Best Of The Stray Cats: Rock This Town - Stray Cats

 

Provenance: Yet another from my Toronto haul. Never been a huge fan of Stray Cats but this was cheap and I'm partial to a little rockabilly now and then.

Review: Stray Cats fall into that weird category of purist revivalist music that saw acts like Sha Na Na and Showaddywaddy gain footholds in the culture at various times, despite no real explanation for it. True, the 1980s did see some of the OG rock 'n' rollers hit chart gold as their music was exhumed for movies and adverts; am I underestimating the power of nostalgia?

Unlike their near contemporaries The Cramps, Stray Cats play it straight. Which, on the one hand, is admirable, but on the other makes for a fairly monochrome listening experience. The vast majority of the tracks on Best of... are built from a foundation of bass, drums and guitar; I almost punched the air when, two-thirds of the way through, I heard a fucking saxophone. Oh, and Slim Jim Phantom (top tier name by the way) plays a drum kit consisting of snare, bass, hi-hat and crash cymbal, a minimalist approach that no doubt played well to the greasers and ensured no Neil Peart style histrionics.

This short, ten track compilation kicks off with the Stray Cats' most recognisable, and arguably best, song, 'Rock This Town', which is a genuine shack-shaker that makes all the right moves. The next track though - '(She's) Sexy & 17' (gender in parentheses, presumably so nobody gets the wrong idea) is a little noncey, in a Chucky Lee Byrd way. Also, two tracks in and I'm bored of Brian Setzer's weedy voice. I'm almost bored by his guitar playing, which trades creativity for period fidelity. Luckily, numero tres is a great doo-wop number called 'I Won't Stand In Your Way', which reveals that Setzer is much better playing the sap than the tough.

A shame, then, that a chunk of the Stray Cats oeuvre which appears here is predicated on them being a bunch of flick-knife wielding alley bruisers. Setzer's lapdog yelp doesn't cut it on 'Stray Cat Strut' or 'Rumble In Brighton', not even when backed up by his two goons, who look like they have acromegaly or rickets or perhaps both. 

The collection reaches a nadir on 'Gene & Eddie' (that's Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochrane to you plebeians), a song that both quotes from and utterly mangles the work of those two doomed genii. It's the kind of concept I tend to despise, with the exception of ABC's 'When Smokey Sings' and maybe Nils Lofgren's 'Keith Don't Go' (depending on which way the wind is blowing at the time). Both hagiographic and tautological, just once I'd like one of these 'tribute' songs to give their subject a proper shoeing. Actually, Stray Cats shouldn't have bothered at all, considering that a few years beforehand, Ian Dury & the Blockheads had produced the far superior 'Sweet Gene Vincent', which deals with the legend in a much more interesting and playful way.

There's not a huge amount that's wrong with this, especially if you like wearing leather jackets, fashioning your hair like a duck's arse and pretending that slapback echo is the pinnacle of music production. Sure, at one point they nick a line from a Lazy Lester tune, but that's the business. Sometimes Lee Rocker walks up the neck of his upright bass, sometimes down it. Slim Jim speeds it up and slows it down. Brian Setzer plays his Cliff Gallup and Scotty Moore riffs with aplomb. The Best of... is a slick, adroit bit of graverobbing, which has its moments but is too in thrall to rock 'n' roll's golden age to be more than a curio.

A Boy From Tupelo - Elvis Presley

Provenance: I've been to Graceland, you know. It's the roughly seven-year anniversary of the road trip I took around the Deep South of the USA, during which I met the person who I would later go on to marry.

That journey proved to be the catalyst for me to fall in love with a whole bunch of things, aside from another human being. There's New Orleans, and fried catfish, zydeco and the Great Smoky Mountains, the Arkansas State Fair and Twelve Bones BBQ, small town hospitality and the alluvial expanse of Mississippi's Delta Region. I know, I've reeled off a bunch of cliches - and I stand by them all. For a dumb, wide-eyed young'un from Bournemouth, it was something the hell else.

Rather unexpectedly, I also found myself falling in love with a certain Elvis Aaron Presley. I'm driving down the highway in my rental, destination Memphis. I want to be the biggest tourist around, see Beale Street and the Stax Museum and, of course, take a pipe at Graceland. I've got a passenger with me, a large raw-boned chap called Tommy, a former Aussie Rules player I picked up in Nashville. He's here on business, but taking some time out to travel a bit. About twenty miles out of Memphis and fiddling with the satellite radio I get an Elvis station - live from Graceland - on Sirius XM. (Closer into town and I'm on the newly-christened Isaac Hayes Boulevard, which is nice because it wasn't named after a racist.) W head south toward the airport, hang a right and we're almost there.

Graceland isn't a place for the fainthearted. It's a monument to both a great artist and to folly. It is excessive, tacky, a glittery testimony of all that is crass. To stumble around this bejewelled carbuncle is almost nausea-inducing, and one has to consciously remind oneself that actual human beings dwelt in this funfair house of mirrors. And you think, yes, the star of such cinematic triumphs as Clambake and It Happened at the World's Fair would live in such a place. Yet on the ride in, you heard something pulsing on the radio, something vital...

We got into Graceland fairly late, and as Tommy and I were leaving we noticed trestle tables being set up and barbecues being lit. So we decided to do what any two folk in our position would do - don our suits (don't ask why I packed one, but a great call), hustled our way into the function and spent the evening partying on the verandah, food and drink courtesy of the Tennessee Department of Tourism. We even witnessed what must've been the most high-pressure gig for an Elvis impersonator to perform. Yet even in that pale imitation, there's a whisper of something great...

Review: This handsome three-CD (and book) box-set contains every recording of Elvis spanning the period 1953-55, including service acetates, radio performances, studio takes and singles. I'm only reviewing disc one, containing the acetates, the RCA masters and those immortal Sun masters that cemented Elvis' early reputation.

Nick Tosches is a man who can spin a yarn, the kind of guy whom I imagine considers the gospel truth to be a minor inconvenience when there's a good story to be told. His biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, Hellfire, might be based in part on speculation and hearsay but it's also scintillating. Similarly, there's some tall tales told in Country: the Twisted Roots of Rock 'n' Roll but amidst the mythologising there's some important history on the genealogy of American country music (spoiler: it's all British, and often very old). The book also takes a stand for white hillbilly music's influence in the formation of rock 'n' roll; if not a wholly equal partner with black rhythm 'n' blues, Tosches nevertheless states a strong case - citing plenty of evidence - to suggest that a) there's a clear and obvious country ancestry to rock 'n' roll that's deeper than white performers appropriating black musical forms and b) that blues and country music were cross-pollinating each other for decades anyway. All this is worth holding in mind with regards to A Boy From Tupelo.

From the collection of early acetates you can hear why Sam Phillips initially didn't think he had much on his hands. In a restrained, slightly quavery voice Elvis sings a few torch songs accompanied by his own rudimentary guitar playing. Nothing here for Tosches, or anybody else, to write home about. Even the first couple of Sun masters are on the soporific side. And then, all of a sudden - magic, pure magic, as rockabilly bursts forth from the speakers in full colour. Elvis, along with guitarist Scotty Moore and stand-up bass player Bill Black, tear into Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup's 'That's All Right' with a wild assurance. Gone is the thin reticence that defines Elvis' sophomore efforts; instead, he meets the percussive thump of Black's bass with a swaggering, swooning brilliance. If ever a recording sounded white hot it's this bad boy, people, it's this one.

There's so, so much more to come; Bill Monroe's waltz 'Blue Moon of Kentucky' whipped up into a 4/4 country-blues; the supreme cover of Roy Brown's jump blues 'Good Rockin' Tonight'; a crackling 'I Don't Care if the Sun Don't Shine'; and possibly Elvis' most potent two and a half minutes ever committed to wax, his cover of Junior Parker's 'Mystery Train' (Scotty Moore is sublime on this cut). Even here, in this formative (and utterly electric) period, Tosches was able to muster up a moue of disappointment; he pinpoints the false start of 'Milkcow Blues Boogie' ("hold it fellas, that don't move me - let's get real, real gone for a change") as the moment Elvis first demonstrates his own awareness as a commercial performer, effecting a compromise that would forever taint the rest of his artistry. Well, it's an interpretation, and from a man who certainly knows his onions.

Given the technological and stylistic(?) advances(?) that have been made since Elvis started stirring things up in a small room in Memphis it can, at times, be hard to see past this compilation as a collection of historical curios. Certainly, for ears attuned to popular music created a bit later - say, from The Beatles onwards - it can sound a bit primitive. I recall a conversation with a friend where he spoke approvingly of rockabilly revivalist fashion but said he couldn't fully dig the whole package because of the limited sonic palette the music drew from. I grok. I'd flip that around and say that Elvis, and a whole bunch of contemporaries (and near contemporaries) coupled simple music to simple instrumentation and created some of the most exciting and life-affirming music of the last century. Sinuous, dangerous, slinky, sexy, sweaty, belligerent and beguiling - that first flush of rock 'n' roll was where it was at, folks. Let's get real, real gone, for a change.

Surfing With The Alien - Joe Satriani

Provenance: When I was a kid I wanted to play guitar really fast.

Review: Ah, like one's first kiss or first pint of beer, one's first shred album tends to linger long in the memory. Some would say I played it safe with a rather canonical choice, the Pride and Prejudice of axe-strangling, if you will.

I'm not an expert in early music (though I know one, if that counts) but the route from Paleolithic civilisations finger-painting on cave walls to those very same digits sweeping some sweet arpeggios feels like a curious one. First came pre-verbal hollers and rudimentary percussion; next, blowing through tibia bones of animals; I guess it's then pipes and lyres; back to the human voice for a spot of plainsong; thanks to the advent of scoring, ever more elaborate instrumentation began to be employed up through the Baroque and into the Classical era; and then, if we skip a few steps, greasy loners playing the mixolydian scale very quickly in their bedroom. Someone commission me to write the history of western music, please.

It's weird, though isn't it? Take the choral tradition, which is bound inextricably with religion. Like the architecture of the great cathedrals, it seems specifically designed to impart the majesty and glory of the sacred mystery upon the individual in a way that bypasses our reasoning faculties. I distinctly recall being in Salisbury Cathedral around six years ago as Evensong commenced. I'm an irredeemably irreligious person but the sensation of hearing that music, in that environment, was awesome in every sense of the word. Similarly, the first time I heard an orchestra playing Stravinsky's Rite of Spring felt like another occasion where I was being shot through with the electricity of pure excitement and elation. Subsequent to both encounters I was compelled to take stock and try to rationalise what had just happened to me, because the sheer power of the sensation I had felt left me a little scared.

So, put those two moments at the top of the list. There have been other, lesser, communions with this otherworldly power before and since, and none of them have involved shred guitar.

Yet Surfing With The Alien is not a bad album at all. Above all the other wankfests that I own, it's the one album that bears repeat listening. As I have aged, the impulse to have my face melted has lessened with each passing year, but there's enough variety here to maintain interest. The melodies are solid, even hummable, and when Satriani lets rip it's never mindless. It may sound like asking for distinctive songs with half-decent melodies is a low bar, but within the shred genre this can't always be taken for granted (see: whenever I get around to reviewing my sole Yngwie Malmsteen album).

When I was younger I was massively impressed with the faster, heavier tunes like 'Ice 9', 'Satch Boogie', 'Crushing Day' and the title track. Now I am more than double the age I was when I first acquired Surfing With The Alien it is perhaps predictable that I like the slower, less speed-orientated stuff like 'Echo', 'Always With Me, Always With You' and 'Circles' (yeah, yeah, if it's too loud you're too old, gramps - whatever). I should point out that 'Circles' does have a really fucking badass solo, and I'm not entirely immune to the dubious charms of finger-tapping.

What does appeal, overall, is an element of the album that must have been a conscious decision by Satriani; to make the guitars sound as little like a traditional guitar as possible. Thus you don't hear anything like the sounds Scotty Moore, Chuck Berry or Cliff Gallup would've made; instead, the sound is heavily overdriven, squeezed, compressed, scooped, echoed, flanged, chorused and anything else that can be done to turn the guitar into extraterrestrial technology. On that basis alone, Surfing With The Alien is a triumph.

This album doesn't lack heart, either. In a genre where the music can sound formulaic or mechanical, Satriani's six-string futurism always sounds like there's an intelligent life form at the helm. I'm not going to say anything as screamingly stupid as "oh, it's the 'Cyborg Manifesto' for antisocial guys who wail on Ibanezes" but I do feel it served as an ur-text for albums like Steve Vai's Alien Love Secrets and Devin Townsend's Ziltoid the Omniscient. There is certainly a thread in the instrumental metal sub-genre that combines playfulness, sci-fi symbolism and technical brilliance. Within that context, Surfing With The Alien is a hugely significant landmark. 

I should also add: playing Satch solos in your bedroom until your fingers literally bleed totally gets the girls. Had to beat 'em off with a tremolo arm.