Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) Read online

  20 Jazz Funk Greats

  Praise for the series:

  It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch. . . . The series . . . is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration—The New York Times Book Review

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  These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice

  A brilliant series. . . each one a work of real love—NME (UK)

  Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon

  Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—Boldtype

  [A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK)

  We . . . aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way . . . watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books.—Pitchfork

  For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our website at www.continuumbooks.com and 33third.blogspot.com

  Also available in this series:

  Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes

  Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans

  Harvest by Sam Inglis

  The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller

  Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice

  The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh

  Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli

  Electric Ladyland by John Perry

  Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott

  Sign ‘O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos

  The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard

  Let It Be by Steve Matteo

  Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk

  Aqualung by Allan Moore

  OK Computer by Dai Griffiths

  Let It Be by Colin Meloy

  Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis

  Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno

  Exile on Main Street by Bill Janovitz

  Grace by Daphne Brooks

  Murmur by J. Niimi

  Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli

  Ramones by Nicholas Rombes

  Endtroducing. . . by Eliot Wilder

  Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese

  Low by Hugo Wilcken

  In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper

  Music from Big Pink by John Niven

  Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy

  Doolittle by Ben Sisario

  There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis

  Stone Roses by Alex Green

  Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth

  The Who Sell Out by John Dougan

  Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti

  Loveless by Mike McGonigal

  The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck

  Court and Spark by Sean Nelson

  69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol

  Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy

  Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard

  Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns

  Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier

  Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier

  People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor

  Aja by Don Breithaupt

  Rid of Me by Kate Schatz

  Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite

  If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef

  Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson

  Swordfishtrombones by David Smay

  Forthcoming in this series:

  Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr

  and many more . . .

  20 Jazz Funk Greats

  Drew Daniel

  2008

  The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc

  80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038

  The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd

  The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

  www.continuumbooks.com

  33third.blogspot.com

  Copyright © 2008 by Drew Daniel

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers or their agents.

  Album cover appears courtesy of Throbbing Gristle/Industrial Records, copyright © Throbbing Gristle/Industrial Records under exclusive licence to Mute. www.throbbing-gristle.com www.mute.com

  Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer waste recycled paper

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Daniel, Drew.

  Twenty jazz funk greats / Drew Daniel.

  p. cm. – (33 1/3)

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-1325-2

  1. Throbbing Gristle (Musical group) 20 jazz funk greats. I. Title. II. Tide: 20 jazz funk greats. III. Series.

  ML421.T554D36 2008

  782.42166092’2--dc22

  2007047126

  Contents

  Preface

  I Don’t Give a Cat’s Whiskers

  Consumer-Friendly Artwork

  20 Jazz Funk Greats

  Beachy Head

  Still Walking

  Tanith

  Convincing People

  Exotica

  Hot on the Heels of Love

  Persuasion

  Walkabout

  What a Day

  Six Six Sixties

  Release

  References

  Preface

  This is the story of a band that could not make up its mind. They made an album about seduction, suicide, boredom, magic, Australia, stripping, rhetoric, plants, disco, Muzak, pornography, calligraphy, dactylomancy, politics, their dog, repetition and underwear. To put it mildly, 20 Jazz Funk Greats sits askew within a series of books dedicated to classic albums: it doesn’t add up in a stylistically coherent manner, it didn’t sell particularly well when it was released, nor is it widely regarded by fans as the “best” album by Throbbing Gristle, nor did Throbbing Gristle produce work that musicologists and academics can roll easily around their tongue. Though they have proved to be juicy subjects for sensationalism, Throbbing Gristle’s actual musical output resists analysis. In some sense, Throbbing Gristle (hereafter interchangeably referred to as TG) are difficult to write about because of their oblique, even hostile, relationship to music qua music. Rather than improving upon, or mutating, a preexisting genre (think of the technically savvy, culturally predatory stance of the Rolling Stones toward rhythm & blues) TG’s mythos rests on the claim that they are the founding creators of an entirely new genre, “industrial music.” It’s a rare distinction to be the initiators of a tradition unto itself, and the tenacious hold of the term in record store bins and online newsgroups attests to its enduring success as a meme, despite its claustrophobic circularity: TG play “industrial music.” What’s that? Stuff that sounds like TG. To kick the tires: the rise over the past two decades of an internationally oriented reissue market and the increasingly accessible twentieth-cen
tury archive of avant-garde, electronic and improvisatory musicmaking has made the claim that TG’s work is sui generis less and less tenable.

  To an audience of contemporary NME readers who had only closely followed pop, rock and punk, the sounds of early Throbbing Gristle records were unearthly, entirely unexpected, withering comets of strangeness. To a present-day generation of casually eclectic listeners readily familiar with AMM and Stockhausen and Cluster, nursed on filesharing and mp3 weblogs that make one-off disco obscurities, kraut rock, musique concrète and extreme noise available to anyone with some free hard-drive space, Throbbing Gristle now feel like a particularly bewitching pop-experimental hybrid, but undeniably part of a larger canon. Yet even if it is easier today to locate TG’s activity within a broader context of musicmaking, the peculiar impact and endurance of their work is hard to explain, and defining the place of 20 Jazz Funk Greats within TG’s own catalogue is harder still. 20 Jazz Funk Greats is the sound of Throbbing Gristle no longer trying to sound like Throbbing Gristle, the sound of people burning off the associative trappings of tabloid scandal and unwanted acceptance, the sound of people changing their minds. Widely misunderstood as their “pop album,” it’s too perverted, willful and crude to effortlessly pass as “real music,” but too mercurial and sparkly to lie still within the chilly ghetto graveyard of industrial stereotypes. I hope to count the ways I love it, rather than to tame its creepy spell.

  Anyone writing a book-length study of Throbbing Gristle in the wake of Simon Ford’s masterful Wreckers of Civilization is placed in an enviable position. The definitive big picture of the life and times of Genesis P. Orridge, Chris Carter, Cosey Fanny Tutti and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson as artists and individuals negotiating the shifts from late-sixties freak culture to early-eighties post-punk has been painted, freeing up those in Ford’s wake to illuminate the records themselves. Internationally recognized artists catapulted by the tabloid scandal of their 1976 “Prostitution” exhibition at the ICA into national prominence as lightning rods for public revulsion, the Coum Transmissions-into-Throbbing Gristle crossfade literally embodies the title of Simon Frith and Howard Home’s landmark sociological music text Art into Pop, and Ford’s account strategically balances the early years of extreme actionist body art and transgressive performances by Coum Transmissions with the birth, flowering and death of Throbbing Gristle in thorough detail. The reader interested in late-seventies Britain will encounter an even more prodigious embarrassment of riches than the literate TG fan, for this time and place has been the subject of a great deal of recent documentary reportage and cultural analysis, from Julien Temple’s film The Filth and the Fury (2000) to Simon Reynolds’s encyclopedic Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 (2005). Because these macrohistories and biographical narratives have already been tackled at length in other texts, I have decided to concentrate rather myopically upon 20 Jazz Funk Greats itself as a self-contained object, an independent artifact so rich in implication that my own text will focus as strictly as possible upon its nuances, internal relationships and effects. That said, the hortus conclusus of 20 Jazz Funk Greats encrypts a wealth of interconnections drawn from a bewilderingly wide territory: English history and psychogeography, international cinema, polymorphous sexual practices (both within and beyond legality), avant-garde literature and poetics, a global mélange of musical traditions, DIY electronics and homegrown techno-gadgetry, London countercultural gossip and occult and magical lore. I’ve tried to capture as many of these links and networks as I can in the space provided, but inevitably, sometimes the artwork flits butterfly-like through the hermeneutic net.

  Thanks are in order. First, I wish to thank David Barker for his willingness to take a chance on an unlikely candidate for inclusion in this series. Casting a cold eye on punk’s apotheosis and famously declaring that “rock and roll is for arse lickers” (a totally rock and roll thing to say), Throbbing Gristle themselves adopted an alternately arch and antagonistic stance toward the kind of mainstream musical culture that promulgates the very idea of “classic albums.” That said, beneath their cranky disdain for the complacency of the culture industry, TG were nonetheless passionate music fans themselves. Indeed, Chris Carter’s devotion to ABBA bordered upon an obsession, and Gen confided to me in an unguarded moment that he had read the 33 1/3 book about Pink Floyd. As an album about, among other things, the historical fate of albums of popular music as cynically marketed commodities rather than High Art, it makes a certain perverse sense that 20 Jazz Funk Greats should suffer the indignity of being critically enshrined. This series remodels the canon as an expression of individual advocacy rather than some pseudo-objective index of timeless musical values, treating records as occasions for argument rather than as fixed stars in a privileged constellation, and I contribute to it in that spirit.

  This book exists because of the encouragement given and examples set by a range of people, including a number of 33 1/3 authors whose entries in the series kept standards intimidatingly high. I am also grateful to a number of individuals who helped in various ways: Jon Savage, David Tibet, Val Denham, Naut Humon, Jean-Pierre Turmel, Eric Weisbard, Vickie Bennett, Ethan Port, Simon Norris, Kim Norris, Joseph Ghosn, Stephen Thrower, Jon Leidecker, Erika Clowes, Don Bolles, Matt Sussman, Jay Lesser, Tavia Nyong’o and the creators of the blog 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Most of all, I am grateful to the members of Throbbing Gristle for speaking with me and making their archives, images and memories available. They proved to be very friendly indeed.

  When a fan has the opportunity to interview people who he has idolized since adolescence, critical distance risks dissolving into a puddle of enthusiasm. Gushing piffle about Throbbing Gristle, anyone? Since TG recorded themselves and did not retain the services of external engineers or producers, I am more or less entirely reliant upon their collective memories about the immediate circumstances surrounding the creation of 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Since this occasionally requires needling and corroboration in order to establish technically specific accounts of what was plugged into what almost thirty years ago, some particulars have inevitably gone missing, and some of what is “remembered” may be inaccurate. As scheduling permitted, I have attempted to separate my subjects and interrogate them about each other’s remarks, and I have attempted to double-check with other members when something seemed implausible. I interviewed Chris and Cosey in person at their home in King’s Lynn, spoke with Sleazy over a Skype line to Bangkok, and talked to Gen over the phone in Manhattan, followed by an NYU conference and drunken dinner party together in New York. All parties were generous with their time, and answered my pestering follow-up emails, supplying images and corrections as needed. In the interest of flow I have tended to present their separate comments in the chronological order in which each interview occurred; as each song is discussed, the reader will usually encounter first Chris and Cosey’s remarks, then Sleazy’s and then Gen’s. I have not sought to strenuously “debunk” anything that multiple band members have confidently asserted, and have tried to give each member free rein to tell their version of events, despite the attendant dangers. This may strike the more skeptical reader as credulous folly, but I have found that Richard Cammell’s fawning description of his friend Aleister Crowley conforms closely to my own personal experience of Genesis P. Orridge in conversation: “It is certain that he had dramatised himself from his earliest years, that he had deliberately created his own daemonic legend; but so certain was he of his daemonic, his elemental origin, so sincere was he in his claim to seerdom, to the prophetic character, that his personality remained absolutely natural and unaffected” (Cammell, p. 6). That said, the members of TG have copped to deliberately misleading the public with partial self-revelations in the past (such as in Chris Carter’s admission that the published schematics for his custom-built “Gristle-izer” contained inaccurate voltages inserted into the plans with the express purpose of throwing people off the scent and sabotaging any attempts to copy his design). Take TG’s stateme
nts at face value and you may get burned. With this caveat in mind, proceed at your own risk.

  This book is dedicated to Martin Schmidt: may our mission never be terminated.

  I Don’t Give a Cat’s Whiskers

  When we are young we are a jungle of complications. We simplify as we get older.

  Graham Greene, The Quiet American

  I was sixteen. Visiting my aunt in Montreal, I left the tony Westmount hills where she practiced as a psychoanalyst and took the subway to a grittier neighborhood in search of punk rock records. At the time, I was head over heels about the Misfits, and soon hit paydirt with a copy of Paranoia You Can Dance To, a hardcore compilation on the Weird System label from Germany with a rare live version of the Misfits tune “Attitude.” Not as good as finding an original vinyl seven-inch on the Plan 9 label—I actually had vivid dreams about finding and purchasing a copy of their coveted Cough/Cool single—but exciting nevertheless. Clutching my prize and flipping through the alphabetized dividers in the punk section in search of the Toy Dolls, I came to a stop at a band I had never heard of.

  Throbbing Gristle.

  The mockery and menace in the name appealed to me, and I thought I’d take a chance on an unknown quantity. Operating on the assumption (often all too true in the case of punk rock) that first albums are best albums, I hunted for the Throbbing Gristle record with the earliest recording date. Assuming that the store just didn’t have their first record, I settled instead for something called The Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle Recorded During the Year Ending September 3rd 1977. It came in a clinical white sleeve, with a smudged sticker on the back that made baffling references to “research and development” and “greater capital expenditure” under the heading MUSIC FROM THE DEATH FACTORY. Back at Aunt Marilyn’s house, I went into the living room, put on headphones (she was napping) and silently rocked out to the Misfits’ sweaty punk rock sing-along. Then I put on Throbbing Gristle and my head split open. Locked on at high volume in my little prison of sound, I was utterly confounded by what I heard. This was not a punk rock record; this was not a rock record; this wasn’t even music. At the time, I thought that a steady diet of Die Kreuzen and Corrosion of Conformity had inured me to extreme audio, but by the end of side one, the piercing synthetic shrieks, ferociously overdriven fuzz bass and visceral low-end throb (sorry, but there is no other word for it) captured on “Slug Bait” and “Maggot Death” had given me a truly punishing headache. I never made it to side two that day. I had finally found art strong enough to cause me physical pain, and I loved it.