On Music
GOORMAN, JOHN
ON MUSIC By John Goodman Music for Guerrilla Lovefare Concerts do not take place in a vacuum, as Richie Havens knows. In the middle of his March 30 performance he paused to address the audience:...
...and mothers and fathers, "Be the first one on your block/To have your boy come home in a box...
...This group is fooling with the older Cage and Stockhausen devices, aleatory music, taped noise, and electronic distortions, mostly at full volume...
...the firing squard halfway through is a bad musical gimmick, but the lyrics catch the prosaic futility of the soldier's death, and Jim Morrison's voice is for once effective...
...King Quintet at the Generation, another refurbished den in the Village, and it was an excellent pairing...
...They all brought something to the theater from the world outside, while the Troggs and the U.S.A...
...A recent notable attempt was the abortive re-enactment of the Great Stony Brook Dope Raid by the Yip-pies (the Youth International party) last February 27...
...Here his voice was never better, shouting with great power and clarity or coyly working up to the title question...
...Rock at its best can tear open a good many of these bags—musical, commercial, or personal—but so far its efficacy as social protest is limited...
...This album conveys the kind of vocal intensity and presence that Havens achieves more often live...
...There, at least for the present, it seems stymied by the lack of a program and the tactics of "up-tight" officialdom everywhere...
...The U.S.A...
...Havens' group—amplified guitar, violin, sitar and bongos—provided varied settings that suggested the jazz, rock, and Indian sources it draws on...
...in Keystone Cops outfits, to roust the students for a concert...
...hence the effect is emotionally cathartic for both performer and audience in so far as the songs truly amuse...
...They tell Wall Street, "There's plenty good money to be made/By supplyin' the Army with the tools of the trade...
...But throughout the Joshua Light Show projected vivid kleidoscopic and fluid images on a screen behind the musicians...
...Havens played Bob Dylan's "Just Like a Women" in 7/4 with rapid-fire strumming behind a slow, intense vocal, accompanied very effectively by John Blair's obbligato violin...
...The piece discards symbolism for suggestive bits of narrative...
...For this listener, that song will never be the same...
...He cleared the air...
...His best disc, however, is his latest, Richie Havens' Record (Douglas SD-779...
...As protest rock becomes more social and impersonal it inevitably moves, as Ed Sanders has moved it, out of the clubs and concert halls and into what he calls the political and social "battlegrounds" of "peaceful guerrilla love-fare...
...On records Richie Havens has had problems with unintelligible lyrics and inadequate material...
...The program ranged from Beatles and Dylan tunes ("Lady Madonna" and "All Along the Watchtower") to original pieces of considerable power, such as "Run, Shaker Life...
...Janis Joplin, the singer with Big Brother and the Holding Company, uses another: her voice, an instrument totally astounding in its range, versatility, and raw emotional power...
...1 Sex Idol in view of his wild, cavorting performances and his wild, curling locks...
...Joe and the Fish ask the college draftees...
...But his personal style properly subsumed everything: His guitar is a fast and proficient joy, and his vocal phrasing, reminiscent of the best jazz singers, extracts new meanings from familiar lyrics...
...New York had just had its first fine spring day, and those incredible polychrome people at the new Fillmore East (the resuscitated Village Theater downtown on Second Avenue) were elated all over again...
...According to the New York Times and other sources, tension was eased as "the folk-rock music began thumping forth from a wooded hillock" outside the gates...
...or "This was No...
...People everywhere in the theater covered their ears in response to some of the loudest, coarsest rock music it has ever been my displeasure to hear...
...and in quieter, more complicated tunes like "Cuckoo" the intricacies of her vocal style emerge undiminished...
...and it plays sloppily at times, particularly the two lead guitars...
...The Yippies originally planned to invade the State University dorms at 5:00 a.m...
...Now the Doors have a hit single, "The Unknown Soldier," that violently protests war and almost succeeds as serious rock...
...This San Francisco group opened April 2 with the B.B...
...the long guitar introduction uncovered fresh rhythmic and harmonic possibilities...
...and it has limited shock value...
...and Richie Havens was superb...
...The college administration, however, accused the intruders of seeking disruption and publicity, curiously enough the very results achieved by the police in January...
...Their announced purpose was to "bring joy" and ease the tension and confusion that has filled the campus since the police raid of January 17...
...As the massive array of electronic machinery finished up a chorus of wild crescendo feedback sounds, someone in the audience yelled, "Solid...
...Havens modernizes the traditional "Down in the Valley," sings a moving love lament in variations on two chords ("Noah's Dove"), revitalizes Nat Adderly's "Work Song" (called "Chain Gang" here), and offers a fine variety of blues from down-home ("Drown in My Tears") to gospel ("I'm on My Way...
...Miss Joplin's vocal style resembles that of singers like King and Aretha Franklin, but she has a slight edge over her mentors in range, flexibility and coloration...
...They were tolerable—except for the lead singer who introduced every tune with a little commercial message: "This is from our latest record on...
...The results are at times interesting, at times (the screechingly amplified violin) unbearable...
...Their power is precisely in the laughter and the release of tension they provoke...
...Little Mama...
...the polychrome people glittered...
...At the Fillmore Havens was preceded on stage by a new experimental quintet, the United States of America, and a typical quartet of hard-rockers from England, the Troggs...
...might well have billed themselves as the Threshold of Pain...
...What are we fightin' for...
...Even when Big Brother gleefully assaults the audience with a wall of total sound, her voice can be heard clear above the clamor...
...Groups like the Fugs and the Mothers of Invention get a good deal more corruscating than this, but their appeal is basically the same...
...That night, everything Havens played and sang was gesture without disguise...
...Unfortunately, the group has keyed up its emotional response to nearly everything it plays, whether loud or very loud, silly or sad...
...is one of King's great numbers, a rock blues with a superimposed Latin rhythm...
...It's hard to see why Stony Brook didn't book the Yippies for a whole week...
...Morrison is currently being promoted as No...
...Fixin'-to-Die" and similar protest songs are presented as satiric comedies, not as invective...
...The Troggs, like so many other groups, have picked up the sound of the Rolling Stones without the satiric bite of their lyrics...
...Unlike the U.S.A., though, it uses few electronic tricks and little experiment for its own sake...
...In a different kind of rock protest, the Doors, a musically accomplished group, have deliberately remained inside the concert halls and chosen a serious, highly theatrical stance to deal with social issues...
...King's guitar improvisations were masterly, whether filling, backing, or piecing out a solo: In "How Blue Can You Get...
...This is one means, I suppose, of bringing "life" into the concert hall...
...more than most pop-folk singers he seems to need and respond to a live audience...
...In the middle of his March 30 performance he paused to address the audience: "I hope you all appreciate . .. what a groovy day this was...
...Still, Something Else Again (Verve FTS-3034) is a qualified success: Although it would be nice to hear the vocal to "New City" more clearly (it has unusual jazzlike chord changes), the whole of the second side, including the title tune with its duet for Havens' sitar and Jeremy Steig's flute, is exciting music...
...B. B. King, one of the grandfathers of rock 'n' roll, played the kind of rhythm and blues that made him famous—that free yet formalized music with all the riffs, breaks, and changes in the "right" places...
...Country Joe and the Fish are among the few who effectively assume an impersonal comic stance by mastering a number of rock styles, which they demonstrate in the Fixin'-to-Die album...
...Their striving after "significance" through sex and cloudy symbols was plain in their first disc (see NL, August 28, 1967) and more pronounced in their second, Strange Days (Elek-tra EKS-74014), which, however flat, had lucid and beautiful moments...
...with musical assistance from Ed Sanders' Fugs and Country Joe and the Fish...
...Though they were confronted upon arrival by the Suffolk County Police and a barred gate, the Yippies eventually managed to get their concert and "guerrilla theater" skits going...
...What's Wrong...
...There ain't no time to wonder why;/Whoopee...
...The showdown may come this summer in Chicago between officials and the many rock bands planning to attend the yip convention...
...3 on the Top 40 in Scotland for a week," etc...
...remained tied up tightly in their own bags...
...we're all goin' to die...
...Country Joe played a new song, "Pot Bust," and his famous "I-Feel Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag," a burlesque of country-and-western from the album of the same name (Vanguard VSD-79266...
...The approach is as honest and intense as Janis Joplin's voice is dazzling...
...His tight, sexy, striped suit and spread-leg stance reminded me of the early Elvis and an awful British pop music film of several years ago, The Young Ones...
Vol. 51 • April 1968 • No. 9
