Rolling Stone and Linda Ronstadt covers two songs to acclaim. His career goes up and down as does his drug and alcohol consumption. This album is his first after a gap of 5 years and features REM’s Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry, as Zevon’s band. Michael Stipe sings Harmony on Bad Karma. Odd backing vocals and other stuff from Dylan, Neil Young, Brian Setzer, Jennifer Warnes, Flea and Don Henley.

Number 94: Little Feat “Waiting For Columbus” 1978. Little Feat were the thinking man’s classic rock band in the mid 70’s, deep themes, technically complex without disappearing up their own ass like Steely Dan had and getting all soft jazz on us. The band featured 3 ex Zappa sidemen so a very LA sound but when they started out in the early 70’s on Warner’s new rock label, they were Dixie rock with a swampy southern spin on things thanks to Lowell George’s lilting voice. George had enough country chops to resonate with many folks without being syrupy C&W like the Burritos or Poco and were not as consciously country folk like the early Eagles output. “Time Loves a Hero” and “The Last Record Album” were their creatively sophisticated peak but live they were always a really tight band and so this album is a kind of best of but it also features the Tower of Power horn section which fleshes out some of the songs to deliver their best funky pomp. From 1969, when he was fired by Zappa supposedly for “Willin” and the “weed, whites and wine” drug reference, until 1979 when George disbanded the group they were one of the most interesting bands around, no blues changes but lots of soul. The band was reformed after George’s death and tour to this day with Bill Payne, Sam Clayton and Kenney Gradney from the original line up. Lowell George’s death from pizza overdose does not make pleasant reading.

Number 93: Orange Juice “Rip It Up” 1982. This band with their sound of Glasgow was one of the break through acts that moved from post-punk New Wave towards a more whimsical pop phase that included the so-called New Romantics. Orange Juice never took themselves that seriously and produced only 3 albums over a 3 year period before the classic “musical differences” but had an immense influence on people as diverse as the Smiths, Franz Ferdinand, Wet Wet Wet and The Wedding Present. Edwyn Collins who sang most of the vocals and wrote the bigger hits had a relatively successful solo career before suffering a stroke in 2005 which forced him to relearn to play guitar and impacted his vocal chords. The title track features one of my favorite in-song shout outs to another song, Collins references the original Howard Devoto fronted Buzzcocks ‘Spiral Scratch’ and the outro on “Boredom” where Devoto can’t be bothered to sing the whole chorus and intones “budum budum”.

Number 92: Neil Young and Crazy Horse “Rust Never Sleep” 1979. So while the rest of the world was obsessed with punk and New Wave Neil Young was also ripping it up and starting again, something he has done often in his long career. A lot of the frustration with the excesses of Prog Rock, corporate rock and pomp which brought about the rest from Punk was equally felt by Young and he showed it in the desire to strip it back to drums and guitars. Neil Young has had such an incredibly diverse and long time in the spotlight, 48 albums and counting. He has delivered some atrocious rabbit holes, “Trans” which was Neil Young does Kraftwerk, “Everybodys Rocking” which is Neil doing the Stray Cats, “This Notes For You” which is Neil meets Booker T and the MGs. In general, you can group Young’s ouvre into two sides, the country tinged acoustic folk and the alter ego is banging feedback soaked guitar rock. This album is the archetypal example of Mr. Hyde to Dr Jeckel’s Harvest Moon.

Number 91: Phantogram “Voices” 2014. I have a bias towards the female voice I think. There were numerous electronica meets rock bands in the 2010’s, The Pains of Being Pure of Heart, Superhumanoids, Hundred Waters, Mr Little Jeans, Fear of Men, and I was fortunate to see all of them over a 5 year period while living in San Francisco. Phantogram were the best of the pack, and this album is representative of the sound. They are a duo from New York, Sarah Barthel and Josh Carter, who record and work together, and both sing and play multiple instruments although live they have a backing band so the sound is harder in the flesh. They have also worked with Big Boi of OutKast and together have a project called Big Grams.

The playlist is here in Spotify and Tidal here.

* ‘Gones’ in local Lyonais patois refers to the inhabitants of the city, its slang for kids so its use in “nous Gônes” is kind of “us kids” . The origin is one of two competing theories: firstly it comes from the Gaulish gunna (“pelisse, dress”). This meaning is found in the old French gonne (“dress”), so kids clothing. The other is that it comes from the ancient Greek γόνος, pronounced gonos (“child”), how ancient Greek gets into common usage is beyond me.

Where did all the face melting go?

There was a time when any self-respecting band featured a self-confessed king of the fret-board, a string-bender extraordinaire, a shredder. Bands played long extemporized songs featuring guitar solos for at least half the length of the song. In a twist there later developed a genre of bands whose whole style was the long rambling instrumentals that were made up on the spot, live, around a base melody or motif, the jam-band, whose music arose out of love for the Grateful Dead. However, as to be expected with a bunch of Deadheads the live noodling was short on melody or rhythm and long on meandering. As much as the blues rock of Clapton, Page and Beck was long on solos they came through the same pop training with the YardBirds to know that solos should be parts of songs not the reason for the song.

The blues from Chicago and Memphis produced great guitar highlights but few self-indulgent solos, even the magii of BB, Albert and Freddie focused on their guitar as punctuation for their songs, maybe they understood the audience in a blues club came to dance and not to play along with the guitar. The arrival of more and more ‘heavier’ music brought the long emotive solo, Skynnerd’s ‘Freebird’, Zep’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’, the Dan’s ‘Reeling in the Years’, Niel Young and Crazy Horse’s ‘Down By The River’ made way for metal and Guns’Roses ‘Sweet Child O’Mine’, and album after album of pouting masculine rock from AC/DC, Sabbath, Ozzy, Judas Priest, Bad Company, Panthera, MSG, Queens of the Stone Age, Van Halen. The list is sadly nearly endless, over the 30 year period from 1975 to 2005 nearly every rock song features as the key selling point the guitar solo, squeezed out at high decibels and high register. The perfect accompaniment for Beavis and Butthead to head nod along to before building up to the guitar climax where the aficionado would play the guitar solo themselves on an imaginary guitar in the air. The perfect climax accompanied by the face distorting into various shapes, in time to the various notes and string bends, effect pedal and shrieks in the classic ‘face melt’.

Unsurprisingly, not a lot of women were a, interested in taking part in this bizarre ritual nor b, encouraged to play this kind of guitar as it is hard visually to make the best effort at being attractive while gurning along to the guitar in your hand. Joan Jett made a career out of one song that both celebrated and parodied this phase in music with “I Love Rock’n Roll”.

The clock spins forward and the guitar solo got lost along the way, certainly as a staple. Whether it was just the self-indulgence of it all. Drum solos lasted even less time. Other than the Doors, Rick Wakeman and ELP, keyboards had never really held the crowds attention, it’s the same with the modern version with earnest looking guys hunched over computer keyboards desperately trying to look rock while yet another loop starts in a synth driven band. The fossilized white rock approach probably didn’t help and people wanted something new and while melody will always be king, his queen is a good lyric. So RnB, rap, alt-rock and pop abandoned the guitar for the most part, at least the part you could play on your air guitar.

Post rock brought the noise and the technical chops, but you would hardly accuse Mogwai of long wanky guitar solos. St Vincent is one of the hardest guitar soloists playing today, but she always tethers the solo in her song structure. Jack White has a great blues touch, but he seems to have got lost of late in a cage of fuzz and reverb, and he is too much of a smart businessman to mess with the needs of streaming, so nothing he releases is ever over 5 minutes and most under 4 minutes. So where are the guitar licks for those who hanker for some twang without the torch song accompaniment?

Well, Uncle Jim is here to help! The guitar hero is alive and well, he is just hiding out in Niger, Houston, Leuven and Peckham. I realized that what drives Mdou Moctar was wanting to play electric versions of taureg songs and having been forced to build his own first guitar he was not going to let tradition get in the way. He brings a hard rocking energy and the guitar leads everything, and he will happily solo his head off, especially since achieving some traction in the West and is now backed with a band.

Kruangbhin sound like they are also from somewhere off the beaten track yet without insulting my friends in Houston, they are not, they are Texas through and through but they have a unique sound that is not in anyway country or western. They are guitar led and long on instrumentals, a re-imagining of the classic rock power trio, Beck Bogert and Appice but Bogert is in a mini-dress and heels and the front two wearing matching Beatle-mop wigs. Mark Speer, the guitarist, has very good technical chops and can play tons of styles and his sound is unique, lots of clever down tempo stuff but he can let it rip, especially live.

Leuven is known as the home of the largest university in Belgium that had been around since 1425, and is also the home of Stella Artois. Like Cambridge without the pretensions and lots of lager. Brutus is a hard post-rock band with classic hard rock vocals although in a twist, it’s actually the drummer Stefanie Mannaerts, who does the singing while beating the crap out of the drum set. The guitarist Stijn Vanhoegaerden can shred.

South London is the home of Dry Cleaning. In the way of the world they have been classified as yet another arty, spoken-word English rockband alongside Squid or Black Country, New Road, who both broke through around the same time, post Covid. If you listen to them, particularly live, there are two things going on, for sure the surreal visual images elucidated by Florence Shaw, and launched like float glass on top of the batshit riffs of Tom Dowse’s almost hardcore guitar. Dowse, a fan of Sonic Youth and Pavement had spells in metalcore bands, he played support once for his heroes Converge. What is interesting about Dry Cleaning is that being in their 30’s they have none of the fears of not doing something, in case it prevents fame and/or glory. There was an interesting comment by Mike Skinner, aka ‘The Streets’, who at 44 is promoting a film he has spent years putting together: “Essentially, it’s all nostalgia. Most of a musician’s career is nostalgia for those few years when they were the thing…. When you’re a musician, your 20s are amazing, and then the rest of your life is about dealing with that.” Unsurprising that many bands disappear only to decide to tour their eponymous, multi selling album 25 years later, when they are all in their late 40’s, and probably need the cash.

I wonder whether it was just the amazing options that computers delivered that killed the guitar? To the budding musician you could learn to play guitar, endlessly playing chords like ‘Play in a Day’ with Bert Weedon, trying to replay the riff you heard that you cannot get out of your head. Hope you find someone else to play with, the way that most bands started for over 50 years. Or you could learn to play basic piano and then GarageBand, Pro Tools, Reason or Logic Pro will open up a complete panoply of musical styles, sounds and rhythms just for you in your headphones – you don’t even get to annoy the neighbors “I’m calling the police!”. For sure, there are never a shortage of indie guitar bands around, but the vast majority of music is not that anymore. I am not sure many 15-year-old boys are playing, on repeat, a shredding guitar solo, while they airplay the imaginary chords and melt their faces to each note; Spotify would only go and interrupt it with something else they are sure you want to hear anyway, or at least something they have been paid to play you.

The guitar solo is not dead, it has just seen better days. If you want to air-guitar away while pretending to do some housework, play this: I added a few older guitar classics for your enjoyment – hopefully Spotify leaves it as is, it boils my brain when they decide to add a song to my playlist playback….

Mdou Moctar – Nakanegh Dich
Khruangbin – Maria Tambien
Dry Cleaning – Hot Penny Day
Brutus – Victoria
Television – 1880 or so
Taste – Blister On The Moon
Pavement – Fillmore Jive
Modest Mouse – Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine
Drop Nineteens – Delaware
White Denim – Cheer Up
Viagra Boys – Research Chemicals
The Velvet Underground with Nico – Run Run Run
Turin Brakes – Sleeper
Thee Oh Sees – The Dream

Je bosse

I think being the eldest child teaches you to be bossy. My brother Bob arrived home from the hospital with my mother when I was 3 and a half, already precocious I immediately enquired when he would be able to play cars with me. He duly became the dastardly Jerries to my plucky Tommy hero, the noble Indian to my brave cowboy, the dastardly Japanese to my Chindit. He was my goalkeeper when I later decided to be a footballer, so I could fire my dream shots into the top corner, or at least into the garage door and annoy my long suffering grandfather whose workshop was behind the goal. As our games outgrew just the two of us I recruited the Twohig brothers from across the road to our gang, then the Cornish brothers moved in around the corner and we had two opposing armies to work through our wars, raiding parties and bloodthirsty campaigns which were played out through the wooded world that was Tardis-like enfolded into our back garden.

I was the major general in charge of the maneuvers, the head coach making the tough calls and the CEO responsible for the division of labour. I was the oldest by one year from Kim Twohig and Neil Cornish but it was less a function of the height giving authority rather than desire for taking the authority, giving direction and leading the group off on our adventures. Whether foraging a path through the jungle of the bamboo thicket in our garden or trekking down the back lane of Webbs Hill to Vallis Vale and the overgrown former quarries that regularly became more strange lands to be explored and conquered.

My first formal interaction with a superior, other than dealing with my teachers, parents, grandparents and a much older sister, was Mr Wells of Wells Coaches. He ran the school bus services in the mornings and afternoons and day trips to Weston-Super-Mare, Bournemouth, Weymouth and Longleat. Children, sweet eating old ladies, smoking pub groups, travel sick as often as not, all his regular clients kept his coaches filthy. Myself and an everchanging cast of characters emptied the ashtrays on the back of every seat, swept and mopped the floors. We also got to clean the outside of the coach with a brush and a hose, I got to clean the outside until Mr Wells caught me cleaning my colleague with the hose and was told to clear off and never come back.

My next boss was a little more understanding but in her own way a little more intimidating. Barb Roberts was a bespectacled Yorkshirewoman adrift with her portly little husband in our little Somerset market town. She and George were friends of my parents and drank together at the Royal Oak, next door, every Friday evening. My mother and Barb did most of the talking, working through their packs of Silk Cut while my Dad and George punctuated with nods, chortles and knowing looks. My Dad’s pipe fulls of Condor tobacco completing the recreation of the great smogs of the 19th century while George, the non-smoker of the group, sipped his half of bitter. Barb was the manager of the Spar supermarket on the corner of Gore Hedge and Keyford. I worked for the going rate of 3 shillings an hour Friday after school and Saturdays stacking shelves and packing groceries. I moved on to other jobs that paid more or fitted around my school and, latterly, my sporting commitments better but I would see Barb and George with Mum and Dad on their Friday evening socials as they came back to our place for a night cap. This was the era of dressing up for an evening out so both the men wore suits, and the women in full make up, jewelry and dresses. George developed an increasingly large swelling in his groin that was never discussed, even as it became the size of a small football, more and more visible in his suit pants. He died suddenly of testicular cancer and it was still never disucssed. Barb went grey completely over the next few months and then died herself of a broken heart within a year. I looked to see on Google StreetView if the Spar was still there in some form but it has also disappeared under what is now a small housing development.

Bill Lewis was another outsider in Frome. He had been in the army but was a cockney who married a local woman. He had started a small cleaning business from scratch. He drove around town in his little van with ladders on the roof, hustling window cleaning when larger jobs were scarce. He managed to get a couple of contract cleaning jobs and then needed help and with my coach cleaning experience I was a shoe in to help him sustain his growing enterprise. I cleaned the floors of the large supermarket in the new West Way Centre every morning at 7.00am using a new fangled wet-vac. I balanced atop his highest ladders cleaning office windows. We cleaned windows of the houses on the new estates. We cleaned PVC storage silos during the factory shutdown at Wallington Weston, where my sister and her husband had worked before setting off to darkest Essex for him to be a programmer. We also cleaned the canteen at the Express Dairy in Oldford, I did the cleaning and then Bill would help himself to chocolate bars and sweets which he smuggled out in the wet vac. Oldford is full of odd memories, the Vaughn family farm at Park Farm, home of first serious girlfriend Jude, The Ship pub where I ended up working as bar man and outside of which myself and a friend spent an afternoon mooning cars as they drove by. The Express Dairy is now owned by Bonne Maman for some reason and in the early 2000’s my brother Bob ended up in charge of HR for whoever was the owner at the time.

Time moved on and I stacked more supermarket shelves, I was a White Hunter at the Lions of Longleat for 3 summers, worked bar, was a cook in a Good Food Guide listed restaurant, did shift work in a carpet factory running looms, was a fitter’s mate in a factory in Newport South Wales where I broke my toe, as Zappa would have been happy to see I wound up “working in a gas station” and before leaving for France after my final summer after graduation, before starting a real job, I worked in an early waste recycling project at a cement factory in Westbury, where I broke my little finger on my left hand while rebricking the immense kiln. So much for health and safety.

My first few months with Unilever were typical of the ‘graduate trainee’ scheme. Weeks of training in the SPD’s head offices in Watford interspersed with weeks in branch operations. My attempt at getting into the shipping part of Unilever failed and I ended up in their distribution business appropriately named Speedy Prompt Delivery. There were various companies all in one way or another moving raw materials into or finished goods out of Unilever businesses in the UK. Romantic intentions of being in a global world of shipping and exotic ports in foreign climes were dashed by the day to day reality of managing warehouses and delivery trucks in Warrington, Eastleigh, Doncaster and other lifeless towns in England enduring strikes and power cuts of the 3 day week and the famous ‘winter of discontent’. So when I was offered a market research project in the Potteries for a newly established international freight subsidiary I had little sense of what path I was headed down. I arrived on the train in Stoke late on a cold Monday morning in February and was picked up by the General Manager’s secretary, Carole. A woman, it saddens me to say, that having worked with her for 3 years my enduring memory is that she was prone to severe constipation and had to be reminded by her father to do something about it when she was starting to look ‘peaky’. She was engaged to a milkman, who because he got up at 3.30 every morning was not exactly the life and sole of the party, she referred to him as Bert, even though his name was David, it was if she had decided remembering boyfriend’s names was too much like hard work so for short hand they all became Bert.

I was asked to wait as my new boss, the GM, was not yet in. At about 12.05 he exploded through the office door rummaged through his in-tray and then came back out, all without taking off his mackintosh. “Lets go and grab lunch!” he said and off we went, me trailing him in an attempt to make small talk, as we jumped into his brand new gold Ford Capri 2.0 GLS and headed off to a pub. As this was late 70’s England pub lunch was a sandwich and a couple of pints of bitter consumed while my new boss, Pete Meyrick, in his broad Swansea accent, explained that there was no project but if I was interested they needed a salesman to cover Britain, the Benelux and France. If I did that for him I would get a company car and he would fight the political battles to make it a long term job. So with a very used maroon Ford Cortina complete with 8 track player and the promise of international travel I was bought. I became the Marketing Development Manager for the Powder Tank Division of Unispeed Intermodal. Meyrick was a hard driving pugilistic manager. I am not sure I learned that much from him as communications were not his forte; he was a team builder in so far as he put effort into the group socializing after long hours. He developed an esprit de corps by belittling the other two sister divisions, their efforts, their GMs especially came in for his withering disregard and the support staff who we shared the offices with in Newcastle Under Lyme. He ultimately left two years later to set up his own operation and became rich by stealing the core contracts from under the nose of the Unilever business. He took two of my colleagues with him and the fact that he didn’t invite me to join him ultimately showed how little he thought of me. I, meanwhile, was sent to another sinking ship of a division in Southampton, whose whole management team upped and set up in business to replicate what they had been doing for the by now embattled Unispeed group.

I have had 14 jobs since then, some were a lot of fun, some less so. Some I am embarrassed about in hindsight. I did learn something from each of them, even if the lessons were simply to never do something again. Some were very financially rewarding and some I spent more money than I earned. I have managed or lead teams as large as 300 and at times as small as me on my own, some of the those colleagues have become life long friends. I have a couple of times joined a completely different industry with differing mores and ways of doing business, that is tough and ultimately not easy to do successfully. So the one conclusion is that you probably need to be thoughtful about making a commitment to a job when you are young, as it tends to direct you down a path that guides or constrains the future career options. I always wanted to work internationally and escape the rainy little island of home so on balance when I sold my soul for the used maroon Cortina that was the bargain that I made and I am happy I did.

On the 8-track this shoulda/coulda been playing.

Settling into a Saturday

There is a glorious luxury to settling in to a lazy Saturday. Not a Saturday full of tasks around the house, no chores, no pressing need to battle the great unwashed in the shopping center. Saturdays waking slowly, slightly hung over from the relief of Friday evening, drinking in the sounds of the birds, soft light of Spring through the silk of the curtains. Saturdays rituals, reading Blind Date in the Grauniad app, debating whether to get up and get croissants from the bakery down the road, pondering the culinary choices for the weekend. Looking forward to the Fulham game, this year has been odd, not just because we have to get used to the expectation of winning but because success brings the attention of Sky and games moved to Friday nights, Sunday lunchtimes and 1.30Pm kick offs. Today is a treat, a normal British Saturday 3.00pm kick off which fills the end of my French afternoon nicely.

Dressed for an unhalfbricked Saturday morning

I dont want to go all Nigel Slater and confessional but one of the other treats is wandering through the cookery tomes to find inspiration. I have flétan, Atlantic Halibut, from the football loving fish guy at the weekly market. I also have the last remaining cabbage that survived the winter, or survived me harvesting them too early assuming they were struggling, sweet potatoes and a large cauli to do something with. Coffee and one of the French biscuits that they call “Petit Dejeuner”, which are whole grain and have chocolate nibs and nuts, accompany a catch up with Private Eye. I know my biases are just being confirmed but the journalism of the Eye is the one consistent investigative effort holding the despicable and corrupt ruling Conservative party to account as they undermine or destroy what is left of the England I had the good fortune to grow up in. It’s ironic that at this very moment, across the plagued island there are many of my peers reading through their Saturday’s Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph feeling the same disgust and distaste but about whoever their target of their privileged ire is today, likely some part of the woke, liberal elites that are in their eyes undermining their world.

Tomorrow France goes to the polls to elect the President for the next 5 years and by the time you read this we hope that we are not reliving that sense of bewilderment that we felt when the desperate and angry elected Donald Trump and voted to leave the EU. There are many desperate and angry French people who Marine Le Pen has spoke to with resonance about their cost of living, their frustrations when they fill up their battered old Peugeot 208’s with diesel to drive the 40 minutes to their poorly paid job. They blame Macron. They blame the establishment. They blame them for their lack of the piece of the western liberal pie they feel they deserve, they blame the dark skinned people for taking their jobs, for causing crime, for not being French and Mme Le Pen nods along with them and smiles in agreement when they vent their spleen. She promises France Unicorns like all populists, “tous et n’importe quoi’, no taxes for the under 30’s, reduced VAT on diesel, no hijabs, no benefits for foreigners, standard stuff. The divisions across Europe and the Western World that are exploited by the Populists are thanks in no small part to the efforts of Mr Putin aided and abetted by the uncontrolled greed which powers social media to be such a sustained force for evil. However, globalisation and capitalism has failed all but a moderately sized slice of French society and that is reflected in the polls where over 60% has voted for either far left or far right candidates. If there were such options in the USA we would probably see that kind of reflection too.

Saturday is also a day to reflect on what music have I been listening to or newly discovered this week, new vinyl arrivals have been slower of late as I am trying to be less compulsive. I got the quite lovely Wet Leg album this week and its no surprise they are the darlings of the rock media currently, as well as the new Jack White which is a nice and quite surprisingly good return to form. It’s also a day to dig through the back catalog and revisit old favorites. I consume vast amounts of music but quite a lot of it blends into itself. I definitely have different preferences for different moods and contexts.

As my Saturday moves sleepily at first it gathers pace and then late morning the coffee kicks in and energy levels go up so this playlist brings its game from folky to funky to just fun, enjoy!

Listen here to:

Who Knows Where the Time Goes – Fairport Convention
Cigarettes out the window – TV Girl
VCR – Antlers
Furry Sings The Blues – Joni Mitchell
The Melting of the Sun – St Vincent
Debris – The Faces
White Rabbit (remix by Marcel Dettman) – Jefferson Airplane
Superman Lover – Johny Guitar Watson
Cosmik Debris – Frank Zappa
Who The Cap Fit – Bob Marley & The Wailers
Slipping Into Darkness – War
Could Heaven Ever By Like THis – Idris Muhammad
Bicameral – The Range
Magic Mountain – Eric Burden
Ooh la la! – Goldfrapp
Into the Twilight – Jack White
Ohh la la (Mexican Institute of Sound remix) – Run the Jewels
The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore – PJ Harvey
The Turning of Our Bones – Arab Strap
Fluorescent Adolescent – Arctic Monkeys
Feel Like A Girl – Coach Party
Ur Mum – Wet Leg

I’m Frank

Have you met any famous people? I met John Cleese twice. Once, on a school trip to London, we saw him in line at the bank under Harrods, we did the obligatory silly walk past him three times and he ignored us. On reflection I am not sure that counts as ‘meeting’. I did sit next to him in the basement of a packed restaurant around the corner from Lord’s at lunch a few years later, while at a test match with a customer. He had an earpiece and a ‘transistor radio’ and so I asked him for the score as we were all late back. Apart from my subterranean encounters with Cleese, I asked Rod Stewart for suggestions on where to go for a night out, I also gave my views on baseball to Tommy Lasorda, Ian Dury tried to serenade my girlfriend with J.J.Cale songs. My daughter, Holly and the ex-wife shared seaweed baths with Tim Booth (of James fame) and anonymous girlfriend. Holly got hit on by Thierry Henry, Rachel got hit on by Tarrantino and Vincent Gallo; all of these encounters happening in LA so that’s where you need to be, obviously, to be celebrity adjacent.

I was wondering whether Mark E. Smith ever met Frank Zappa.

Mark obviously liked Frank’s music and The Fall regularly played Hungry Freaks Daddy, the geeks tell me they played it live 33 times in fact. Mark also wrote “I’m Frank” which was supposed to be guitarist Craig Scanlon’s tribute to Zappa. They have quite a lot in common. Both were ridiculously prodigious. The Fall released 32 studio albums over a 38-year period with 42 Live albums and 51 compilations. The reason behind the vast compilation catalog is that Mark tended to burn through record companies almost as fast he went through band members. Frank Zappa tended to mix live and studio work so it’s hard to subdivide his vast catalog which includes both releases under his own name, releases as The Mothers of Invention or a mix of the two but there are 62 albums and 82 compilations. The Zappa estate, which is a story in itself, continues to release material so Frank’s musical catalog starts in 1967 and continues to this day so 54 years, 55 albums have been released officially since his death. Both men were chain-smoking auto-didacts, self-educated in the fringes of culture. Zappa was a fan of Varese and music concrete, a fan of Camus and existentialism but also finding it pretentious as fuck. Smith had a fascination of the macabre writings of H.P. Lovecraft, Wyndham Lewis and M.R.James. The band’s name is from the Camus book, ‘La Chute’ although that was said to be fellow band founder Tony Friel’s fascination and Tony lasted just over a year.

Both Frank and Mark loved a good cover song, which tends to suggest they had that purist’s view of music, they reserved the right to like or detest anything, popular or otherwise.

The Mothers covered quite a lot of doo-wop, ‘cheesy music’ as Frank thought of it but a reminder for him of growing up in the 1950’s. Mark had a soft spot for 50’s rockabilly, the Fall were referred to mistakenly for a while as “punkabilly”. The Mothers released an album of self-penned doo-wop “Cruising with Ruben and the Jets” as well as covering the Four Deuces “WPLJ” and Jackie and the Starlites “Valarie”. They regularly played live Richard Berrie’s ‘Louie Louie’ and the song Plastic People on We Are Only In It For the Money is based openly on the same riff. The Fall covered the Big Bopper’s ‘White Lightning’ and Tommy Blake’s “F’olding Money”. They both were fans of garage music from the 60’s, the difference being Frank actually was in the garage in Lancaster, CA making that noise with the Captain, Don Van Vliet while Mark was discovering the Other Half and The Sonics from the Nuggets compilations in the 80’s but “Strychnine” and “Mr Pharmacist” were live staples of The Fall. They both liked to take a popular song from one genre and make it their own. The Fall had pop chart success with covers of the Kinks’ “Victoria” and R.Dean Taylor’s “Ghost in My House”. I had the original 1974 single which was memorable as at the time he was the only white artist on Tamla Motown. One of my favorite Fall covers is Sister Sledge’s “Lost in Music”. Zappa took on the staples of Classic Rock radio the Allman Brothers Band’s “Whipping Post” and played “Stairway to Heaven” relatively straight as a live number, although I think that was his bizarre way of showing he could outplay Page and the ‘rock god’ guitarists.

They were both interesting if tough interviews for journalists, both always good for some snide line about the music industry. Frank’s famous quote about journalists defined his sense of disdain for them: “Writing about rock music is like dancing about architecture”. Mark was not unpleasant per se, he was just oblique, and interviews famously involved trying to drink with him, or you paying for Mark to get shit-faced. Woe betide the young journo from NME who fetched up in Prestwich to chat to Mark over a quiet drink in the Forester’s, only to be poured into a taxi to get to the train back to London several pints and several hours later. Frank was famously abstemious, made it a point of honour to not take the drugs always on offer. Mark was an alcoholic and suffered in his later years with broken bones due to one too many drunken falls. Both died of cancer as poster children for the concept of not eating well or treating your body with any sense of propriety. Naturally skinny and workaholics neither had any body issues to shame them into taking better care of themselves until they became ill.

They both found love through music, or in Zappa’s case frequent sex. Mark had a relationship with Una Baines in the original line-up, followed by Brix Smith who he married and brought some commerciality to the band, after their divorce he married Saffron Prior, who was running the Fall fan club. He then dated the keyboardist Julia Nagle, but after a fraught drunken assault on the other band members that came to an end. His next partner was Eleni Poulu, who played keyboards and they were married from 2002 until 2016. In his final years his partner was his manager Pamela Vander. Frank was married straight out of high school but that was over by the time he was making music. He married Gail Porter, who worked at the Whisky-a-Go-Go in LA and was a self-confessed groupie. They were married in the 8^th month of her pregnancy carrying Moon-Unit, the first of 4 kids. Frank indulged his penchant for groupies for the rest of his life, he celebrated groupies in his songs including the “Jazz Discharge Party Hats”, most of the Live at the Fillmore album, “Magdalena” and of course, the glorious “Road Ladies”.

Both Zappa and Smith were egotistical and self-centered in the way you have to be to get up and take center stage night after night for a living. They both burned through band members, both metaphorically and in many cases physically, very few former Fall or Mothers/Zappa sidemen went on to have a successful career outside of the original band. Lowell George and Steve Vai being major exceptions but no-one from the Fall seemed to be that enamored with rock music to pursue it as a lifestyle option. They both had interesting artwork on their music releases – either unique graphics and art or portraits of the band and/or them featured prominently, yet always not just a flattering good light shot, an odd view. Frank played live from 1960 until 1988 regularly, prior to his final live gigs in the new Czech Republic in June, 1991. Mark played his first gigs in 1976 and his last on Saturday, 4 November 2017, at Queen Margaret Union, Glasgow, 42 years on the road, the last gigs from a wheelchair and clearly still wanting to be there.

They both brought not just the music, they brought an ethos, an approach to music and life, completely uncompromising. Frank changed his band when he got bored of their limitations, Mark changed the band when they exceeded their limitations, before they got too good. Mark famously said “no fucking improvisation” whereas Frank had his bands drilled to respond to elaborate hand signals to foster improvisation and unlikely key changes. In their own way they had an inner drive to create that was both uniquely personal and unrelenting. If they did ever meet I am not sure whether they would hate each other for being so self-assured that they and only they were doing the right thing, doing it the right way, or they would have got on famously, due to a mutual respect of a true artist. They would have shared a cigarette, Mark would have asked if there was anything to drink and if the answer was no, probably headed off elsewhere, down the road.

For those with Spotify here are the Fall covers, and here are the Zappa covers.