December 10th – Because I have a penchant for rock
music doesn’t automatically exclude me from
a) Liking other types of music and
b) Liking other types of seemingly at odds with this premis
music.
When I first started out in bands back in, oh, I don’ know,
probably 1966 or 7, we, as did most other bands just starting out, did covers
of the popular songs of the time; this was in the main because we, the band
members, didn’t have the collective intelligence to write original material. Being
fiercely working class it was only after the first year together, when we’d got
to know each other really well, that we had the courage to turn up at a
rehearsal and say;
Hey, guys, I’ve just written
this song; whaddya think?
without having the urine extracted by the other members
because they all thought you’d ideas above your station ’cos everyone knew songwriters
were pretentious fags. So in place of being creative we became copy-artists,
trouble was most of the stuff people liked to dance to was Motown…and it may have passed some of you by that know me but I,
like all my other band mates, am not black. Still this was the last thing to
deter us from cashing in on the preferred musical money-earner. So set lists
which included the likes of Shotgun –
Junior Walker, Baby I Got It – Jimmy
Ruffin, I Can’t Help Myself – Four
Tops, My Girl – The Temptations and Knock On Wood – Eddie Floyd would get
regular airings and along with this we were always on the lookout for the next
thing. Trouble was every other band was also doing the same stuff so it was
only a matter of time before we’d reach our shelf-life and this is what forced
our hand to try writing our own material and introducing a heavier edge to our
covers. Thing was, Motown and Rock were the musical equivalents of Mods and Rockers. We all know how humanity wants (needs) to belong to a
tribe, a group of like-minded individuals who you can mix and feel secure with;
you only have to walk into a side-street pub to feel the threat of alienation
seep under your collar and draw sweat from your neck. Reminds me and apropos of
nothing in particular:
A hyena walks into a
bar, pops his paws onto the counter and asks the barman for a pint of bitter.
The barman, slightly shaken by the animal’s appearance and excellent grasp of
English, pulls the pint and, with a swift look around and a lowered voice says,
“That’ll be eight
pounds please, sir.”
The hyena slides a ten
pound note across the bar and sips the beer whilst waiting for his change. The
barman returns and proffers the change and the hyena nods in the direction of
the beer mat alongside his pint. “There’ll do.” He says.
The barman places the
change down then, after a few short seconds of silence, begins to make small
talk.
“Is it still raining
out?”
“Nope.” Says the hyena.
“Stopped about an hour ago.”
“Oh, good. Don’t want
it to spoil the walk home, eh?”
“No.”
“We…er, we don’t see
many hyenas in here y’know.”
“At eight pounds a pint
I’m not fuckin’ surprised.”
Both sides of the Motown/Rock
musical divide saw the other as the ruination of music and there was enmity
aplenty in the clubs we frequented where many a juke-box was assassinated
because of its musical stupidity and where manly call-outs could and would
emanate from the simple indulgence of a selecting single.
Given this ne’er the
twain shall meet attitude then, it may seem strange that a convicted
rock-felon like me should find Motown
even slightly tolerable but the thing is, the thing is, some of the landmark
songs of the 60’s were Tamla
born-and-bred and spoke of universal attitudes to love and life that rock
sometimes found hard to express; none more so than Otis Redding’s body of work and
nothing more relevant than Sittin’ On the
Dock of the Bay. Written by Steve Cropper (of supergroup fame) the song at
first drew derision from the studio musicians who were to provide the backing.
Mr. Redding’s wife, Zelma, disliked the melody (?) the studio musos were
dissatisfied with the new Otis sound (?) and the senior members of the STAX
label thought it would damage the label’s reputation (?). Using Mr. Redding’s
personal history, Mr Cropper put the song together and it became an anthem for
the time and the political climate as well as (for me) a universal hymn to
economic migration, hopelessness and the plight of black America
When his own plane crashed into Lake Monona in Wisconsin only
one of the seven people aboard it survived, the trumpet player from his touring
band, The Bar-Kays, Ben Cauley, who
went on to perform and record up until 2010, even after suffering a debilitating
stroke in 1989 from which he recovered completely; so, two bites of the cherry
for Mr. Cauley Personally I would have liked one of those two to have been
gifted to Mr. Redding but then, maybe, as Sittin’
On the Dock of the Bay was his last recording before he died…? No, not at
all, that record, that quality of performance and story-telling, it would have
been a landmark disc under any circumstances.
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