risk

music, moon shots and the 1957 pandemic

I’m going to talk about risk taking in music in a bit, but before I get to that I want to address risk taking in society as a whole.

It seems to me that we have become a risk averse society, and that we are becoming more so. I’m speaking about this from the point of view of an American born in 1957. Two other things happened in 1957. One was Sputnik.

I don’t think I have to rehash the events that happened rapidly after Sputnik. NASA was created and they put a man on the moon by 1969. We know a great deal about the risks taken to achieve that goal. We have only recently started to learn about the risks the Russians took to achieve their goals in space. The collective appetite for risk on the part of both nations was what made any of those goals possible. Lives were lost. Calculations were recalculated. Tests were done. Lives were put at risk again, until the goal was achieved.

The other thing that happened in 1957 was a pandemic. You probably never heard of this pandemic. I hadn’t. I got curious about the history of pandemics, for obvious reasons (future readers: we’re in the middle of a pandemic which is being called Covid-19 in 2021). The one we all know about is the Spanish Flu of 1918 which happened before influenza vaccines were invented. That one lasted about 2 years and killed from 20-50 million people according to Wikipedia. There weren’t even antibiotics then to treat secondary bacterial infections. Bloodletting was still being used as one of the available treatments.

By the time of the 1957 pandemic vaccines had been invented. Guess how long it took them to create one to combat this new pandemic. A couple of years? All the experts we’ve heard from during our current pandemic have said how extremely difficult it is to create a vaccine quickly … IN 2020!! … so you’d think that in 1957 they would have been hard pressed to get a vaccine out in a hurry. It took them about 4 months. During those 4 months they did a trial to test the vaccine, just like they do today only it takes a lot longer to do the trial today. In 1957 the trial was done on soldier “volunteers”. Some of them died. That virus killed about 100,000 in the US. About a million would have died without the vaccine (again, according to Wikipedia). I’ve discussed this 1957/2020 vaccine development disparity with a few of my friends (none of us are virus experts) and they all told me that this virus was different and it was harder, and I don’t dispute that, but that’s not what the viral experts on vaccine development have been saying. They said over and over again that a vaccine has NEVER been developed as quickly as our current Covid-19 vaccines.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m ecstatic that we now have multiple Covid-19 vaccines. I have no doubt that many people worked around the clock to get these vaccines out as quickly as possible. It just seems to me that it was made possible a little more quickly in 1957 when we, as a society, were more willing to risk a few lives to speed up the trials in order to save many more lives. And of course this level of risk taking also has its down side. The 1950’s saw heavy use of DDT to increase crop production, among other things, and by the late 50’s its use was being heavily debated. In the end, the risk was taken (along with the profits). It could be argued that for every life saved by the quick vaccine, another life was lost or ruined by DDT exposure.

What’s all this vaccine shit got to do with music? Well, music is not immune from the risk taking habits of the society which consumes it. Rock’n’roll was born in the 1950’s and by the end of the 1960’s had taken off into many directions, some of them experimental. Jazz was on a similar path with the great free-jazz albums from Coleman and Coltrane coming out in 1961 and 1966 respectively. Then Miles Davis invented a whole new genre in 1970 with Bitches Brew that would change jazz AND rock to this day.

The man I’m writing about in one of my projects, producer Giorgio Gomelsky, was right in the thick of this musical risk taking as he went from guiding the Yardbirds through Pop and Psychedelic sounds, to fully embracing this new jazz/rock fusion movement with the band Soft Machine. The band’s recordings with Gomelsky actually predate Bitches Brew by a couple of years. Gomelsky was all about creative risk taking, and as I write more about him we will see plenty of this in his recordings over the decade of the 70’s and beyond …… all in my forthcoming blockbuster hit book: The Gomelsky Recordings!

During the decade of the 70’s societal and musical risk taking would continue almost unabated. Astronauts still go to the moon, and even the aborted Apollo 13 mission turns into an amazing display of successful risk taking to get the crew back alive. Rock music is moving from the progressive to the completely experimental. King Crimson is giving way to Henry Cow. Virgin records thought Henry Cow, this extremely avant-garde ensemble founded in halls of British academia, were going to be the next big thing. Virgin was the record label that made its initial fortune by signing Mike Oldfield for his album Tubular Bells a few years earlier, and a few years hence would sign the Sex Pistols. In between, Henry Cow were recruited to replace their best selling but difficult to manage krautrock band Faust. Listening to either bands’ music today you’d be hard-pressed to put the words “best selling” in front of any of their records. Then something funny happens. NASA abruptly stops going to the moon, and experimental bands can’t get signed to major labels anymore. The economy was going into the toilet and with it the appetite for risk. Punk rock happens. Fuck this avant-garde shit … I HATE PINK FLOYD was scrawled on the home-made t-shirt worn by Johnny Rotten.

Is punk rock risky? It would sure seem so by the press accounts of live shows where both band and audience seem to risk life and limb to be part of the action. On record though the music was like a throw back to the original rock of the 1950’s. Simple chords. Simple beat. Lots of energy. Shocking message. Society recoiled in horror. For awhile, confusion abounded in the world of rock music. Punk quickly gave way on the pop charts to the more mainstream accessibility of new wave. Risky music, any risky music, was relegated to indy labels, and indy labels started popping up all over. This new music would become the music of cults with only a few bands breaking into the mainstream. By the end of the 70’s Gomelsky would move from Europe to NYC where he saw the strongest of these cults forming. At around this same time, Johnny Rotten had left the Pistols and formed his new band Public Image Ltd. His rotten image hadn’t changed much, but his name had … he was now John Lydon. Virgin Records was still hoping he could produce some hits, and at first he did, but it didn’t take long for PiL to also embrace the experimental. It became their goal to be anything but a rock band. In a bit of irony that would become his stock in trade, at the same time Lydon was wearing his I HATE FLOYD t-shirt, he was also listening to and enjoying some of the most avant-garde rock the day had to offer, including CAN and Peter Hammill of Van der Graaf Generator. In their concerted effort to avoid any hint of being a rock band, each album by PiL would become more boundary pushing, and yes, even avant-garde, culminating in the austere pounding and wailing on the album Flowers of Romance. That album would become my first PiL album because the mainstream critics universally hated it. It was Art with a capital A and I was all in. Eventually this music would get a new name … Post-Punk. Rock had become Art, not to be taken seriously again by the now risk averse society that was crushing the life out of it. Beat It Michael Jackson and Welcome To The Jungle.

There’s nothing like a risk averse society to bring out the best in art. It only takes a little prodding to get a massive reaction. Say or do the wrong/right thing and the next day they’re burning your records. So, you wanna make hit records? How about making art instead?

As art rock got driven further underground forming cults around the world, Gomelsky saw the heart of this movement in NYC. By the late 70’s he moved there and invited others from the European avant-garde to join him. (Also around this time, Brian Eno would arrive in NYC scouting talent that would end up on his album No New York and yet another rock subgenre formed as No Wave.) It wasn’t long before Gomelsky had gathered enough talent together to create a festival. He also started managing a band that formed around the bass player Bill Laswell, who was living and rehearsing at Gomelsky’s place at this time. It was a heady time for art-rock in NYC. The Euro players started mixing in, and Gomelsky got his new band to back former Soft Machine and Gong founder Daevid Allen under the name NY Gong. They would embark on a continental tour of the USA in a run-down school bus that would end in disaster in LA. Back in NY Gomelsky soon had the band in a recording studio (with an unknown guest singer named Whitney Houston) and this band Material would become famous for launching a few careers, including that of the bass player and budding music producer Laswell who would, soon after this, revive the career of former Miles Davis keyboard player Herbie Hancock in the eyes of his record label by producing one of his biggest hit records. He would later attempt to do the same for The Rolling Stones. I hope Laswell was aware of the irony here since it was Gomelsky that launched the Stones career at the Crawdaddy Club in London.

What was it that I said about wanting to make hit records?

We’re into the mid 80’s. Any societal risk taking approaching the scale of a moon shot is now being shifted away from government and being put into the hands of corporate America. Eventually the government would just give up completely and declare that corporations are people and that would be the end of it.

Meanwhile, back at Virgin Records they’re still trying to get another hit out of Mr. Lydon. So, who do they turn to? You guessed it. Bill Laswell. At this point things were looking a bit grim for Lydon’s chances as he’d fired everyone in the band some time ago and had since hooked up with some unknown LA musicians to help him write and perform some new songs. Once they all got into a recording studio it didn’t take long for Laswell to send these LA guys home and replace them with session musicians. And not just any session musicians. He got some of the best musicians in rock music. Tony Williams on drums, who played with Miles Davis on his records just prior to Bitches Brew. And on the songs Tony didn’t play, Laswell got Ginger Baker (there’s a long story about how Laswell tracked down Baker, and it apparently starts with a joke made by Lydon were he suggests Baker should be in his band). On lead guitar, Steve Vai, one of the top virtuoso rock guitarists of his day who got his start in Frank Zappa’s band. In my opinion, his guitar work on this PiL record is his best work ever, although I admit I haven't heard much of his work (he apparently agrees according to his wiki page). And the list of superstar talent on this record goes on. The record was called simply “Album” (and the cassette was called “Cassette”). Did they get their hit? Sort of. The album didn’t crack the top 100 in the USA, but it did reach to #14 in the UK charts. And the single “Rise” got to #11. To me it is yet another unique and incredibly enjoyable PiL album, but a far cry from the avant-garde direction of earlier releases, which the band would never pursue again. (Lydon would much later release a solo record that had hints of his experimental past.) If anything, all of PiL’s albums up to and including Album are a testament to Mr. Lydon’s ability for writing and assembling a diverse collection of people and music.

What happened to Gomelsky? As with so many musicians that he worked with, Gomelsky had a falling out with Laswell sometime before the latter became a big-time producer. And Gomelsky, the former big-time producer of The Yardbirds, would grow tired of what the music business had become. No major label was willing to take a risk on him or his artists anymore. He would continue to host musician gigs/parties at his live/work space and other places in NYC, but his creative energy began focusing more on computer work in the fairly new endeavor of digital video, even winning awards for his work with a new tool for the Amiga PC called the Video Toaster.

We all enjoy taking risks from time to time. It can be fun. That’s why so many like to gamble at casinos or online. It can also be tragic. That’s part of the risk. Most of us are willing to take calculated risks. We often have to. Just to get through the day. Sometimes we’re either forced or inspired to risk it all. These are individual choices that we make. The collective risk we take on as a society is a different animal. The wrong choice can have devastating effects on more than just ourselves. What motivates a society to take big risks is often not pretty. Fear of losing something, like your freedom or your life. Or not having much to lose in the first place, so why not go for it. I admire all the risk takers that I’ve talked about here, and so many more, but I don’t want to go back to another time. And I have no idea where we’re going. But I hope it’s somewhere where the artists willing to take the risk are at least rewarded better than they are now when they succeed. And goddammit I hope I live to see SpaceX get people to Mars.