out beyond the blues

One really amazing thing that happened in the late 1970s -- new paths in guitar playing that weren't from our beloved blues influences nor from our deplored prog dinosaurs. The perfect storm of the era -- punk, post punk, the funk avant garde of James 'Blood' Ulmer and Ornette's Prime Time. The tradition-minded rebel could look to Billy Zoom for inspiration. And I did.

The mavericks among us were looking to a different breed -- Keith Levine (PiL), Marc Moreland (Wall of Voodoo), Alan Riggs (Delta 5), Jody Harris (Contortions), and, my two favorites of that world, Andy Gill from Gang of 4 and Viv Albertine of the Slits.

Andy Gill was a thrilling wake-up call. About 1979, I got ahold of the Gang of 4 debut album, Entertainment!, which was nothing short of a masterpiece. The muscularity of that rhythm section was staggering, and Andy Gill... Andy Gill did to my fourteen year old mind something Cecil Taylor did to my twenty year old mind. He made me think that the way you hear songs and chords and all that stuff had better be flexible, because sometimes the things songs express might need something other than chords as usual. As Frank Zappa said, sometimes there isn't a chord ugly enough to express what happens to your tax dollars.

Gang of 4 had a fierce anti-conservative message, and a rhythm section that was bottom heavy funky. Gill's guitar playing grooved like Jimmy Nolen did (the guy on the James Brown records), but he spiked it with aggressive and dissonant chords, chords ugly enough to point up to Thatcher's England. I've never heard a guitarist with more presence on his instrument.



Viv Alberine -- of the Slits -- came at it from a different operating system. They started out as an all-girl first generation punk rock band. Their original drummer, Palmolive, wound up in The Raincoats. So for the Slits' landmark first album, Cut, they brought in Budgie to play drums. Most people know Budgie's drumming from Siouxsie's records, and they should. He was one of the most creative musicians of a very creative time and place. The Slits, Modettes, Delta 5, and Siouxsie each did a lot to impact a post-Patti Smith idea of just what a woman rocker is.

But he wasn't the only one in that band who was. Bassist Tessa Pollitt and guitarist Viv Albertine were obviously big reggae fans, to be sure. But they also had a slinkier, mischievious thing. Budgie's Bruce Smith, who also played in The Pop Group, another incredible band of the period. The first Slits record he appeared on what "In The Beginning". The follow-up to Cut was the innovative and underappreciated Earthbeat, a record that prefigured so much of the post-punk worldbeat fusion.

"Animal Space" is a great, brilliant guitar record. It's a high point for everyone. Ari Up's vocal is sotto voce menace, and the rest of thre band sounds like evil dub. I saw the live at Emerald City on Halloween 1980, and they were truly frightening. They sounded like they'd made as dark a deal with Satan as anyone else to emerge of that era, including Jefreylee Pierce. True haunted stuff.

The American in me always points to American music as the roots stuff, as the voice of the have not. But alas, this is not a strictly American problem, and the great roots expressions of it aren't always rooted in something Woody Guthrie would recognize.

One again, Roger Miller was right about England: It does swing like a pendulum do.