Category: [Music]

Molly is 80

Ian Alexander Meldrum turned 80 today, and I’m having trouble imagining that.

I mean, he was born on January 29 1943 and today is January 29 2023, it’s eighty years since Molly was born. That’s eighty years right there. He was already a grown adult (insofar as he’s ever been one) when he and Ronnie Burns were thrown out of the Beatles’ show in Melbourne in 1964. He started as a roadie for The Groop that same year. Writing for Go-Set in 1966. Producing Russell Morris’ “The Real Thing” in 1969. Countdown. He’s been at this for a very long time when you think about it.

Which is the thing, cos, well, I didn’t think about it until a couple of days ago when he was trending on Twitter cos his eightieth birthday was coming up.

Eighty?

Molly Meldrum has just always been there. I’ve never thought about how old he actually must be. That may be because doing so makes me realise how old I’m getting myself… Countdown started on November 8 1974, a week to the day (almost to the hour, in fact) before I popped into the world myself. I’m 48. So… Molly kind of must be 80?

Um, as the man himself might say.

Anyway, happy 80th, you strange individual. Even if it is kind of inconceivable.

Hottest 100

Yeah, it’s that day of the year again. Australia Day has passed, that controversy has quietened again, and we can all get down to doing what REALLY matters: pissing and moaning about The Young People and why Triple J’s Hottest 100 sucks now compared to whenever we old farts were The Young People.

I know when I stopped listening to the J’s, i.e. after Merrick & Rosso left for commercial pastures at the end of 2000, but I’m not sure when I stopped actually caring about the Hottest 100, which I still did for a few years; I still explored new music, I just found it in different ways, it was the oughts and I had community radio and Internet forums and so forth… then Angus & Julia Stone inexplicably won it one year, then the amount of stuff I actively disliked started outnumbering the stuff I liked, then eventually I stopped actively disliking stuff on the list cos I realised almost none of it was worth getting passionate about one way or the other. Even the stuff I thought was good wasn’t really worth getting worked up about.

I was old.

And Triple J no longer needed old people…

This infamous Twitter outburst would be followed the next day by this:

Ouch. The criticism they copped for sniping at us whiny old people complaining “it aint like it used to be in the 90s” while being kind of ageist regarding some of the artists (particularly female ones) it played, or rather didn’t, is something I can’t really comment on being a non-listener and all that, but the question still needs an answer beyond just “fuck you, ‘youth’ radio station which is part of a network whose Group Music Director turns 59 tomorrow”.

And that answer is… not really? It was one of those things that just happened. I got older, Dig and the revived Double J which emerged from that proved more to my taste by playing stuff that was more like what I used to like (and still did, and still do), and I don’t even listen to that any more. It didn’t hurt. Far more painful things related to age assail me every day. The Hottest 100 was for other people, and I didn’t need to care about it.

But then this happened:

The Wiggles—THE FUCKING WIGGLES—winning the 2022 contest with a Tame Impala cover was probably not something anyone expected. When it did happen, it was magnificent. Not only was their version of the song actually pretty good in its own right, the whole situation was just screamingly funny; it was the best thing of this sort to happen since the La La Land/Moonlight debacle at the Oscars. And much like the Oscars should’ve just quit after that cos they would never be anywhere near as interesting or entertaining again, the Hottest 100 should’ve ended on that wiggly note. It could never be so much fun again after that.

And, well, this year it wasn’t, the winner being some bit of r&b electro meh of no particular distinction that I could see by Flume. If that actually was the best 2022 had to offer (and I don’t know, maybe it was) then, well, I have a lot of older music I’ve never heard before that I might actually give a shit about. Leave me to that.

One thing that does puzzle me, though, is the antipathy towards Beyonce Knowles making two appearances on the list,e.g.:

30 years ago, when they topped the 1992 Hottest 100 of all time (the year before the J’s started limiting the competition to the best of each year), Nirvana were on Geffen, which was not only a label but a goddamn big one, with distribution by Warners and MCA. Labels have never NOT had control of the industry. Personally I find Beyonce tedious as hell, obviously got the technique but it’s kind of empty, so I wouldn’t vote for her myself but that’s just me… I just find it interesting that people are snarly over her and not, say, Billie Eilish, who’s on a major label as well. And I actually do kind of like her, I think she has a bit more going on than most of the other modern plastic poppers… but she’s still on a major label. I don’t think that’s an argument either way, and I’m more persuaded by the argument others make about why JJJ considers Beyonce acceptable but not, say, Taylor Swift…

It’s spelled Raymond Luxury-Yacht

Spotted this on Mastodon (Burlington Free Press for that date, apparently). I’ve seen the “jass” spelling before (they were the Original Dixieland “Jass” Band and their first record was “Dixieland Jass Band One-Step” after all, even if they adopted the -zz spelling within a year of the recording) but “jacz” and “jasz” are new to me. The -zz spelling seems… you know, exactly right for the music, but that could just be because that how it’s been for the last hundred-plus years. Eubie Blake said “jass” was considered a Very Bad Word, hence maybe the -zz spelling (a bit softer and sounds less like “ass”?). I wonder if jacz or jasz would’ve ever stood a chance given how Slavic they look by comparison…

Take it away. PLEASE.

Saw this posted on Facebook a few days ago, don’t recall seeing the video before (probably saw it on Countdown at some point and I’ve just forgotten) and had almost completely forgotten the song… indeed, this may actually have been the first time I’d heard it since it came out. Hasn’t left my head since then. Which is a bit of a problem cos… I don’t like it. Chorus and verses sound like they’re from different songs that have been beaten together into one, and the Beatles pulled that trick off successfully a few times, but oh it doesn’t really work here. And like I said, I can’t get the fucking thing out of my head now. Help.

Sure you don’t need that education?

So Pink Floyd, or whatever passes for them these days, are gearing up for the 50th anniversary of their most famous album, but because it’s 2023 and the Internet is still a thing, this is apparently the sort of response they’ve been getting from people who I can only assume have never seen what that album’s cover art was. DINOSAUR BAND USE GAY COLOURS ME NO LISTEN NO MORE! Good thing the band never went with this originally, hey…

Spirit of zzzzz

Yeah… no. I keep seeing Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock by Talk Talk listed as two of the best albums of all time, and frankly both of them can fuck off. Saw the former mentioned in a Facebook music group I’m a member of, and I wondered if I’d been overly harsh on them in the past… maybe if I gave them one more spin, give them a closer listen on headphones this time, I might finally understand what other people find in them that I never have. And, well, I still haven’t got it. All I can say for sure is that at least now I’m fairly sure that Spirit isn’t quite as tedious as Laughing Stock. Not quite. Also not far off either. To hell with both of these.

What happened to vinyl?

But I was shocked at what I encountered. Few of the albums I wanted were available in vinyl. Prices were outrageously high. The whole market seemed designed to discourage buyers.
I’d heard so many grand claims for the vinyl resurgence, but the reality was tremendously disappointing. And I was a late adopter—the revival had been going on for a decade, but record labels still didn’t have their act together.
In my case, I ended up buying vinyl albums, but mostly used ones. I simply couldn’t find new pressings of the records I wanted. This was fine for me, but lousy for musicians and labels—who make no money on the sale of a secondhand vinyl album.

Ted Gioia is unimpressed by the vinyl market as it currently stands. I am, frankly, a vinyl skeptic; I remain unconvinced about its supposed superiority to digital (especially when it’s produced from digital sources, and didn’t Mobile Fidelity fuck up on that account recently) except insofar as vinyl doesn’t (usually) fight in the loudness wars as much as digital recording does. I no longer understand why I used to think having stuff on vinyl was important (unless that was the only way in which it was available), most of the stuff I do have on vinyl I now have in digital form too (whether CD or flac files), and in any case I have nothing to play it on anyway. And, apparently, I’m not alone there. Ted further observes:

But here’s an even more ominous sign. Half of vinyl buyers don’t own a record player. They apparently bought the Taylor Swift album as a kind of memorabilia—something a little nicer than a band T-shirt.
This can’t be a good thing for the record business. After all, how many records are you going to buy if you don’t have a turntable? This is like trying to sell Teslas as a status symbol to people who don’t drive. […]
I guess it could be worse—but it couldn’t be much worse. The music industry took its fastest growing segment and killed it through greed and laziness.

I get the appeal of the physical artifact and all that, but a vinyl record is… a bit useless in thar regard if you can’t play it. Especially given how expensive they tend to be, which is what really puts me off them these days… At the moment JB Hifi is selling a vinyl edition of Neil Young’s Eldorado for $54.99, which is not only a 34 year old catalogue item, it’s a fucking EP, not even a full album. And they want fifty-five dollars for that? To be sure, JB are also selling Neil on CD at kind of absurd prices too (thirty-eight dollars for a single CD of one of his bootleg series?) so I wonder if that particular case is a Neil thing, and it should be said some of JB’s vinyl actually is rather more reasonably priced… but not a lot of it.

The ludicrous price of new vinyl is the chief sign that the vinyl revival is really pitched at hipsters with money to burn, with the industry basically just doing what it did when CD was new, i.e. lazily bilking people out of money for music they already owned, except now they’re presenting the twelve-inch disc rather than the five-inch one as The Thing To Have, and I’m afraid I’m just not buying it (literally or figuratively). Mind you, I can kind of understand the nostalgia aspect of the vinyl revival in some ways; what baffles me is the cassette revival. I remember when cassette tapes were still a thing and they always left a fair bit to be desired. I don’t understand the appeal now at all. I mean, the revival isn’t exactly big; Gioia’s piece has a graphic showing that cassette sales aren’t even into seven figures, although numbers are rising even so. But the fact that it’s happening at all confuses me. That’s the modern world, though, it has that effect on me generally…

RIP Jeff Beck

I don’t think I knew there were different kinds of meningitis, nor that one of those kinds can be fatal within hours of getting it (and that it will fuck you up if it doesn’t kill you), but, thanks to today’s news about Jeff Beck, I certainly know that now… sigh. The only non-Yardbirds Beck I have are his first two solo records, which I’m giving another listen to tonight, cos it’s been a while anyway.

Regarding which: Double J dusted off an old interview with Beck from when he was in Australia back in 1977, wherein he says this:

Two of the three albums Beck released in his 20 months with the band comprised entirely of covers, which he saw as a limitation.
“I said to them, ‘We can’t keep going and doing Howlin’ Wolf numbers for the rest of our lives. Or Sonny Boy Williamson. You got to start writing your own material’. I found that I had a lot of influence on that.
“The first record we did, other than blues, was ‘Shapes Of Things’, which is a homemade job. And it worked a treat.”
That 1966 single – and Beck’s blistering solo in particular – became part of the blueprint for the psychedelic rock that would take over popular music in the following decade.
The Yardbirds shift from blues into more psychedelic territory was hugely influential on the development of rock’n’roll. Like so many important moments in rock history, many fans hated it at first.
“There was this great sort of complaint from all and sundry about the fact that they weren’t sticking to their guns,” Beck recalled.
“But, like I said, you can’t just sit around playing Howlin’ Wolf numbers. Sooner or later, you’ll die of boredom and people will die of boredom listening to.
“And you won’t even die gracefully, you’ll die having failed playing someone else’s material. So, it’s completely negative. We had to move on.”

Weird, then, that Truth, his first album from 1968, was full of covers, including not only a Howlin’ Wolf number but the aforementioned “Shapes of Things”, and even the three numbers actually credited to Beck & Rod Stewart are all rewrites of existing blues songs by Buddy Guy and B.B. King. Jeff apparently was less ready to “move on” to original material than he wanted his bandmates to be… and I think the next album, Beck-Ola, maybe demonstrates that too; the original material is kind of thin next to the two Elvis covers. Points to “Rice Pudding”, though, for the abruptness of its ending…

Cold shafts of broken glass

Some years ago I read biographies of the Beatles and Pink Floyd one after the other, and having finished the latter I remember thinking “gods, Pink Floyd look like grown adults next to the Fabs”. That said, the bullshit over the liner notes to the 2018 remix of Animals that meant it took four years to finally come out demonstrated that when all’s said and done Gilmour and Waters are still pissy little children at heart. Syd would’ve been more than usually bemused had he lived that long…

Anyway, I gave said remix another listen tonight… don’t know how great the differences are beyond one or two really obvious ones, more a case of the overall sound being kind of bigger and fuller. Works fine for me either way. Like Low, which came out only a week before this, it looks like a strange album to have appeared in 1977 when punk was starting to blossom, and yet, in its way, it was also about as punk as Pink Floyd could’ve got… also the point where they really turned into the Roger Waters Band; with Gilmour only contributing to one song and Wright not writing anything, Roger was running the show. Given how miserable the ensuing tour seems to have been for all involved (with Wright threatening to quit at one point), maybe the show should’ve stopped there? But then, of course, the misery of the experience gave Roger the idea for another album…

Don’t you wonder sometimes

After listening to the live album the other day, I had to pull this out for another listen. I really didn’t get this the first time I heard it, though now I place it as my second favourite Dave album after Ziggy; but I was in good company in not getting it at first, cos in 1977 a bunch of critics (and his own record label) didn’t get it either. I don’t entirely blame them (though Charles Shaar Murray’s description of it as “an act of purest hatred and destructiveness” was kind of ludicrous), cos I suppose it was a fairly what-the-fuck album even in 1977, especially coming after Station to Station. Side two in particular must’ve seemed just alien. Somehow the thing was still popular once RCA grudgingly released it…

Splendid production and a quite remarkable range of sounds at work, and it’s got “Sound and Vision” on it, which is only one of his best singles (the remix of the latter on the Ryko issue of the album is less so, shall we say). And that drum sound. I know Steve Lillywhite and Hugh Padgham get the credit for gated reverb, and Visconti didn’t actually do gated reverb as such on Low, but that harmoniser box he did use came up with much the same effect.