I recently watched that marathon of a Beatles thing by Apple that shared the pain of plotting the written song. Here on the last edition of this blog I conflated all of the Marxes. Now one might assume I’d conflate the Lenin’s with the Lennons. But not so much. Like the snarky Bowie line “Lennon’s on sale again”, I tend to sneer at morally dubious musicians with big production budgets hammering out timeful songs. It’s like watching the icky squabbles of a dysfunctional family you know will go on to later successfully divorce. With the possible exception of Ringo (drummers, am I right?), these guys were really angry with each other. Egos paraded around in snapshots and footage of juvenile squabbles.
But the animosity directed at Yoko! It was palpable, undeserved, and leaves one needing a shower. Thus we are reminded how much the whole no girlfriends on tour trope has invaded our collective unconscious. “Watch out, that woman may destroy our creativity”. This is the person that performed at London’s Royal Albert Hall with Ornette Coleman and had otherwise been a successful artist on her own for years prior to John. Clearly she had agency far beyond her association with her husband. Simply by the nature of her art she was the better improvisor.
They met in 1966.
That same year Sonny Sharrock married Lynda Sharrock (aka Linda Chambers). They had met from a mutual musical association with Pharoah Sanders. Now here is a husband/wife collaboration merging the improvisational stance of jazz with animalistic scream therapy. A snippet of some musical lineage would be…Sun Ra to Pharaoh Sanders to Lynda and Sunny, back to Coletrane, Alice, Milford Graves, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry to Ornette. In my opinion this web of players (among others) created a situation for noisy endeavors of all stripes and was set in opposition to the stranglehold of virtuosity.
No, I’m not forgetting Miles. Yes of course Miles Davis influenced rock (or at least jam bands), but it was these other folks that created with an open mind. And because of that they retooled the musical world, which left a void to be filled by descendant genres. I’d give Miles more credit for this but he could be such a Wyntony Marsalisy snob dissing innovators like Cecil Taylor and Eric Dolphy. Punk rock was on the horizon and they’d be needing some poetic license, not trad rules and cutting competitions.
In our meta world of mind…
Yoko had met Lynda, who met Sonny who met Pharoah who met SunRa who met Alice and Cecil and John McGloughlin forgot to meet anybody. Please John, go introduce yourself to Pharoah for Pete’s sake. Or Alice, or rather, take a knee. Yes, John McGlaughlin show fealty to Pharoah, Alice, Sunny & Sonny. Both Johns actually.
Now let’s just say you’re a poor white boy like me, and you’ve experienced what you thought was pretty fucking primitive music. Poison Idea, Butthole Surfers, Eugene Chadbourne covering the Butthole Surfers, Smegma, Caroliner Rainbow Hernia Milkqueen, ….the list goes on. While there actually is much song writing in these bands, they absolutely had a different ethic than historic song crafters. I was fortunate enough to catch onto the freedom of spirit they had grown out of.
Then something magical happens as you realize punk (et al) isn’t so much a chord progression but a stance one adopts to resist rote living. You get a soul full of experiment as you realize you are reversing direction on what you know to be musical evolution You start crowding notes together. You’ve found that your love of an amped guitar has been replaced by the overtoning combination of reed and bell. In my personal experience the saxophone has replaced the distorted guitar, which replaced the auto-tuning technology of squawk boxes. These canaries had become the new thing, the first thing, you play instead of the instrument itself. By the way, Sharrock used no effect boxes early on. He plugged directly into an amp up until the moment he needed the extra volume to compete with what?…an overtoning sax. Damn, that’s a fat sound he had.
Effects pedals and analogue synths became so advanced that an improvisor could kneel down on a stage and immediately satisfy the need for volume without any actual instrument….on the same day they bought the thing no less! Thus completing the circle back to improvisation.
And when I grew up some more the power of the amped and fuzzed guitar had fallen emotionally short. Counterintuitively they were replaced with an antique analog powerhouse, the saxophone. I experienced the reverse of the aforementioned lineage. Or rather, I was, and am, climbing the ladder into the depths of musical history feet first.
Oh heavens, don’t mistake me, I love a good song. They’re so immortal while still being ineffable vibration. But alas, there are joys in overtones that can’t be mimicked by the rote repetition of rock. Improvised sound can’t really be contained because it’s bigger on the inside than out. Seems bursting in all the ways, always. As a spiritually freed musician you will hear music all around, in the warts, the births, deaths, and all. Something new is always revealing itself as groups of people make happy turns in the din, or for that matter, just walking down the street, clashing, then coupling, breathing life into sound lemons, rather than sucking the life out of them.
Long live Yoko. Long live cosmic vibration. The king is dead.
