‘Songs the Lords Taught Me’ – For a small sentimental education of this humble writer of yours. Episode 3: ‘I Was a Punk Before You Were a Punk!’… just tell me, tell me! Tell meeee! (to a young lad for whom These Aliens from Arizona were as important as the Clash)
If one day I were to take power (I quietly tell you that my totalitarianism will always be better than others, trust me), this would be the first executive action I would implement: make listening to the Tubes mandatory for everyone.
Alright, but where have we ended up? Not even the quirkiest of Dictators from the Free State of Bananas or an Elagabalus (forgive me, great Antonin Artaud, it’s for narrative purposes) who has appointed himself as the guide of the Least Cool Site on the Internet (no insinuations are allowed on Scaruffi or Ondarock) would ever think of such madness.
And yet, yes.
Thus a dedicated radio channel would be created, similar to what was done during the Cold War in the USSR in conjunction with the not yet officially announced deaths of the PCUS Presidents, with the task of continuously and unremittingly broadcasting the music of these artists whom unfortunately few besides your Devoted Self are inclined to recognize among the Greatest Geniuses ab rock-urbe (Memphis? New Orleans? Chicago? or directly in Africa?) fondly.
But since in madness resides the purest seed of truth, now I will try to argue.
(a bit of history)
The Tubes, from Phoenix, Arizona (could it be the relentless sun beating down on your head that makes musicians from those fiery lands so eccentric? For further confirmations, ring: Meat Puppets. That said, the ideal place to make a ‘music commune’ could only then be San Francisco) were a gathering of brilliant friends of the staff notation, of those – all, without exception - who rendered the most sophisticated virtuosity from their instrument. But not those pseudo-intellectual prog-fusion things (although even in that area people like Bill Spooner, Michael Cotten, Vince Welnick and the rhythm section propelled a thousand alders and a thousand odd times by the formidable pair Rick Anderson-Prairie Prince could fold, wrap, and outdo practically the entire contemporary prog-et-similia scene).
But here we are talking about and especially a ‘complex’ that, in a Zappa-esque manner, makes rock in all its forms (hard, glam, pop, without leaving out debts to ‘blackest-black’ things like R&B reinterpreted in their way and even funky-disco); moreover – what an insignificant detail, huh? - writing great, grand, enormous ‘songs’. All of this with an attitude that combines provocation, gleeful prankstership that can only be categorized under the heading (pre)-punk. The Stooges without extreme debauchery who become Mothers of Invention and who moreover can actually play...
Not much, huh? Definitely something to knock the socks off even a seasoned recording studio fox like Al Kooper, the one who had them at – um… – ‘orders’ for the production of their first self-titled album, or in the second record capable of a fantasmagoria of songs each different from the other by genre and species, with a single common thread: that they are all nine ‘great’ songs (they are nine by tracklist, but some of them contain within them at least three-four together. There are groups that in their entire career have had half the ideas exposed by the Tubes in a single one of their songs).
(a bit of autobiography)
1980: punk and new wave had already irreparably changed my life for about fifteen months and therefore nothing could ever be the same. But... there's a but (there's always a 'but'): curiosity in the form of the mischievous devil in the left ear has seductively whispered to you: 'don't be like those who want the tabula rasa of 'old people's' music, ‘no more Elvis, Beatles and Rolling Stones in 1977…& rsquo;, or rather: try to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, you might have some nice surprises’. And therefore the opportunity to see these strange gentlemen live, whom the Great Cousin had extolled, is irresistible even for me, a foolish and uncritical pasdaran of the ‘new wave’ anthracite-colored (and never mind if shortly afterwards it would soon turn black-dark)
Well, what can I say: it wasn't a show. It was a vision, an apparition, an epiphany, an unprecedented steamrolling event.
The Tubes were (obviously unbeknownst to me) preceded by a reputation for outrageousness on the edge of legality, pyrotechnic live shows with semi-naked dancers twirling on stage, set designs that amplified outlandishly – mocking it, for sure – the reigning glam, bondage costumes and (not very) soft-porn film-like movements with duets between the beautiful Re Styles (capable of making you fall in love just with her slender and perfectly polished fingers slicing through the cover of the first album) and the singer Fee Waybill that makes the lascivious practices of the ‘cochon’ Gainsbourg with the pseudo-nymphet Birkin seem like stuff for schoolgirls.
That same Waybill who staggers on 40 cm high heels bearing the name of a Superhero, Quay Lewd, a clear allusion to the practice of rockstars overdosing on Quaaludes. In short, if there ever was a rock'n'roll circus, if show and music must know how to go hand in hand, the Tubes of the mid-late Seventies were the ultimate pinnacle. Bill Spooner clearly recounts: ‘We did tours of 150 sold-out dates and lost money for all the people we took around, all the props and truckloads of extra crap. You must remember: it was the '70s, and we were at the forefront of outrageous behavior onstage. Today it would be for adults only. ”.
So, they were losing money, accounts were – incredibly but true – always deeply in the red. Therefore, the Tubes I saw appeared on stage dressed as Wall Street employees, suit and tie as mandated by the financial world because in the end they realized that 'everything is wrong, everything needs to be redone', hence the ‘Reverse Completion Principle’, (title – loosely translated – of the album that would open the doors of AOR for them). As if to say: show-business crushes (has crushed) even us, all we have to do is come to ‘terms’ with the harsh reality. But since, like Aesop’s scorpion, it is in their nature to transgress, after a few minutes of entry, they tear off those employee clothes and start showing underwear with, let's say, quite prominent plastic attributes. And naturally it was delirium, so far yet so close in spirit to the Cramps that had already shaken my life a few months earlier. An indelible groove in the mind. Would you ask: but if you had seen Boston with their spaceships instead of the Tubes, would you say the same things? Uhm, no offense to anyone, but I'd say no.
(but let’s get to us…)
For the staid critics, ‘Now’, ‘the difficult third album’ (quote), is a half mishmash, uncertain and ultimately unresolved. And so why am I telling you about this record?
First: because the essential 'What Do You Want from…Live?' is already reviewed (and then between us, no live record could ever match the entrancing, epic, surreal magic of their show)
Second: because I have a special affection for all those ‘do it weird’ albums, those that, at the edge of self-injury, break established clichés, basically, those that almost make a clean slate and mark a point and new chapter. Between the before of the oddities and the after, with Todd Rundgren (‘Remote Control’) usually going heavy with his cumbersome hands and the subsequent-final influx (ah, those red accounts, etc.) into stardom. Always maintaining superior class.
Third: because I love ‘Now’ so much, with those completely irrational loves, that I want to recount it in the old-fashioned way, when albums were reviewed track by track, yes, precisely with the abhorred track-by-track. More, note by note, so that nothing is (left) to chance. And if not, what kind of Dictator would I be, if I have to please the people?
But since, in the end, I am an Enlightened Tyrant, I will tell you that this album defies explanation, it is to be loved. Like the Eleatic philosophers, ‘there is no becoming, only being’, for the Tubes’ ‘Now’ there is only listening that can explain it.
Yes, sure: minor, as can be the attempt to become arty-jazz for pranksters without a cause, to become the Steely Dan of San Francisco. Here, yes: ‘Steely Dan of San Francisco’ could be a good definition for these Tubes of 1977, provided we place the adjective ‘uncontrollable’ alongside. As always, moreover (that story of the scorpion’s nature, already mentioned, right? To mention: A&M goes nuts because the ‘imposed’ producer John Anthony is practically defenestrated by Spooner halfway through the recordings)
In ‘Now’ our Sublimated Ones consequently shuffle the deck, pretending to be ‘the authors’, if not really engaged, almost.
Almost, huh.
About half of the album, although the cover is a vivid orange and with the nine (yes, ex-Santana percussionist Mingo Lewis temporarily joins the ranks) caricatures of the members suggesting something else, the mood becomes more ‘dark’, ‘smoky’ as suggested by the title of the opening track (‘Smoke - La vie en fumer‘: ‘if life is smoke, the world is my ashtray’), an up-tempo piano-rock that is literally irresistible in which Waybill showcases all the splendor of his baritone crooning. In much of the album, the protagonist is Welnick’s classical piano, the piano-rock in fact that recalls the Steely Dan-era 'Pretzel Logic’ (‘Hit Parade’) or, with all due caution, Elton John or Billy Joel. On the side, however, there are Cotten’s futuristic synths that whistle and intermittently disturb. Even more to the side, Spooner & Steen’s guitars, which create scenarios sometimes bordering on country & western (‘Strung Out on Strings’) and the less conventional R&B (‘Golden Boy’, did you ever think of harmonica in a Tubes’ song?). Not to mention the idiosyncrasy of certain covers (but to be surprised by them means never having understood them: hadn’t they already ‘smeared’ the first side of their debut with that waltz-like deranged version of the Brazilian classic ‘Malagueña Salerosa’?): over to who it belongs, and so it belongs to one rather distant and yet close in spirit, one Van Vliet, Don, by rank Captain, whose minor cantilena ‘My Head is My Only House Unless it Rains’ is transfigured to the square, which here transforms into a soul ballad in slow motion, suspended between dreamy, acoustic arpeggios. Which pairs with the Lee Hazelwood (as you may have noticed: all people ‘shifted’ from the right side, our favorite side) here in Hoagy Carmichael's sequined jazz-swing attire of ‘This Town’, stuff in which Fee Waybill chooses no less than 'Ol’ Blue Eyes’ Frank Sinatra as his interpretative model.
Yes, ok, but... what about that nature of the scorpion thing? Calm, calm, it’s there, of course it is, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about the Tubes.
Because as said above, there’s that ‘almost’: then, instrumental prog-fusion tirades like ‘God-Bird Change’ (writes Mingo Lewis, would you have ever expected it?) that seem like Yes conspiring with Blue Oyster Cult, tell us that Tubes’ rock, fortunately, like nature, ‘does not make jumps’. That ‘I’m Just a Mess’ and ‘Pound of Flesh’ are classic rockers so dirty, oblique and powerful in execution (but how ‘popadelic’ in the appeal!) that they could have fit like a glove on the first two albums. That ‘Cathy’s Clone’ is pure art-rock that foreshadows certain new-wave pushed to the edge of research (the boors/fools Tubes were even capable of No New York-like stuff!), with that ghostly sax signed by a certain Van Vliet, Don, who in precious return responds in kind to the above-mentioned tribute.
And then, to close everything THAT song. The one that on first listening scrambled my brain like ‘White Riot’ by the Clash, one moment I was one person, after that I was a totally different one.
A prog-punk suite! Steely Dan turning into the Rolling Stones with Ian Stewart going crazy on the piano as if he had to play the Ramones. Even today, never heard anything like it in just under five minutes. Rapture.
Because yes, remember: ‘I Was a Punk Before You Were a Punk’
And then, really: but ‘what more do you want from life?’ A Lukather?
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