In December 2008 15 year
old Alexandros Grigoropoulos was shot by the police. US percussion
player Matt Weston, of whom I think I never heard, created a tribute
to Grigoropoulos' memory, which is a powerful, loud work of electronics,
turntablism (it seems, it might also be the kaos pad), and percussive
instrumental bits, all recorded loud, in your face, without becoming
too obvious noise based. This is also only partly rooted in the
world of improvised music, but perhaps owes more to old good musique
concrete in the old analogue sense of the word. Quite a powerful
work of heavy electronics for a heavy subject.
A new orchestra piece, composed, arranged, performed and produced by Matt Weston. Cover design/artwork by Plum Crane. Here's an early review from Dave X at Startling Moniker:
This is not an EP. It’s a three-track, sixteen-minute treasure, filled
to the brim with Weston’s signature percussion and electronics. If Tom
Waits was an orca (a drunken orca, natch) then he’d make music like
“You’re Not That’s Right,” which opens the disc. Off-kilter, sobbing
kettle drum noises issue mournful wails amongst the careless clattering
of tin. “I Just Saw Fog and Dust” brings us to a clearing in an
electronic cuckoo forest, where Weston is a one-man Arkestra.
Amazingly, this doesn’t seem too hyperbolic as I listen to it for the
umpteenth time today. But really, nothing compares to the final act,
which I have described poorly as sounding like an ocean liner AND a
freight train capsizing in the Arctic. “This October, All Octobers” is
Weston’s opus– an arresting and majestic work of musique concrète that
not only evokes nostalgic disaster and sci-fi film, but simultaneously
re-awakens listeners to the immense power of sound. Most highly recommended.
Seasick Blackout will be released on December 22, 2009. It will be available on iTunes, in record stores, and through the 7272Music website. You can hear excerpts here.
December 3rd marks the 30th anniversary of the Who concert tragedy in Cincinnati. The what and how of the incident has been more than amply detailed elsewhere (starting with Chet Flippo's detailed and probing 1980 cover story in Rolling Stone).
More than any other band of similar stature in the 70s, the Who explicitly addressed class politics.
The key difference between the motivations of the Who and those of,
say, Led Zeppelin is that the Who spoke for, to, from, and with their
audience, always looking for the kind of give-and-take that
defined them in their formative years as the favorite band of working-class London
mods; Led Zeppelin only needed the audience as passive affirmation of
their cool solos and pants. No audience input beyond that was
necessary, much less desired. This difference in aims between the two
bands (or rather, between the Who and nearly every other 1970s arena-rock band) was part of what sent the Who into a tailspin of frustration and
confusion. As Daltrey said in the mid-70s, "At one time, the kids told
the musicians what they wanted. Now they sit back and let the
musicians preach to them." The Who were more frustrated by this turn
of events than any band of their era; indeed, such an arrangement was
advantageous to many of the large-scale arena-fillers that now
pervaded the scene. They didn't have to challenge their audience, and
their audience didn't challenge them (or, more accurately, the bands
simply ignored any challenges from the audience). Everyone was happy,
or so it was assumed.
In an age when the demographics of rock & roll are symbolized in
part by a Les Paul hanging on the wall of a CEO's office,
the idea that a rock band playing at a sports arena once represented an
unwanted and unwelcome intrusion seems difficult to grasp.
Yes, the rock fans who filled the arenas (and represented their surest
draws, often keeping them in the black when sporting events couldn't) in the
1970s might have been as rowdy as the sports fans, but to the venue
owners they still represented remnants of the counterculture, the younger brothers
and sisters of anti-war activists (or Vietnam vets
themselves), holdovers from the 60s wanting to test and stretch the
limits of official tolerance. The arena owners responded in kind by
forcibly herding the audience into vast open spaces with shitty
acoustics, treating them with the kind of contempt only workers footing
the boss' bills could engender. In the case of Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum, the policy seemed to be that only 4 out of 16 doors were opened for massive throngs who had been gathering for hours in order to get the best seats. Previous incidents at shows by Led Zeppelin, Elton John, and Paul McCartney were ignored by the promoters and arena security. Fuck these kids, right? Their enthusiasm is annoying, and they don't deserve much better than to be shoved into dangerous bottlenecks.
In December of 1979 Pete Townshend was back on the road with the Who, about
18 months after he swore never to tour again, and 16 months after Keith
Moon died. As is largely forgotten now (understandably, given the
lifeless shows on their early 80s tours),
their 1979 performances, with former Small Faces drummer Kenney Jones
on drums, were widely praised. There seemed to be a renewed sense of
purpose, though without new material, that purpose wasn't entirely clear. Just
how entrenched the Who were in what was quickly cohering into the new
mainstream of mass entertainment didn't become apparent until the
Cincinnati tragedy. As Dave Marsh pointed out, "[the Who] were especially shaken not
just by the fact that something like this could happen at a rock gig
but by the fact that it happened at theirs."
Mike Royko wrote about the Cincinnati concert's attendees as "barbarians" (somewhat incredibly without affixing a shred of blame to the greedy concert promoters or inept police and security at the scene -- in fact, Royko didn't mention them at all). This prompted a slew of angry letters from which Royko naturally chose the most poorly-written to bolster his case. But this was a world that was utterly alien to Royko, under all circumstances (Walter Cronkite displayed a similarly embarrassing unwillingness to meet the culture on its own terms by lazily branding the concertgoers "a drug-crazed mob of kids"). Townshend spelled out the difference between rock audiences and the mainstream entertainment industry (which, at the time of this interview -- 1974 -- were still relatively distinct and separate) at :20 in this clip:
Five days after Cincinnati the Who played at Chicago's International Amphitheater. The concert was broadcast via closed-circuit to movie theaters around the Chicagoland area (one of which was the Varsity Theater in Evanston, where as a kid I had my first exposure to Beatles films, Monterey Pop, The Producers, Plan 9 From Outer Space, and Ken Russell's campy deconstruction of the Who's Tommy -- and I still wish Russell had taken Townshend's suggestions and cast Stevie Wonder and, no kidding, Charles Mingus). While the rest of the band is reliably solid, Townshend is coked to the gills and drunk off his ass. He seems bent on wiping out any memory of the Cincinnati tragedy as self-destructively as possible, but at one point during "Music Must Change" he spears the camera with a look that says, "Is this what you want? Is this what you, the audience, are willing to die to see? Is this what you promoters are willing to endanger peoples' lives for?" and tears into a series of staggering windmills, determined to confront everything in that instant (at 6:32 in the following clip).
Sadly, subsequent concert tragedies are little more than footnotes
in the histories of those bands, and even less of a part of what Greil Marcus called the "rock &
roll frame of reference." In January, 1991 three fans were killed at
an AC/DC concert
in Salt Lake City. In May, 1996 a young Irish fan was killed in the
mosh pit of a Smashing Pumpkins concert in Dublin. And in June, 2000
nine concertgoers were trampled at the front of the stage during Pearl
Jam's set at the Roskilde festival in Denmark. In a way, it could
almost be argued that the Cincinnati tragedy laid the groundwork for
such incidents to be seen as commonplace -- and for promoters to
continue the practice of "festival seating," conveniently blaming the
bands and audiences for any problems, and absolving themselves of any
responsibility, despite the greed that set the stage for these
tragedies in the first place. The more of these incidents that occur, the more promoters and other assorted music-business weasels can claim it's just something that goes with the territory.
Not that the bands
involved -- and the Who in particular -- were entirely blameless. In the
aftermath of Cincinnati Roger Daltrey proclaimed they would do
"everything we can" to prevent future incidents. But not only did the
band continue to play general admission shows, they played them in
massive arenas and stadiums, some with several times the capacity of Riverfront Coliseum. At a number of shows on their 1982 tour they
had to urge the (sometimes 90,000+) crowd to move back. In 2006
Townshend made reference to their "long time ban...with very few
exceptions" on general admission shows, which was pretty disingenuous
given that no fewer than eight of the shows on their 1982 tour -- in the largest venues possible -- were
general admission, as were many of the shows on their 1989 tour. I don't want to suggest that the Who were unfeeling or uncaring about the situation (and on numerous pre-1979 concert recordings you can hear band members asking the crowd to move back -- they obviously had some sense of the potential dangers of general admission shows). But, like any business that puts profit above the health and well-being of people, the music industry simply couldn't sit around and wait for things to be properly sorted out. There's a show tomorrow night, and the next night, and the next, and for the band to cancel the tour to stay in town and speak with the victims' families (something Townshend in retrospect regretted they hadn't done) will just cut into the loot.
Greil Marcus pointed out in his 1980 Rolling Stone interview with Pete Townshend that Cincinnati
"...has
not become part of the rock & roll frame of reference, as Altamont
instantly and permanently did. It seems to me that it was an event
that should have signified that something new about the relationship
between bands and their audiences, or about rock & roll as mass
culture, was taking place. It ought to have forced people to reexamine
a lot of assumptions, a lot of what they took for granted. That hasn't
happened."
As Dave Marsh wrote in Before I Get Old, "Nor would the new Who ever encourage it to happen. That was perhaps the biggest tragedy of all."
