Daniel Johnston spent most of the ‘80s passing out his cassette albums to people on the street. Recorded in his basement to the accompaniment of rinkydink organ, piano or plain a cappella, when half of his tape deck broke down, he responded by recording each tape separately – making each a unique, now valuable, work of art.
Johnston combines each and every characteristic of lo-fi in one package. Alone among lo-fi artists he even appreciates Paul McCartney’s records other than ‘McCartney II’. Little wonder that for many fans it was just too much. For other it remains a perplexing triumph of courage over hardship.
In later years rockumentaries would offer a glimpse behind the artistic persona, revealing an avid golfer, a friend of Groucho Marx in his later years who recalls fondly the time he and Iggy Pop sang ‘Short’nin bread’ at Phil Spector’s mansion.
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The lo in lo-fi stands for Lou. With the final track on Dinosaur jr’s fabulously badly recorded second album ‘You’re living all over me’, lo-fi returned to SST. ‘Recorded on two crappy taperecorders by Lou + Lou alone in his room’, initially Lou wanted to use the band’s bottomless funds to re-record his Good Vibrations for the ‘80s with the Wrecking Crew at Sunset Sound, but Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon convinced him these crappy songs would sound best under heavy beds of static and tucked away at the end of the album.
A legend was born and from such humble beginnings Lou would build up a world class discography under such aliases as Sentridoh, Sebadoh, Folk implosioh, Smoosh, Lou and All Girl Summer Fun Band. People remember him best from the multi-million MTV reality series ‘How Lou can you go’ in which he manufactured a tortured, bedroom recording artist.
When fashions changed in the early 2000s, Lou was unable to secure himself an amateur female drummer and his luck turned. But even with his vast fortunes tied up in litigation surrounding McCartney copyrights, Lou remained the sociable and affable man who, full of good cheer, dropped off free turkey at J. Mascis’ and Murph’s every Thanksgiving. At least for a while. After the break-up of Dinosaur Jr J.’s new drumming career went nowhere. Likewise Murph’s singer-songwriting efforts.
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Lo-fi was in the air and the public was going crazy for it. Even the dinosaurs were beginning to take notice, it seemed. Looking back however, the involvement of the big studio elite in lo-fi was just a series of misunderstandings.
Like the time Bruce Springsteen was so wracked over the loss of his canoe, he accidentally delivered the wrong master tape for his new album ‘Nebraska’. Later on, the home recording of ‘Tunnel of love’ was motivated by more prosaic reasons. ‘I was doing this heavy concept album on how I didn’t love my 10-year-younger supermodel wife. I felt I should do it in our home. It felt right.’ Not that concept albums about supermodel wives would ever qualify as lo-fi anyway. Maybe if she was made of cardboard…
It was the same for other veterans. J.J. Cale: ‘I just got so laid back that I couldn’t make it into any real studio anymore. Started doing them on my porch. It gave me a couple of years at least before the inevitable Eric Clapton guest appearance, but a Capitol agent gave him my home address. So my next album became ‘Travel log’’.
Much was made of the deep and desolate lo-fi sound of two early ‘90s Bob Dylan releases, ‘Good as I been to you’ and ‘World gone wrong’. A Bootleg Series intern later revealed: ‘Those records were just [Don Was produced] ‘Under the red sky’ at half speed. We couldn’t believe nobody noticed.’ But then, nobody had noticed ‘Under the red sky’ either…
The dinosaurs who tuned into the promise of lo-fi the most were the unlikely duo of George Harrison and Jeff Lynne, neither of which could be suspected of any McCartney appreciation. ‘He gave me a wah wah,’ as Harrison bluntly put it, ‘Like he doesn’t know I prefer clean slide lines.’ ‘Never gave me anything…’ grunted Lynne.
For the recording of their breakthrough single ‘Handle with care’ they went as far as loaning the instruments from similarly down-on-their-luck dinosaurs. Then they recorded the track in Dave Stewart’s garage. Jeff Lynne would later express deep hurt at the suggestion the record didn’t really sound like it was recorded in a garage on borrowed instruments. ‘Hey, I tried to make it sound as bad as I possibly could, ok? What do you want from me? At least we didn’t sound like one of those terrible bands on K Records, right?’
Fair point.
J.J. Cale still on the run:
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People were getting confused on what was and wasn’t lo-fi anymore. It was time for Sonic Youth to step in. ‘I first heard of lo-fi when I picked up a copy of Metaphysical Musician Quarterly from a trashcan outside my friend Mike Watt’s place,’ states Thurston Moore, now a professor-in-residence at the Sorbonne. ‘Or maybe it was hip-hop. I don’t really remember anymore. One of those new musics.’
As it happened, Sonic Youth had a number of meta-recordings on the shelf which had been vetoed from inclusion on their regular albums, songs like ‘(silence)’, ‘Two cool rock chicks listening to Neu’ and a karaoke cover of Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to love’. ‘I just didn’t get where those were coming from at all’, admits drummer Steve Shelley, who declined to play. Undeterred, Thurston picked up some beat boxes and Sonic Youth got to work. ‘Because we didn’t have to worry about melodies or riffs and stuff like that, the songs came fast and easy,’ remembers Thurston, who makes his debut as a rapper on 35 second fragment ‘Tuff titty rap’.
The songs veer from mindfrying proto-post-rock instrumentals (most of it) to spoken word (‘Me & Jill’), Blaxploitation funk (‘Hendrix Cosby’), a pair of Madonna covers and lots of hip-hop flirtation (‘Moby Dik’, ‘Tuff titty rap’). ‘I always get those two mixed up,’ admits Thurston. ‘We titled the record as a signal. In the wake of the Travelling Wilburys people were getting real snarky about Paul McCartney. That wasn’t the fun scene we’d started with the Huskers and Dinosaur. We wanted to bring it back to the source. ‘McCartney II’, you know. That and graffiti.’
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‘It was time to get rid of the McCartney shit,’ says Scott Kannberg, formerly known as Spiral Stairs of prime lo-fi band Pavement.
Kannberg was a blues purist from Stockton: ‘that sound, a primal noise…makes you want to dance.’ He still waxes eloquently about Buddy Guy, even after the troubles over some ‘borrowed’ Muddy Waters riffs. ‘I met him one time, you know. He was doing some repair work in Gary’s studio, standing on a ladder in his overalls. And I was there recording. Crazy.’
‘Pavement always was an equal partnership. I handpicked the players, the songs, the arrangements, artwork and did the quality control meetings all by myself. But the others had their input too. For sure, that’s how we ended up with this crazy record ‘Slay tracks’, the blues but filtered through modern ears.’
Stephen Malkmus shrugs. ‘I was always more of a Cheap Trick fan myself. I mostly remember Scott yelling ‘pentatonic’ while I was doing my parts. To this day, I don’t know what pentatonic means.’ Drummer Gary for his part emulated his hero David Grohl from up and coming classic rock band Scream. ‘He was a monster. Nasty learned a lot from him too.’
And there you have it. They don’t know how they did it either. Over four Eps (‘Slay tracks’, ‘Demolition plot J-7’, ‘Perfect sound forever’ and ‘Watery, domestic’) and one album, this threesome laid down the holy grail of lo-fi, then imploded spectacularly amid accusations of selling out to the Eagles. ‘No regrets,’ smiles Kannberg, ‘I wanted our music to be like a sonic highway and I think we did it.’
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