BRIAN AUGER AT 75 & 35

The British jazz-fusion musician Brian Auger is 75 today (18 July 2014) and is still recording and performing. To mark the occasion of this significant anniversary, here is the interview he gave me 40 years ago, and which was first published in Melody Maker on July 27, 1974. It's a time-capsule now - a reminder of how things stood back then, at a moment of great mutual unease between rock and jazz and when a jazz person like Auger was recognising a break-out into pioneering complexity by the pop figureheads of Tamla-Motown:

BRIAN AUGER has been stomping round the commercial radio stations as part of his duty in promoting his latest album Straight Ahead by the Brian Auger Oblivion Express.

             “We’ve spent the last three months on tour in America, covering just about everywhere. I have very few plans for working in England: two weeks at Ronnie Scott’s Club starting July 22 and that’s about it. But we are busy on another album.

            “We cut a live album while we were in the States and at present we’re mixing that. That’ll take quite a while to sort out because there’s so much to listen to: three nights of it, done at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go in Los Angeles.

            “But I’m very pleased with it; hopefully we can make it a double, and make a presentation thing of it – and try to get it out for October.”

            Did Auger find the contemporary music scene exciting, bearing in mind that he was one of those musicians who started out in jazz, not rock?

            “Yes, in a way. I do see something new happening. You have to look at it in terms of various scenes. There’s an English rock scene, for example, which I don’t really think I fit into.

            “All the people I feel a connection with – that I’ve listened to and been influenced by – have been out of black American music: from blues through to early jazz, Charlie Parker, hard-bop, Miles Davis, Coltrane, and then people like Herbie Hancock; Ray Charles even.

            “And now what’s exciting is that there’s a whole stream got going in the States – Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, Curtis Mayfield: those guys have been in Tamla, or round about that sort of level of musicianship, and they’ve now sprung forward, using sort of jazz harmony.

            “The whole thing has taken a turn into a new music, in fact. And that’s the kind of scene I’ve always felt for.”

            Did Brian think this new black music has been influenced, en route, by any white American jazz-rock fusions? Had anyone like Frank Zappa contributed in any way?

            “Well Zappa’s a strange example, because he’s really out there on his own. A brilliant musician, and he’s written some great things – he really knows his music. Up to a point he’s contributed. But people like Stevie Wonder, restricted for years, suddenly came out and did their own thing and knocked everyone out.

            “There seemed to be a lull all of a sudden, for a year or so, when in Europe anyway we weren’t hearing those things; and then suddenly there’s a whole stream that’s there.

            “The thing is, inevitably the mainstream of rock is feeding on information drawn from either the classical side or the jazz side or both. That’s what’s there: those are the two areas which contain the harmonic knowledge necessary for the rock scene to evolve.”

            Brian went on to talk about what was happening when he first started playing music professionally.

            “Oh, well, first it was the end of the Cyril Davies-Alexis Korner blues era; I was far more into playing jazz. I was playing jazz organ, and about six months after I started doing that I met Long John Baldry, who saw us in Manchester. Now his Hoochie Coochie Men thing had just ground to a halt and he was looking for someone to act as a sort of MD – someone to just take care of everything for him. So we were talking about putting something together; and he had another guy, name of Rod Stewart, who he said was pretty good – I think maybe we could have him in. And we had a young lady who was just answering Yardbirds fan mail in our office at the time, whose name was Julie Driscoll.

            “I’d done a session with Julie on a first single, so I suggested she should come in too, and we’d do a whole package show, which would go right across the whole spectrum from sraight, pure blues – which Baldry did very well – to Tamla and Sam Cooke stuff, which Rod was very much into.

            “And then Julie was into a funny mixture of things – some Tamla things, but also Nina Simone and Aretha Franklin. And I was doing more jazz material. So, after a year and a half working with all that lot, I knew exactly what areas of rock really interested me. Having decided, I came out, and Julie and I formed the Trinity to do our thing.”

            But way back before that, what had been the music that had had real impact on Auger? What had he listened to before he ever started playing at all?

            “Oh, right back when I was ten or eleven? I used to listen to early Stan Kenton records, and Shorty Rodgers. West Coast jazz, mainly – they were the more easily available records to buy. Then I heard some of the Blue Note catalogue – Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Miles: and that was it. Once I’d heard that, that was it. The guy who influenced me most was a guy called Horace Silver, a really funky bluesy hard-bop jazz player who had his own band (and still does). And then of course one always listens to guys like Charlie Parker: there’s so much information there.

            “That’s how it all started off, from there; and because it was bluesy stuff, it wasn’t too hard for me, when I started playing organ, to align myself with the blues field.

            “Another great influence I should mention is Eddie Harris – not someone who is too well-known. I’d been listening to Miles Davis – to ‘Freedom Jazz Dance’ on the Miles Smiles album, and I’d assumed he’d written that number; and then when I looked I found it was by this guy Eddie Harris.

            “I thought, you know, who the heck’s that – he sure writes good things. So I looked round and came up with an album by him on Atlantic, which I really liked. He’s very funky, very down-to-earth. So I listened to a lot, and in fact we recorded a couple of his things later.”

            Auger had long been raving too about another jazz keyboards man, McCoy Tyner.

            “McCoy Tyner was the late John Coltrane’s piano-player, and he’s my favourite keyboards player. He’s one of those guys who comes along and suddenly makes that strange harmonic turn, and just puts piano-playing from the earth to the moon, and you say ‘Wow! How the hell did we get from there to here?’ And then a lot of people start to work at it. I should imagine that a lot of people like Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, all those modern keyboard-players, have all come out from this guy, although he’s relatively unheard of. An excellent, excellent musician – a fantastic player; deserves so much credit and gets so little. He’s definitely my man. Anyone who can continue Coltrane’s work, and has actually broken that harmonic barrier and let everyone else in – if one could ever achieve that in one’s lifetime, that would be enough.”

            I picked Auger up on the mention of Herbie Hancock, whom he also admires.

            “Yes, I’ve been into Herbie Hancock for a long long time, but more recently he’s been one of the people on which the rock scene has stamped itself – and in a very authoritative way. Some of the very best musicians now cannot avoid its influence. I was in Philadelphia a while back, and I went down to see Herbie Hancock, and I was expecting something very ethereal – horns and close-voicings, pretty and rather nebulous – because the last album of his that I’d got was like that; very difficult music. When I got there it was quite different. He had an unbelievable band. It was rock – or anyway a fusion of rock and jazz. Who knows what to call it?

            “It’s just music now, good music, and that’s how it should be. And the fact that the Headhunter album by Herbie Hancock got to about No. 10 on the American charts, and took about six or seven months to do it, means that we’re really into one of those periods when it’s not not impossible to sell good music. I’d like that to be clear to all the record companies.”

            I wondered whether Brian Auger looked back at the Trinity with fondness. Did he still regard that as good music, or did he, like many artists, find his old work a slight embarrassment?

            “Well apart from one or two tracks, which have faded a bit, most of the stuff I’m happy to say stands up very well. I think it’s because the Trinity was put together for a particular function, and that was to make a bridge the rock scene as it was then – around 1965 – and the jazz scene.

            “And those two scenes in England at the time were totally separate. At the time it wasn’t easy. We laboured on for about two years and the pop people said ‘What the hell are they playing?’, while the jazz guys said ‘Oh! God! I can’t listen to that: it’s commercial!’ So we were in a sort of limbo for a while.

            “But as you see, it had to go in that direction – because to make the rock scene evolve itself it had to turn to jazz (or to classical music). There was going to have to be a fusion of one or other of those things with rock. And now of course it’s happened. I think the Trinity albums stand up quite well, mostly.”

            We turned to the question of what Julie Driscoll is doing now:

            “Well, as you may remember, the band came apart around 1969 or ’70 – we had a hell of a lot of management hang-ups and pressures which nearly drove us right round the bend; so what with trying to put up with that, and trying to put up with the pressures of being on the road almost full-time, the quality of our lives suffered so badly that it just wasn’t worth it. It got to a point where you could have offered us anything and we wouldn’t have done it.

            “Plus we were let down very badly at the end, and were left with nothing – for four years’ work. So Julie took the attitude that if that’s what can happen in the business, I really don’t want to be associated with the people who can do that. I felt more or less the same way, but I went out and started a new band and set up as an independent, whereas Julie just stayed really in the background.

            “She’s done a few gigs here and there, done a little bit of recording but that’s all. We’re still in touch, though – still great friends. She was in a bit of a car accident a while back – which was not only unfortunate for her personally, but also messed things up because at that time we were about to get together to record a new album, and that’s gone by the board now.

            “Maybe we can do it later, in the States or something. I think a lot of people would be interested in that, and I’d like to do it anyway.”

_______

FRANK ZAPPA

Frank Zappa died 20 years ago today. I met him once, in his hotel in London when he was there in the 1970s suing the Royal Albert Hall for cancelling a gig they'd contracted to host (on grounds of anticipated obscenity). I attended the trial, a wonderful prolonged comedy, for Let It Rock magazine, and interviewed him in his commodious hotel suite one mid-afternoon. Room-service arrived bearing an enormous tray of flambuoyantly British afternoon tea. Zappa handed me a cup & saucer, picked up the teapot and asked: "Shall I be Mother?"

Here's the obituary I wrote for, ahem, the Daily Mail in 1993:

Frank Zappa, who has died of cancer in Los Angeles at the age of 52, might well be seen as the last wild man of rock, were it not that on the one hand Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard are still alive, and on the other that Frank Vincent Zappa, born December 21, 1940, was a composer and musician whose work ranged far wider than “rock” suggests.

For many, he will remain the man who gave the world The Mothers Of Invention, and albums called “Lumpy Gravy”, “Weasels Ripped My Flesh” and “We’re Only In It For The Money” (this last a savage parody of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” artwork). His breakthrough came on the West Coast as a bohemian avant-garde was becoming the mass “hippie” movement, and with early songs like ‘Call Any Vegetable’, ‘Who Needs The Peace Corps?’ and ‘The Brain Police’, Zappa made himself famous with equally savage satirical attacks on both the gullible hippie young and their parents, while appearing in early publicity shots sporting a flowery dress along with a distinctively swarthy moustache and Imperial beard, and with his long hair up in bunches.

Having gained an entree into the world of rock celebrity, however, Zappa put himself at the cutting edge of studio technology and was a pioneer at integrating modern “classical” music, jazz and rock in complex, witty ways. In the end, he offered us thirty years’ worth of music across what was an unprecedented, and remains an unrivalled, breadth of musical terrain.

Zappa’s life and work always displayed dramatic contradictions. An artist of the most demanding musical sensibility, he never outgrew a taste for smut-songs, always missing the critical point by defending them for their “humour” and “sexual honesty”; a talented self-publicist with a trademark flair for grotesque-joke titles, he was always committedly serious about his work; a workaholic disciplinarian who despised the use of drink and drugs, he chose for his early image that of laid-back leader of an anarchic drug-fuelled hippie band. A loud champion of “groupies”, he was one of the very few men in rock to stay married (to Gail Sloatman) for over 25 years; an effective political campaigner against the New Right televangelists in Reagan’s America, he never considered himself a liberal or a supporter of the left. A fine rock-guitarist, he was a steadfast enemy of mainstream rock music; a “classical” composer, he was always quick to bring into his band jazz musicians of promise and talent, including George Duke and Jean-Luc Ponty.

In the end, perhaps, Zappa came to see musicians as purchaseable units, like editing-suites or amps: part of the baggage the composer needed to finance and deploy. Or not, in the case of rock musicians. His 1986 release “Jazz From Hell” was made, one track excepted, entirely on the computer-keyboard instrument the Synclavier: dispensing with musicians yet sounding like lots of them.

The crunch came in 1988, when the rock tour that would be his last collapsed after 81 shows, Zappa sacking most of the musicians because they were all in dispute. The rehearsals had lasted 10 hours a day, 5 days a week for four months.

As the me-decade ended, Zappa made trips to Russia and Czechoslovakia. He got caught up in “facilitating American finance” (unsuccessfully) for a Russian horror film, and trying to help sell frozen muffins to the USSR. Zappa said: “I met all these very interesting people who wanted to do a wide range of business things with people from the West... [I was] kind of like a dating service.”

In 1990, Zappa revisited Prague, President Havel urging him to be a cultural liaison officer for the new régime in its approaches to the west. In 1991 he returned to Czechoslovakia and Hungary to celebrate the departure of their Soviet troops, and at a Prague concert gave his only guitar performance since the rock-tour collapse. In London he told BBC Radio 4 that he was still doing “a feasibility study” on standing for the US Presidency in '92, by getting US radio listener-response. By the autumn, no decision had been announced, and then his illness was announced instead.

Despite myriad other activity, serious composition had long been Zappa’s main concern. The vegetable-fetischist with the dope-head rock group and the aesthetically-challenged publicity (older readers may recall the “Zappa the Crapper” poster) had become a serious composer, his work performed in concert-halls alongside Cage, Stravinsky and other moderns.

In 1983, overseeing a Barbican performance of his orchestral works with the LSO and the young American conductor Kent Nagano (now with the Hallé), Zappa was unhappy at the orchestra’s apparent drinking in the interval, and said that on the subsequent recording-sessions, repairing trumpet-section faults needed forty edits in seven minutes’ music. These are undetectable because, as Nagano concedes, “Frank was such a superb editor.”

Zappa also worked with Pierre Boulez, but felt that the Ensemble InterContemporain, too, was under-rehearsed, for its 1984 performance of his work in Paris. “I hated that premiere,” he wrote. “Boulez virtually had to drag me onto the stage to take a bow.” Five years later, asked to identify his “primary goal”, Zappa answered: “That’s easy. I’m still waiting for an accurate performance!”

In the event, he lived to hear something he probably felt came close. Since contracting cancer, Zappa had cancelled many public appearances and new works. His last completed major project was “The Yellow Shark”, a collection of work commissioned by the Ensemble Modern and premiered at the Frankfurt Music Festival in September 1992. Zappa had planned to conduct part of each evening’s performance but in the event could manage the baton only for small portions of the first performance. The work was nevertheless an immediate success, and under Zappa’s own supervision yielded a CD recording, released only last month, which, happily, can stand as a decent last release from one of the major creative figures of modern music.

THE IMPORTANT TOM WILSON

Extraordinary that it's now 35 years since Bob Dylan's first “electric" record producer died. But Tom Wilson was much more than Dylan's man. Here's the entry on him from The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia :

Wilson, Tom [1931 - 1978]
Thomas Blanchard Wilson Jr. was born on March 25, 1931 in Waco, Texas, where he attended the A.J. Moore High School - ‘the first school in Waco designed to educate the Negro youth’, as its Historical Marker now notes. Founded in 1881, its third Principal was Tom Wilson’s grandfather, Prof. B. T. Wilson; its fourth was Tom’s father, who took over in 1934. The school’s inspiration was Booker T. Washington and his maxim ‘Take what you have and make what you want’; the school’s motto was ‘A better Moore High through better behavior’; and though its list of what it aimed to instil in its pupils included ‘To refrain from excessive theatre going’, in general Tom Wilson became an exemplar of the school’s positive stance, however old-fashioned and ameliorative it seems today.

Wilson, tall, dark and handsome and an affable young man with a throaty Texan drawl, became a Republican and, as 1970s friend Coral Browning said bluntly: ‘Tom felt let down by blacks. He felt that after the civil rights successes of the ’50s and ’60s, blacks should stop complaining and get on with it. He felt they caused many of their own problems by carrying such large chips on their shoulders.’

Wilson thus occupies an interesting position in the history of those decades from the voteless 1930s to the civil rights struggle and beyond: the son and grandson of educated middle-class blacks inside the segregated school system of the South, he gained a place at Harvard, becoming President of the Young Republican Club and graduating cum laude in 1954. On the other hand he also helped run the Harvard New Jazz Society, got involved with radio station WHRB, moved to New York, founded the jazz record label Transition in 1955, produced radio programmes as from 1958, became jazz A&R director for Savoy, then worked for United Artists and Audio Fidelity before being hired as a staff producer for Columbia in 1963 - the first black producer in the history of the company - by which time he was also executive assistant to the New York State Commission for Human Rights.

Not only did he become Bob Dylan’s producer from Freewheelin’  to Highway 61 Revisited - which is to say, the producer of many of Dylan’s ‘protest’ anthems, the work that saw him go electric and of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ - but then when he moved over to MGM he signed FRANK ZAPPA’s Mothers of Invention and put his own career on the line to let them make an extravagant double-LP as their début release, throughout which they were articulating the kind of anarchic bohemian ‘filth’ that was anathema to Wilson himself (though in truth, of course, Zappa himself was an obsessively hard-working disciplinarian, very anti drugs and alcoholic excess). Zappa said years later: ‘Tom Wilson was a great guy. He had vision, you know? And he really stood by us...’ While producing the second Mothers album, Absolutely Free, Wilson was also supervising the Velvet Underground’s début album The Velvet Underground and Nico. Wilson was, too, the hands-on producer of its track ‘Sunday Morning’, and (albeit against the band’s wishes) edited and re-mixed the album’s other most important tracks: ‘Heroin’, ‘Venus in Furs’, ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ and the especially brilliant ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’.

Sometimes his interventionism paid off and sometimes it didn’t. It paid off on The Velvet Underground and Nico; it paid off when, after producing the acoustic SIMON & Garfunkel début album Wednesday Morning 3 A.M., he took its track ‘The Sound Of Silence’, added a rhythm section and some electric guitar, issued it as a single without consulting them at all, and gave them a no.1 hit.

It didn’t work with Bob Dylan when Wilson tried the same thing on him first; nor did it work, in the end, when Wilson tried to make decisions over Dylan’s head in Dylan’s presence in the studio. To start with, though, they got on fine. Wilson replaced JOHN HAMMOND for the final Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan session on April 24, 1963 - a year to the day after the first session - because ALBERT GROSSMAN tried playing games about Dylan’s Columbia contract and Hammond rightly felt that Dylan himself was not trying to walk out on him or the label, that a producer switch would be diplomatic and maybe that a young black producer would be harder to reject. Even if that were a factor in the mix, it would not have weighed heavily: one thing Hammond, Dylan and Tom Wilson had in common was an absolutely undeflected view that people were individuals, not race representatives. When Dylan ‘dropped out of’ supporting civil rights and singing ‘protest’ songs, he always explained this in exactly these terms: that he knew, and wanted to keep on knowing, black people as people, not blacks; and Wilson felt the same. ‘He lived his life unapologetically as a human being, not as a black man,’ said his friend, the cookie magnate Wally ‘Famous’ Amos.

That session yielded ‘Girl of the North Country’, ‘Masters of War’, ‘Talkin’ World War III Blues’ and ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’ - plus the lovely ‘Walls of Red Wing’, given to Witmark as a music publishing demo, circulated widely many years ago and finally released on The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3 in 1991. (Hammond is credited as the producer of this track on the box set liner notes.)

When they worked together on Dylan’s third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, beginning on August 6, 1963, Wilson rightly allowed Dylan full control. That first day yielded the great, much-neglected ‘North Country Blues’ and attempted several other things, among them the stellar ‘Seven Curses’: another recording that circulated in bootleg form many years ago and saw official release in 1991. The next day’s session yielded four album tracks: ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown’, ‘With God On Our Side’, ‘Only A Pawn in Their Game’ and the glorious ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’. What a day’s work. Further sessions on August 12 and October 23 were separated by momentous events: Dylan’s star-making appearance at the NEWPORT FOLK FESTIVAL that August 17, the appearance at the historic March on Washington D.C. on the 28th, and the less career-important but artistically significant writing of ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’ at JOAN BAEZ’s house in California, followed by a performance that no-one appears to have taped, of the two of them sharing vocals on a début outing for that song when Dylan made a guest appearance at her Hollywood Bowl concert on October 9.

The August 12 session had yielded various further outtakes for retrospective issue nearly 30 years later - the turgid ‘Paths of Victory’, the worse ‘Only A Hobo’ and the magnificent ‘Moonshiner’ (among the greatest vocal performances in Bob Dylan’s entire canon) - but nothing for The Times They Are A-Changin’; but October 24, while adding ‘Eternal Circle’ and ‘Suze (The Cough Song)’ to the list of material held back till 1991, also gave them the album title track plus the lovely ‘One Too Many Mornings’. A further session on Hallowe’en finished off the album with ‘Restless Farewell’. A few days earlier, Wilson had been in charge of the recording of Dylan’s concert at Carnegie Hall (October 26, 1963) from which, as from his New York Town Hall concert of April 12, it had been planned to make a live album, Bob Dylan In Concert, which got as far as a tracks selection and a Columbia job number (77110) but never did see release. No producer credit is given on the tracks issued retrospectively.

The fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, was recorded entirely in one day, June 9, 1964, again with Wilson producing. They also came out with a long-since circulated take of ‘Denise’, the magnificent ‘Mama You Been On My Mind’ and early attempts at ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’. The album was released to a mixed response in August, and on Hallowe’en Wilson supervised another live recording, Dylan’s New York Philharmonic Hall concert, which was released 30 years later as Bob Dylan Live 1964 - The Bootleg Series Vol.6.

Things between them changed after that. In December 1964, Wilson got drummer BOBBY GREGG and others to overdub backings onto the Bob Dylan track ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ (released in 1995 on the Highway 61 Interactive CD-ROM, with packaging that implied that the whole recording had been made back in 1961) and onto three tracks from the Freewheelin’ sessions, ‘Mixed Up Confusion’, ‘Rocks And Gravel’ and ‘Corrina Corrina’, all of which had to have their original backing tracks removed for the benefit of this futile exercise. In an otherwise entertaining and acute article on its subject, ‘The Amazing Tom Wilson’, blogger Eric Olsen makes the absurd claim that it was Wilson’s electric overdubs on ‘House of the Rising Sun’ that planted the seed for Dylan’s electric flowering (‘The folk spell was broken’). Wilson doesn’t need his achievements augmented by that sort of claim; it’s enough that he was the producer of Bringing It All Back Home - achieved in two days of sessions in mid-January 1965 - and of the first sessions for Highway 61 Revisited, that June 15 and 16.

The first of these two days yielded the fast version of ‘It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry’, one take of which - the wrong take, it might be argued - was released in 1991 on The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3, as was the same day’s ‘Sitting On A Barbed Wire Fence’ and a fragment of an early try at ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. (Other outtakes of this were issued in 1995 on the Highway 61 Interactive CD-Rom.) Far more importantly, the second day’s session produced - and Tom Wilson produced - the classic take of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.

It was Wilson who brought in AL KOOPER, to watch and play a bit of subsidiary guitar. The story of how Kooper switched to organ, Wilson tolerated this, Bob Dylan liked the organ part and got it turned up in the mix and it led to the perfect take of the song - all this is well known: but a key exchange between Wilson and Dylan in the course of all this has usually been played down. When Dylan says ‘Turn the organ up’ and Wilson replies ‘But he’s not an organ player’ Dylan is often quoted as merely saying, ‘I don’t care: turn it up’ - but in fact what Dylan says is ‘Hey, now don’t tell me who’s an organ player and who’s not. Just turn the organ up.’ The difference is small but telling; in that Dylan response is contained all his resentment, perhaps going back a considerable time, at what he perceived as Wilson’s high-handedness: an attitude on Wilson’s part that means he’s always going to under-attend the artist’s instincts and is likely to fail to catch the moment as it flies.

Fair and reasonable or not, that was the end between them. When the sessions for Highway 61 Revisited  resumed on July 29, Wilson had been replaced by BOB JOHNSTON.

Among many other distinctions in a relatively short life, Tom Wilson also produced the Blues Project and ‘discovered’ and signed Hugh Masekela, went into music publishing and was a founding co-owner of the Record Plant studios in New York. At 47, he died of a heart attack, at home in LA, on September 6, 1978.

[Main sources: Eric Olsen, ‘The Amazing Tom Wilson’, posted 23 Oct, 2003 on the Blogcritics.Org web page http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/23/154347.php, incl. for the quotes from Coral Browning, Frank Zappa & Wally Amos; Waco City Directory 1934; Social Security Deaths Index; Moore High School data from its alumni reunion webpages seen online 21 Feb 2006 at www.wacoisd.org/ajmoore/alumni/history.htm; other sources include Al Kooper, Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards, New York: Billboard, 1998 and Robert Shelton, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, New York: Beech Tree Books / William Morrow, 1986.]

GOODBYE TO A REAL MOTHER

Very sorry to learn of the death on Christmas Eve of Ray Collins, one of the original Mothers of Invention, at the age of 76. Collins was born in November 1936 (some reports say 1937), grew up outside Los Angeles and had been a singer in various R&B bands around LA, including Julian Herrera and The Tigers, before befriending Frank Zappa, who joined Ray's group The Soul Giants (Ray, Roy Estrada, Jimmy Carl Black and Davis Coronado), which changed its name to Captain Glasspack & His Magic Mufflers before shifting personnel and leadership and transmuting into the Mothers.

Ray was recorded by Zappa singing ‘Louie Louie' at the opening night party when Frank bought his Cucamonga Studio back in 1964; he and Frank co-wrote the Penguins' single ‘Memories of El Monte'; and Ray was the Baby Ray of Baby Ray & The Ferns who made ‘How's Your Bird?' c/w ‘The World's Greatest Sinner' ahead of his settling into Motherhood.

Ray was there on Freak Out!,  Absolutely Free  and Cruising With Ruben & the Jets, and his live performance highlights included, arm in arm with Roy Estrada, a memorable send-up of the Supremes' ‘Baby Love' at the wonderful Royal Albert Hall concert of September 1967. He remained one of the Mothers until almost the end of the fourth line-up, though he was absent on 1967's We're Only In It For The Money  and disappeared after the Uncle Meat  album of 1968. It was rumoured that he had quit at least four times in this period; he quit formally in January 1969, though he re-surfaced as a guest artist on  Apostrophe (')  in 1974. I asked Zappa what Ray had done in the interim, and he told me: “He went back to being a carpenter, which is what he'd been before he was a full pro musician in the first place."

Collins left with nothing, and never performed again after the mid-1970s. He washed dishes to help support his daughter while she was a community college student in Maui, Hawaii, where he slept on the beach. (For much more on his later life see David Allen's article in The Daily Bulletin (from which this photo is taken). 

© Patrick Brayer

Goodbye Ray.

LOOK, NO Es

Thanks to an inspiring ‘Anticipatory Plagiarism’, by Paul Grimstad, in an LRB this month (Vol.34, no.23), I’m constructing this blogpost in an Oulipian way: that is, with a voluntary artificial constraint upon its composition. So: a roughly chronological listing of thirty classic tracks  -  and, as with this paragraph’s wording, no song or artist on my tracklist can contain any word with that oh-so-common, hard to banish vocal (as Rafa Nadal and his compatriots would say):

1.  Jambalaya - Hank Williams

2.  Black Hills Of Dakota - Doris Day

3.  Midnight Shift - Buddy Holly

4.  Goin’ Down Slow - Howlin’ Wolf

5.  Chicago - Frank Sinatra

6.  Diana - Paul Anka

7.  I’m Walkin’ - Fats Domino

8.  Raunchy - Bill Justis

9.  Hoots Mon - Lord Rockingham’s XI

10. Splish Splash - Bobby Darin

11. Rockin’ Robin - Bobby Day

12. What Do You Want? - Adam Faith

13. Mona Lisa - Conway Twitty

14. North To Alaska - Johnny Horton

15. A Thousand Stars - Billy Fury

16. Asia Minor - Kokomo

17. Cryin’ - Roy Orbison

18. Hurt - Timi Yuro

19. Any Day Now - Chuck Jackson

20. Sukiyaki - Kyu Sakamoto

21. Turn, Turn, Turn - Judy Collins

22. Colours - Donovan

23. Homburg - Procol Harum

24. Abraham, Martin And John - Dion DiMucci

25. Lay Lady Lay - Bob Dylan

26. Waiting For A Train - Boz Scaggs

27. Domino - Van Morrison

28. Solid Air - John Martyn

29. Waka/Jawaka - Frank Zappa

30. Up Town Top Ranking - Althia & Donna

DEATH OF JIM MOTORHEAD SHERWOOD

photo credit unknown

There's no sadder day of the year to die on than Christmas Day, and I'm sorry to have learnt that one of Frank Zappa's crucial early colleagues and Mothers of Invention, James Euclid Motorhead Sherwood, died this Christmas Day just gone, aged 69.

A book of mine is a Zappa biography (lumberingly titled Mother! The Frank Zappa Story), and though I'm not very proud of it  -  I couldn't afford much first-hand research and it was taken up by two terrible publishers, one after the other  -  it meant that for a while back a long time ago I was reading avidly about Zappa's earliest career moves . . . and as that much-missed giant of the music told me in an interview in London in 1975, Motorhead was there right from the start. They may have met at high school as early as 1956, though Zappa claimed later than it was only when he had a regular gig at a club called the Village Inn in Sun Village in 1964 that Motorhead came to his attention, playing saxophone while a club regular called Cora sang the old blues song ‘Steal Away'.

Soon afterwards Zappa held a party at the little studio in Cucamonga CA he'd just bought from Paul Buff (for $1000, in August 1964), and “At the party was Beefheart, a guy named Bob Narcisso, Ray Collins, Motorhead..."

Jim Sherwood became a Mother of Invention while he was dating Joni Mitchell. Zappa told me, possibly inaccurately: “Yeah, he picked her up in New York some place and brought her to the house. And I remember her sitting in the corner,  playing guitar, singing to herself. She had a beret on the first time I saw her and she was leaning over the guitar and she was drooling. That was before she had a record contract."

Jim was in the line-up from the time of the group's second album, Absolutely Free, recorded in 1966 and released 1967, through to the Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels Ripped My Flesh albums issued at the end of the decade. He left in late May or early June 1970 (but took part in the movie 200 Motels  -  Zappa said he'd “got into scientology for a while, but then he recovered") and came back as tenor sax player and ‘guest vocalist' a decade later on Zappa's own album You Are What You Is, released in September 1981.

In later years Motorhead played in and recorded with post-Mothers spin-off bands The Grandmothers and the Ant-Bees and on the 1995 Sandro Oliva album Who the Fuck Is Sandro Oliva?!? on Muffin Records. (To answer the question, Oliva is an Italian guitarist and wannabe Zappa lookalike who plays at Zappa tribute festivals.)

Jim Sherwood, born Arkansas City, Kansas, May 1942; died December 25, 2011, believed to be in Los Angeles.