a path to the avant-garde
prog … punk … metal
… or, how did I go from this:
to this:
OK, I confess. This entire blog post is just an excuse to publish the above photo taken recently while in LA to visit a friend. Passing by this pizza place daily, I kept hearing it screaming at me to pose in front of it. The pizza was pretty good too.
More seriously, this post is about context. Those of you that have been following this know that I created it in order to help me write a couple of books about music history (see the “About” section). It’s been a little over 6 months now and I’m not sure if my writing skills have improved much, but I have learned at least one thing. I like writing. I may even love it, but I want to continue dating it for awhile before I make a commitment. I will soon be diving into a bunch of blog posts about albums and history tidbits related to the books, but before I do that I want to give you a little context about where I’m coming from. Context is important. To get started, here’s the full context for the above photos:
Photo by Brian Schindele
That’s me and my little brother in the backyard of our home in the suburbs of Buffalo NY. He’s almost 4 years younger than me so I must be about 7 or 8 in this photo. In my 9th year we would move to Phoenix AZ. Our mother was from Germany (hence the authentic lederhosen outfits) and she played zither and a little bit of piano. Our father was born in Pennsylvania from a generation of coal miners that immigrated as farmers from Wales. He played saxophone and came from a family where everyone played something. Before I was born he was heavily into “modern jazz” ala Stan Kenton, so some of my earliest memories of hearing music would be those LP’s which would get rotation in between my Bugs Bunny albums.
I would trade the toy sax for his when I turned 11.
The first record album that I could truly call “mine” was given to me by my young uncle (he was about 10 years older than me). It was a Beach Boys album called Surfin’ Safari.
I was 5 or 6 then and I loved the Beach Boys from what I heard on the radio. I played the grooves off that record. Not long after, a music event would happen that would change the course of world history forever. On Feb 9, 1964 The Beatles played the Ed Sullivan Show. I’m sure I knew about them from the radio too, but what made this event stand out in my mind was how interested my father was in watching this event on tv. The whole family gathered around the tv and witnessed Beatlemania. My father’s interest did not end there. Sometime after Ed we were in a large store that also had records for sale and he took me over to the record bins and said I could pick out a Beatles album. I chose The Early Beatles. I now had two records to play the grooves off of. I still have them both.
Sometime during my 7th year I started taking guitar lessons. I don’t remember learning any Beatles songs although I may have attempted some on my own. The guitar was acoustic and the teaching was horrible, but I kept at it for almost 2 years and could read music. I was forced to learn to play “Moon River” and I had no idea why, but learn it I did. After we moved to Phoenix I discontinued the lessons but was determined to form a band. I enlisted my little brother on bongo drums and we called ourselves The Termites. In no time at all we had our first song written … “We Are The Termites.” I’m certain we recorded it on our father’s reel-to-reel, which the family also used to send tapes to Buffalo since a long-distance phone call at that time was super expensive.
I cannot overstate my father’s influence on my music preferences. He was probably always interested in contemporary music, but after seeing The Beatles on tv, he was totally sold on rock-n-roll. Not long after we moved to Phoenix we had a very nice “stereo” sound system to listen to our growing LP collection. It seems we could never afford a color tv, but we always had the latest in good sounding music equipment. I hardly ever had to buy a record myself because he was already buying them. Here’s just a sample of his collection at the time off the top of my head …. Tubular Bells, Cat Stevens, Procol Harum, John Cale, Carly Simon, The Who. And then came Prog … Fragile, In The Court of the Crimson King, Dark Side of the Moon, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. When I was about 15, he got tickets for us (he, myself and my little brother) to see Yes. This would be the first rock concert for any of us. It was a seated show at a civic center type of venue with folding chairs. We were about half way back and I had little idea what to expect. It’s the early 1970’s, so the hippie freak show was still in full swing in Phoenix. Their colorful clothing was nearly matched by the face paint that many were wearing. We weren’t seated long before I noticed many around us were lighting up joints. I was very naive about pot then, but I knew what it was. I also knew that in spite of my father’s excellent musical taste, which made him the coolest dad on the planet as far as I was concerned, he was also very politically conservative. How would he react to this flagrant law-breaking going on all around us? As the tension built within me, I noticed that he seemed to relax as he pulled out one of his tiparillo cigars and lit up with the rest of them. The show went on complete with full laser light extravaganza (man I miss laser light shows). We had a great time. This would be the first of many wonderful concerts that I would enjoy with my dad.
In these early days of Prog Rock there was often some experimentation going on that might end up on the records. Electronic music was starting to take off and any record featuring a synthesizer was a bit of a novelty. The song “Lucky Man” by ELP broke the pop charts open for synths. My dad and I drove 100 miles to see the band perform in Tucson. I remember waiting a long time in our seats for the band to start, but once they did I enjoyed watching my father rock-out almost as much as I enjoyed the band. It was a long drive home and we both rode the whole way high on adrenaline, and whatever buzz he got from the tiparillos.
At 17 I would graduate from high school a semester early and head straight to the U of A in Tucson where my life in the dorms would expand my friendships, my mind, and my music collection. It would also create one big regret. For me, the three greatest albums of the classic prog era are “Close to the Edge,” “Brain Salad Surgery,” and “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.” Sure, “In the Court of the Crimson King” should also be there, but in many ways to me that was just a warm up album for Greg Lake to join ELP. And “Red” would be my favorite King Crimson album anyway. Of those three on my greatest list, I saw the first two in person when they were toured for the first time. I COULD HAVE SEEN “The Lamb Lies Down…” if I were willing to skip my first day of classes that semester at college and drive the 100 miles to Phoenix instead. I gave it strong consideration. My dad and brother were going. Perhaps had I known then that this would be the last time Peter Gabriel would tour with Genesis I might have chosen differently, but probably not. I would have to satisfy myself some 30 years later with a wonderful performance by the official Genesis cover band The Musical Box who did the entire “Lamb” concert with the original slide show, costumes and instrumentation.
And so it went for me in college …. prog, prog, fusion and more prog. Tucson was (and is?) a college town and there were kids from all over the world. But Tucson is also a cultural backwater. Frankly, I felt at the time that all of Arizona was a cultural wasteland that I was eager to escape. Before I could do that, punk rock would happen. And I don’t mean in Tucson. I was reading about it in the news and hearing some on the radio. It looked chaotic and was definitely anti-prog. It took a bit for me to get over my initial punk-repulsion. I bought “Never Mind the Bollocks” mainly as a joke to freak out my prog friends, and I ended up liking it. Eventually, even I could see that the punks might be right about the bloated nature of prog. A few embarrassing albums released by my prog heroes would seal the deal. I was off to San Francisco and heading straight to the punk clubs to see The Dead Kennedys. They quickly became my favorite live band, but it was a venue in SF that would have an even bigger influence on me. It was on the worst shit-hole block in the entire city, and today that block is still the worst shit-hole in the entire city. The only difference is that today it is actually covered in human shit. The venue building is still there, but the name and live music are long gone. It was called The Sound of Music, and I’ve got a whole lot to tell you about it in future posts. Anything could happen there, and it usually did.
We’re up to 1980 now and I want to pause from this memoir accounting and take a quick look at what one man was doing at this same time. His work would have a huge influence on my musical taste and by this time he had recorded and released most of the music that made up his production career. And yet in 1980, I’m not sure I had even one of his records in my collection yet. That would soon change.
The man is Giorgio Gomelsky, and in 1978 he was tapping into the avant-music scene in NYC like a water diviner into an aquifer. He arrived from Europe representing a record label and soon found himself somewhat stranded as those deals fell through. He started acquiring talent as he so often did, and soon had a young Bill Laswell sleeping and rehearsing in his loft along with many others. By the end of ‘78 he organized the “Manifestival” by inviting his European talent including Fred Frith and Daevid Allen, to combine with the NY crowd and make an all night celebration of the avant-garde that would be so admired by the NY cognoscenti that the power was pulled from the event at some late hour in the night and they simply moved it outside and continued making noise until the wee hours of the next morning. Or so the myths go. I’m sure I can get some interviews with people who were there. I think I may even know some of them.
More important to me and my record collection would be the Daevid Allen backup band that Gomelsky assembled around this time including Bill Laswell, Fred Maher – drums, Bill Bacon – drums, Michael Beinhorn – synthesizer, Don Davis – alto sax, Gary Windo – tenor sax, Mark Kramer – organ. Look at those names. Three of them would go on to be big time music producers, like Gomelesky himself. There’s Bill Laswell who according to TapeOp magazine has produced Ornette Coleman, Santana, John Zorn, George Clinton, Pharoah Sanders, Iggy Pop, Herbie Hancock, Buckethead, William S. Burroughs, Tony Williams, James "Blood" Ulmer, PiL, Praxis, Material, as well as re-workings of Bob Marley and Miles Davis. There’s Michael Beinhorn who would produce Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, Hole, Violent Femmes and Marilyn Manson. There’s Mark Kramer, better known as just Kramer, who produced Half Japanese, White Zombie, GWAR, King Missile, Danielson Famile, Will Oldham, Daniel Johnston, and Urge Overkill, but whom I will always remember as part of the band Bongwater that I saw many times in SF and once in Berlin where I would meet a couple of other musicians and eventually play with one of them on my next trip to Berlin. There’s Fred Maher who would produce Lou Reed, but more significant to me would play drums on one of the most important records in my entire collection “Killing Time” by Massacre with Laswell and Fred Frith. I’ve also had the pleasure of talking to Don Davis on the phone who has had a distinguished career on reeds and is a wealth of knowledge on the important music that was being made by not only this Daevid Allen backup band that would soon be called Material, but also many others in the Woodstock region of the late 1970’s and 80’s.
So here we have it, around 1979 or early 1980’s I would buy a record that had the name Giorgio Gomelsky on it as producer. I didn’t notice his name on the Material album. I would buy many more albums in the early 80’s that would also have his name. Bands like Soft Machine, Gong, Magma. Still, I did not see his name. Giorgio Gomelsky died in Jan of 2016. About a year later I finally saw his name. It was not on an obituary or one of my albums. It was during an internet search about who recorded the first Material album (there’s more about that in the About section, and I’ll write a lot more about that later). And since then I’ve picked up a few more of his albums: The Yardbirds (of course, I had some, but not on vinyl), John McLaughlin’s first solo album (of course I had many of his post Miles Davis albums), Keith Tippett (of course I heard him on the King Crimson stuff and actually saw the man play solo piano in Berlin), Julie Driscoll and Brian Auger (of course … well I didn’t have any of their stuff), John Stevens Spontaneous Music Ensemble (of course I had a lot of free jazz, but not this), and the list goes on. As you can see I have plenty to write about.
I’ve deviated a bit from my path to the avant-garde so I can show you the influence that goes on. It may be completely invisible to you, but there it is, happening in the background of your life, influencing you in ways you are not even aware of. So many people doing so many things that make your life better. If you’re lucky you may find out who they are.
But hey … back to the memoiresque thing. I covered prog and was just getting to punk in SF. And while this prog to punk to metal thing seems like it has clean transitions, it does not. I never stopped listening to prog while I was going to punk shows. I still listen to prog. WTF, prog seems to be cool again, at least since sometime in the late 1990’s when Tool made it so. Metal was always in the mix too, but it would get much bigger later. Let’s get back to the early 1980’s. I was finally immersing myself into a real culture of music and art at a time when there was little difference between the two. Almost anybody doing music or art was also doing performance art of some kind. When I went to a show at a hole in the wall club in a dangerous zone in SF, I had no idea what I might see. Or what might end up splattered on me. That was part of the excitement of the time. Everybody was experimenting. Some were trying to see what would stick, but most didn’t care.
There were plenty of other gigs too at store fronts, galleries, churches, and a few at peoples homes or garages or warehouse spaces. I’m not sure who I saw first, Fred Frith or Henry Kaiser. Maybe they were performing together. Both had a huge influence on me.
When I left AZ for SF, I didn’t land in SF first. I landed in Redwood City, about a 40 minute drive to SF. This was ok for seeing live shows on the weekend, and most weekends I did. At that time there were a few really good college radio stations that formed a hub for this greater music scene. The record stores were also a great place to find out what was happening. I still love going to record stores. On the recent trip to LA pictured above, we were driving back to the hotel when I saw a record store in my peripheral vision and instinctively pulled over to a side street to check it out. I couldn’t help myself.
If my failing memory is any guide, my first exposure to free improv electric guitar was seeing Fred Frith perform at a college campus with his guitar and other things spread out on a table or laboratory bench in a lecture hall. I’m sure this is completely wrong, but that’s how it’s been fixed in my mind for many years. I must have seen Henry Kaiser around the same time. I don’t remember Henry, but I do remember his album that made a huge impression on me. It was called “Aloha”. I got it soon after its release in 1981 as a double vinyl record. Right away it was side C that got my attention and I played it over and over again. The side-long song is called Aloha Gamera and contains some of the most terrifying noises you’ll ever hear coming from a guitar. I loved it. I ran into Mr. Kaiser not long after at a gig and told him how much I liked that piece. He seemed to back away from me and said something like “oh, you’re one of those.”
At about this same time I got exposed to the avant-garde at the international level from a band I did not expect. Public Image Ltd. They released “The Flowers of Romance” in 1981 and it was the first PiL album I would buy. Up until then they seemed like a continuation of the bad boys from the Sex Pistols that I was reading about in the press. I didn’t hear much on the radio other than their first hit. By 1981 that bad boy image was morphing into the performance art thing that was going on everywhere, and they seemed to be doing it very well. Flowers was an amazing kick in the teeth. It was as minimal as any pop or rock album could get with pounding drums accentuated by other percussion, and little else besides Lydon’s wailing vocals. Yoko Ono must have loved this album. I sure did. I soon bought every earlier PiL album and saw them live every time they came to SF.
By the mid 1980’s I was no longer satisfied with weekend only live music fixes. In 1985 I moved into SF, which more than doubled my work commute south. I had a very good career going at a big company that gave me a lot of freedom. As long as I produced for them they didn’t care much if I stumbled in late a few days a week. Before I got to SF I picked up the guitar again, soon abandoning my lessons to play whatever noise I wanted. For awhile I wrote and recorded songs with my friends. Songs were fun, but the jam sessions at rehearsal were often more fun. Losing all interest in songs I found a few like minded players to go fully free improv with me. With the right group of people this was like boarding a rocket ship on a roller coaster ride to the heavens.
Almost everybody practicing any art in the city was pushing things to the limit. I became a huge fan of the SF machine performance group Survival Research Labs and would soon meet them and contribute to their work. Their big shows were in parking lots, the small ones at venues with bands. They even performed at a PiL show in a large water-front venue not far from the Golden Gate Bridge. During one of the parking lot shows that I worked on, we set the freeway approach to The Bay Bridge on fire. This was just part of the fuel that drove my musical passion.
Most of the above music, including what was left of prog and the territory punk had thoroughly plowed, had created a scene in which everyone was an artist. It was all art rock. There were plenty of other scenes going on however. One would never call itself art. It was metal.
I had not paid much attention to metal up to this point. I had an AC/DC, a Motorhead and a Big Black album, none of which I considered to be metal at the time. I saw the latter two bands at different shows at the I-Beam in SF’s Haight district. The Motorhead show is the first one I can remember where they offered ear plugs for sale in the lobby. I can’t remember if I got any, but I wish I had used them more often back then as my hearing has suffered a lot since. Motorhead blew the venue fuses out 3 times at that show. Metal? As Lemmy liked to say at the start of a show: “We’re Motorhead and we play Rock and Roll”. I couldn’t stand the hair bands that dominated metal then, and to this day I do not get Iron Maiden or Judas Priest. Most metal just wasn’t heavy enough for me, until this one album fell into my lap. A close friend gave it to me because I’d expressed some interest in the band which he considered to be a joke. It was Master of Puppets by Metallica and it was deadly serious to me. I loved it immediately. Something was going on in the metal world and I wanted in. This album opened the flood gates for the kind of metal that was truly heavy in my book. Just like there are 3 definitive prog albums in my collection, I have 3 metal albums: Master of Puppets, Reign in Blood by Slayer, and Arise by Sepultura. Today metal has fragmented into hundreds of subgenres, and every one of them owes something to those 3 albums. These seeds were soon thrown in the face of John Zorn who would plant the metal sound firmly into the avant rock music of the so called NY downtown scene. (See the previous blog post for my Napalm Death/CBGBs story).
I seem to have run a bit long with this blog post, but I want to tell one last story to tie it all together. Even before I heard that first Beach Boys album my uncle gave me I was searching for a sound. Every now and then I would hear it and it would make me so excited that I couldn’t wait to find the next one. That’s what I’ve been doing my entire life. That’s why I moved from AZ to Redwood City CA. A whole new world of sound started forming around me. But I still wasn’t close enough. I remember hearing about a concert put on by the “new music” series of the San Francisco Symphony. I’d been to some of these before and they were mostly good. This show really got me interested when I heard about the wall of sound to be generated by a large ensemble of electric guitars and other home-made amplified string instruments. But it was in SF on a mid week night and I don’t know what else was going on in my life that week but Redwood City seemed very far away from SF. I didn’t go. I did hear it though, maybe even that same weekend. A radio station recorded the show and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. If it sounded that good on the radio … WHAT HAD I MISSED!? I had missed Glenn Branca’s Symphony Number 5 ''Describing Planes of an Expanding Hypersphere.'' The next chance I would get to hear Branca’s music would be 4 years later and I’d have to fly to NYC to do it. In less than a year after that missed show I would move to SF and spend the next 20 years there seeking out sounds.
That’s more than enough about me for awhile. My next posts will be focused more on the music. Until then, thanks for reading.