A question I surprisingly never get asked is: Pieter, when are you going to write that definitive history of ‘90s lo-fi rock, also known as the pinnacle of rock’n’roll? Not today, sorry. This is a place for snapshots to chronicle its rise and fall.
Rock’n’roll is of course the story of man’s attempt to record music as crudely as possible. Sure, musicians always go astray. From the moment the drummer demands two microphones for the drums (one for the drums and one for singing is allowed, extra mike for the conga set – eh, no) – you’re astray. From the moment the well-meaning technician asks if the guitar can be turned down just a little – you’re astray. A rehearsal? A second take? – What do you think this is? A union?
But somewhere down the line rock’n’roll will sort itself out.
Hiss will return, you bet.
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Anything worth doing in popular music, Paul’s probably done it first but without any sense of decorum.
For the start of lo-fi we might go back all the way to 1970’s ‘McCartney’ album. Primitive home recording – check. An artist who is continually baked – check. Songwriting starts after you press record – check. But lo-fi is not any home recorded music, nor is it just any badly recorded music (though other forms of badly recorded music are also laudable). Lo-fi means a certain perversity that is missing from the first ‘McCartney’ album.
No such trouble on its 1982 successor, which is only partially unfairly maligned. ‘McCartney II’ is the sort of record Ween spent a career trying to emulate. Don’t tell me you don’t hear the kinship between ‘Coming up (like a flower)’ and ‘Push th’ little daisies’. Backstory – one morning a couple of newfangled synthesizers and beat boxes arrived chez McCartney. A couple of days of frantic recording later, voilà, 20 improvised, meandering jams done. Proof of McCartney’s edgy – for the time – attitude: only one Christmas song in the bunch (sadly not included on the album).
True, the album may be home recorded, but most lo-fi artists don’t have a control room in their basement/garage/bedroom. But the album is nicely in the spirit of lo-fi due to McCartney’s extraordinary ability to stay baked the whole session through. Legend has it he composed all the material in a single 8 ½ hour sitting. Later he admitted that period included dinner and a movie, which seems altogether more likely.
Still, for a result as jawdropping as Temporary Secretary.
Ridiculous? It took five days in a Japanese prison to get McCartney’s consent for the record’s release.
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Over in New Zealand, the brothers Kilgour with Robert Scott on bass laid another foundation stone for lo-fi as the Clean. Their first single ‘Tally ho’ was overproduced on 8 track, but that was twice as much as they needed anyway. For the rest of their 1981-82 initial run they would rely on a trusty TEAC 4 track.
Lo-fi principles practiced by the Clean include:
- The wisdom of naivety
- The struggle with technical competence
- Get a ten year old to do your artwork
To infuse their mystique, the Clean invented a whole New Zealand scene around imaginary label Flying Nun. Selected band names include the Tall Dwarfs, the Verlaines, the 3Ds, the Jean-Paul Sartre Experience, the Bats, the Gordons, the Skeptics and so on. Generations of lo-fi bands and journalists played along, but none of these bands actually existed.
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Meanwhile back in Britain…
One of lo-fi’s quirks is the inspiration it draws from a severe strain of early ‘80s post-punk (Fall, Swell maps, Young marble giants…). None of its adherents produced any music of note.
More promising are the works of two idiosyncratic British artists.
Fresh from the Soft Boys non-career, a ‘bland junk’ expensive second solo album and a subsequent ‘sickened’ retirement from the industry, in 1983 Robyn Hitchcock was determined for something different. Initial session as a trio had to be abandoned when a disgruntled neighbor responded to late-night rehearsals by blasting Motorhead records through the walls. His compadres preferred the Motorhead. In the end, Hitchcock worked out the arrangements by himself on a portastudio.
‘So I went and made Trains in three or four days. It was great to be back in the studio after three years and not sit there with a bunch of musicians and all that. But I’d worked it all out on the portastudio, so I did know what I was doing. I was organized and I wasn’t drinking while we were recording.’ Too well prepared and sober to qualify as full-blooded lo-fi, but still an interesting step on the way there.
A wide-ranging set of piano études, a capella rhymes and sparse oddly moving songs full of sideways wisecracks. Hitchcock went on to a career of many mistakes, not the least of which was playing with Peter Buck, who stayed no matter how many Motorhead albums they played.
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Nick Saloman added two powerful new archetypes to the lo-fi lexicon. That of the eternal loser, for which he found inspiration in rock’s luckless multi-millionaires like Neil Young and James Taylor, not that he needed much inspiration. And secondly, that of the inveterate and chronically prolific amateur artist.
Saloman passed through a succession of dead-end bands since the late ‘40s with names like Oddsocks, the Von Trap family and Room 13. When even his back-up plan, replacing Stacy in his beloved Hawkwind, fell through, Saloman retired to his chosen profession of hoofsmith.
A freak motorcycle accident in 1987 laid waste to this latest of dreams, but the insurance settlement provided the means to purchase Robyn Hitchcock’s 4 track portastudio. An endless stream of self-produced albums followed, all bearing the legend ‘recorded in the bedroom on a 4 track Tascam Porta One. These include symptomatic titles such as ‘Miasma’, ‘Acid jam’, ‘Triptych’, ‘Aunt Winnie album’, ‘Sexorcist’, ‘Christmas in Walthamstow’ and ‘Saloman II’.
Critics usually introduce Bevis Frond carefully to the public, proposing one of their plaintive riffrock nuggets. Here’s 15 minutes of ‘Miskatonic variations’ featuring David Tibet chanting.
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In the US SST’s in house producer Spot pioneered a whole new approach to bad recording for bands like Black Flag, Husker Du and the Minutemen, an important step on the way to full-blown lo-fi. For the Meat Puppets, always the label’s most frazzled artists, this soon proved too constraining. ‘When we approached Spot to record our next album in the style of ‘McCartney II’, he just wouldn’t hear of it.’ They set out on their own.
‘Our original plan for ‘Up on the sun’ was to borrow an 8 track tape recorder from a local music store and set up a do-it-yourself studio at our soundman’s house, free from the distractions and delays that plagued the recording of our previous albums.’
Of course, ideas which are feasible in such musical hotbeds as New Zealand and Walthamstow, UK, don’t always work in the musical dryland of the US. ‘Unfortunately the tape recorder we’d borrowed used a proprietary configuration, and when the music store asked for its return, we were unable to find another machine compatible with our tapes.’
Duly chastised the Puppets returned to Spot for the album, and got rewarded with a US Top 10 production job. The lo-fi tapes, including such standards as ‘Mother American marshmallow’ and ‘Embodiment of evil’, lay in storage for 15 years. But lo-fi would soon return to SST and to the States.
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