when the Slits toured with Don Cherry

and he brought Lou Reed's band

1979 Tour Poster

I love discovering unexpected (to me) connections in music. For those of you who follow me, you know that’s how I got started here on substack writing about Giorgio Gomelsky. Here are more connections I’ve been exploring lately.

The 2014 Viv Albertine memoir Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys was recently recommended to me. She’s best known for being the guitar player in the Slits, one of the many new bands that lunged out of London’s punk scene after the rapid rise of the Pistols and the Clash. She was good friends with both bands prior to their fame. If you remember anything from her interviews back when the book came out, it would most likely be about her not-so-intimate gobble with Mr. Rotten, which takes up all of one hilariously written paragraph.

Inspired by these friends, she wanted to learn guitar in a hurry and start a band. She got some help from her boyfriend Mick Jones of the Clash. She was soon practicing with pre-Pistols Sid Vicious and Clash member Keith Levene. Vicious was playing saxophone! Who knew! They talked about forming a band and wanted to call it Flowers of Romance, but that would never happen. Levene would later recycle the name for a 1981 Public Image Ltd LP that remains one of the most avant-garde to ever come out of the post-punk scene. (This is the album that got me interested in PiL.)

Albertine talks about many other interesting tid-bits. She was friends with Levene from the time he was 14. Her description of his admiration for Yes guitarist Steve Howe, to the point that he became a roadie for Howe, pokes holes in the myth that all punks hated prog. Many of these details I’ve read about elsewhere (see Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds, but make sure to get the UK edition and not the USA), but Albertine’s close proximity to it adds flesh to the bones of these characters.

Fascinating as these details are, my jaw would drop as I read about her early attraction and implementation of free-jazz into her work as a guitarist. When she joined the Slits she barely knew how to play guitar and had little confidence in her ability to boot. Her connections with The Clash quickly put them in the spotlight as an opening act. The Slits’ very energetic 15-year-old singer Ari Up was the one with any real musical training, having come from a wealthy family. Her mother, Nora Foster, was something of a music impresario in Germany having worked with Jimi Hendrix and YES among many others. She would eventually marry Johnny Rotten. Every member of the Slits was like a sponge, soaking up musical influences wherever they could find it.

One place they’d find it was from a band they crossed paths with frequently called the Pop Group. To give you a sense of the influence of this relatively obscure band, here’s a quote from a Wikipedia article:

The Guardian wrote that the Pop Group "almost single handedly affected the transition from punk to post-punk," noting that they "– ahead of Gang of Four, PiL, A Certain Ratio and the rest – steered punk towards a radical, politicized mash-up of dub, funk, free jazz and the avant-garde."

The article goes on to say the Pop Group “are cited as an influence by artists and bands like Minutemen, Primal Scream, Sonic Youth, Steve Albini of Big Black, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and Massive Attack.” But the Slits were being influenced while the band was still together and performing. And when it came time for the Slits to find a new drummer, they borrowed Bruce Smith from the Pop Group. He would eventually become a more permanent member of the band (and later join the former Mr. Rotten, now John Lydon, in his band Public Image Limited).

Among the free jazz music shared with the Slits was a 1975 album by Don Cherry entitled Brown Rice. The use of African rhythms and instruments on this album gave it a funky, danceable edge that the Slits were incorporating into their own music.

Along with the African instruments, Brown Rice finds Cherry playing with Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, his old bandmates from their days together with Ornette Coleman. To my ears, this album owes more to the early fusion work of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew (1970) than it does to any free jazz work they did with Coleman. Whatever the Slits heard on this album, they wanted more of it.

They loved this album so much that they asked Don Cherry to tour with them. It’s now late 1979 and Cherry has moved on from Brown Rice. According to Viv Albertine, “… instead of really cool jazz players he turned up with Lou Reed's backing band and this corny electric piano and wailing electric guitars. He obviously thought; 'Oh, I need something edgy and rocky.' We were incredibly disappointed by that naff band he brought with him.”

Lou Reed’s music can have that effect on people, myself included. While I enjoy, and sometimes truly love, diving into his experimental side, the rest I might agree is naff, if I knew what naff meant. Sounds about right though. I’m sure I’ll be writing more on Mr. Reed … soon.

It turns out that Don Cherry, by the time of this tour with the Slits, had already collaborated with Lou Reed on and off for a few years. Story has it that they met by chance at an airport in Los Angeles, or somewhere on the west coast. Lou was so excited to meet Don that he immediately invited him to play with his band that night. There are many poor sounding recordings that you can find on YouTube capturing some of these live performances. It’s a weird mix of Reed songs and free jazz.

By the time of the tour with the Slits, Reed and Cherry had recently recorded a studio album in West Germany called The Bells. Like much of Reed’s work attempting to do something new, or at least different, this was not well received by his fans or his critics, although Reed himself would later say it was one of his favorites … “The older I get, the more meaningful it becomes to me.”

Along with Lou Reed’s band, Don Cherry brought someone else with him on that tour — his 15 year-old step-daughter Neneh Cherry. Neneh did backing vocals on the Slits studio albums and later toured with them on her own. About a decade later she had a hit record singing hip-hop style on the dance song "Buffalo Stance".

Fast-forward 20 more years and you’ll find Neneh Cherry returning to her father’s free jazz roots, performing in collaboration with sax screamer Mats Gustafsson and others from the Euro free jazz group The Thing on the LP The Cherry Thing. The Thing originally got their name from a track on Don Cherry’s album Where Is Brooklyn?.

And now, all these connections I’ve presented to you come full circle back to me. I started putting them together after reading Viv Albertine’s bio. That bio was recommended to me in a video blog produced by Dennis Lyxzén, the lead singer of the Swedish hardcore band Refused. I think it’s appropriate now to call them an avant-hardcore band since the release of their seminal album The Shape of Punk to Come. I think most of you know where that title comes from. The story connected to that album is what rock legends are made of, and I will save that for another time.

How it’s related to THIS story is that I had the good fortune to meet Dennis Lyxzén in San Francisco. I approached him after a gig he had with another of his bands and asked him about pushing boundaries. He told me about a new project he was working on with Mats Gustafson. This was less than a year ago. The band is called BACKENGRILLEN and he has described it as “anti-racist, anti-fascist free form Death Jazz.” They’ve only done a handful of live gigs that I know of. We can only hope for more.

Here are some sources for the connections in the above story :

Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.: A Memoir by Viv Albertine

Don Cherry - Don Cherry / Brown Rice (1975)

THROUGH THE RINGER: LOU REED’S THE BELLS

Dennis Deep Cuts #37 Some fantastic Music Biographies that you really need to check out.