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Rating: It's as if I can see them, Jeremy and Nikki, very young, in the late '70s London, on an ordinary day in the middle of someone else's workweek, leaning against the counter at Rough Trade, the record store on Kensington Church Street, just a short walk from the intersection with Portobello Road.
Jeremy Gluck and Nikki Sudden (whose real name was Adrian Nicholas Godfrey) probably met for the first time in the summer of 1978. Their respective bands, the Barracudas and the Swell Maps, occasionally performed together, and perhaps fate had already decided everything since then. Jeremy and Nikki had become friends, and as often happens between friends who are passionate about music, they would buy records at Rough Trade and plan to collaborate and record some songs together. Indeed, over time they organized a couple of sessions and recorded some demos, but nothing ever came of it.
By the autumn of 1986, the Barracudas were history, as were the Swell Maps, and Jeremy, who was about to get married and already had a young daughter, suddenly received a call from Nikki, who was recording at Woodworm Studios, an old Baptist chapel turned recording studio (owned by Dave Pegg of Fairport Convention) in Barford St. Michael, a village in the idyllic English countryside north of Oxford. Gluck recounts that Sudden told him: "I'm recording in a great studio with one of the greatest guitarists in the world and with my brother, the drummer from space. Why not join us for a week, so we can ruin an album with your bovine growls?".
Jeremy informs his future wife, contacts the record label Flicknife Records for expense coverage, and packs his bags. Appointments with destiny cannot be postponed.
Nikki, his brother Epic Soundtracks, and Rowland S. Howard, who were already recording Nikki's solo album, Dead Men Tell No Tales, and the album by Nikki and Rowland, Kiss You Kidnapped Charabanc, were now simultaneously engaged in recording three albums. However, they completed the recordings of I Knew Buffalo Bill in just over a week. Most of the tracks were composed directly in the studio, with Gluck providing vocals and lyrics, while Sudden and Howard crafted the music with Nikki's "Civilized Guitar" and Rowland's "uncivilized guitar," as they themselves described them.
Jeremy recalls: "I was in awe of Rowland as a musician, and we were such different people that I expected nothing more than a functional connection. Standing and watching - listening - to Rowland doing his parts in our songs is one of my indelible memories as an artist. It was incredible. It was more than improvisation; it was like tearing the veils between musical realities. That he was one of the greatest guitarists of his generation is beyond question. Rowland... all I know is that when we were preparing the overdubs for 'Looking For A Place To Fall,' he asked me what I wanted. What do you answer to Rowland S. Howard? Of course, play what you like. And he did. It was incredible. Deafening, but fantastic. He knew damn well what I was looking for."
Drawn by the sulfurous atmosphere emanated by these four horsemen of the Apocalypse, masters of debauchery and perdition, Beelzebub himself, Jeffrey Lee Pierce of the Gun Club, decided to join them, as he heard about the project and offered his electric guitar for a few tracks, contributing with his presence to the creation of the underground legend of I Knew Buffalo Bill, which was described by New Musical Express as the album produced by "the first indie supergroup" and funded by Flicknife Records, which didn't even know what it was paying for. Nikki Sudden recounted, however, that "as long as the studio rent and the dealers were paid, we didn't worry too much."
The first indie supergroup. A handful of lost souls from three continents. Five restless minstrels, Nikki and Epic brothers by birth and all the rest by destiny. Five cult musicians who gave life to an album of ramshackle Roots-Rock, unique in its kind. The roots of English folk, American rock, and country sifted with the hard and pragmatic attitude of punk. An album of worn-out and wonderful ballads embellished by the electric slashes of Howard's wailing guitar. A strange and marvelous record, filled with a sense of desperate malaise, perhaps generated by the demon of alcohol and heroin haunting the protagonists of the story. A passionate and vibrant disc but one in which at the same time a sense of devastating torpor sneaks in. An album that smells of autumn, rain, and dead leaves.
Other material from the sessions of I Knew Buffalo Bill, would be published on the EP Burning Skull Rise and later included in the 1999 and 2010 CD reissues, further expanded.
The album begins with "Looking For A Place To Fall." Doomsday guitars, Garage Rock drums, and a poignant melody. "The rain outside my window has been used a thousand times... I'm just looking for a place to fall." "Time Undone" is another of the strong pieces of Buffalo Bill, characterized by a wonderfully sinister atmosphere thanks to Rowland S. Howard's menacing guitar, who also plays bass on almost every track on the album, here pulling out of the hat an obsessive and hypnotic acoustic bass line. “Gone Free”, "Gallery Wharf", “Four Seasons of Trouble,” “All my secrets,” “Time goes faster” are masterpieces of modern Folk. The fresh and dynamic Garage rock of “Old Man's Dream” is a direct descendant of the Barracudas' surf-pop. Howard's slide guitar imposes a drunken pace on "Sorrow Drive," making it even more sadly sincere: "Sorrow Drive, I’m living but I ain’t alive". "Episode In A Town" is even more dazed and drunken, with the chorus intoning "drink that bottle down, boy. drink that bottle down" while Rowland's slide derails up to the pulsating explosions of “April North” and "The Proving Trail," where the punk lurking beneath the ashes emerges. The thrilling "Burning Skulls Rise," later taken up by Rowland and Lydia Lunch in Shotgun Wedding, is another blazing comet crossing the sky shrouded in sadness of this strange, dissonant, elusive album. A disc of those that grow slowly, listen after listen.
After the work was done, Jeremy would leave music to focus on his career as a journalist, writer, and screenwriter and on his three children, only returning to his first love after about twenty years. Jeffrey Lee Pierce would die at thirty-seven, on March 31, 1996, due to a brain hemorrhage, and Epic would follow him on November 5, 1997, at just thirty-eight, from unknown causes. Nikki would also pass on March 26, 2006, and Rowland would leave us down here on December 30, 2009, due to liver cancer. Both had just turned fifty.
On October 20, 2005, Nikki Sudden wrote that he hadn't forgotten those days he had had the privilege to share with his friends and his brother, who died long before his time, at the end of 1986. And although he hadn't seen Rowland in about ten years, since he had returned to Australia, and the meetings with Jeremy had become increasingly rare over the years, he planned to record together again and ended with: "It’s been almost twenty years since the last time we went into a studio together. But what are twenty years among friends? Too long a time or not enough? The path continues into the sunset, and the sunset is many years away.".
Unfortunately for him and Rowland, it would not be so.
And for us, knowing that I Knew Buffalo Bill will never have a sequel, all that remains is to cherish this little masterpiece jealously and let it play from time to time to remember the survivor, the dead, the immortals, and as in the old movies, where heroes disappeared into the distance in the fiery light of the sunset, imagine that Buffalo Bill still rides towards the setting sun.
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