Entertainment For Lively Minds
Cod rock
The recent brilliant insight elseblog by David Hepworth about the career-crippling resemblance between the Moody Blues and hairdressers set me thinking about the whole raft of bands in the Seventies that peer pressure forced me - sometimes quite unfairly - to write off as Not Proper Rock.
In nearly all cases it was because they were perceived as being fey, although that doesn't explain how the likes of Jon "Hello Clouds Hello Trees" Anderson, public schoolboys dressed as daisies or one-legged flautists managed to wangle free passes into the Proper tent.
So who were/are the faux rockers we shunned, cruelly or with all due cause? Some of mine:
The Moody Blues - Nights in Black Leather? Not quite.
Peter Frampton - Guitar heroics for girls.
Queen - Opera, a codpiece, a sixpence and a Stickybackplastocaster. Oh deary deary me.
Barclay James Harvest - The ultimate joke prog band even for people who quite liked prog.
Wings - Think Badfinger. Now add the singer's wife.
John Denver - Having James Burton on guitar ought to have been enough, but it so, so wasn't.
10 c.c. - Prestwich perms and a tidy beard. All together now: wrongity....
Status Quo - Not fey, per se, but naff beyond redemption - Chas and Dave with Marshall stacks.
- More from Archie Valparaiso.
- Login or register to post comments
-
Contentious ground there Archie old son...
The Moody Blues - Agreed
Peter Frampton - Look past the 'Frampton Comes Alive' histrionics and there were several good, workmanlike albums.
Queen - The first three albums were stunning. I'd agree they lost the plot after that.
Barclay James Harvest - Agreed. Never quite saw the point of them.
Wings - Some of the songs were of doubtful quality but the guitar solo on My Love alone is better than 90% of The HJHs output.
John Denver - Agreed.
10 c.c. - One of the great underrated British bands (until the split obviously)
Status Quo - What's wrong with Chas & Dave - with or without Marshall stacks? Quo were one of the best live bands I ever saw; kept it simple and stuck to what they did best.
Peter Frampton
"Several good workmanlike albums."
Be still, my beating heart.
Ah but surely there are times...
...after a long day at the Wordface when all you want is something undemanding and reliable?
Whats wrong with Chas and Dave?
Well, Dave, Chas and Lennard whatsisface for 3, the original grandfather in Only Fools & Horses, who is, I gather, remarkably, still the C&D drummer, despite having died many a long year ago.
There are some good calls there Archie
And, as you say, some unfair ones.
You've got most of them but I could add (and at least one of these is irrational and unfair):
Gary Numan - not quite Bowie, not quite Roxy.
Bachman Turner Overdrive - fat blokes with a riff pinched from the Who.
Generation X - singer was Billy Idol. Nothing else needs to be said.
ELO - Unfortunately bearded and unfortunately successful.
Tony....cruising for a bruising
Dissing the Overdrive? I don't think so....
Not Fragile was a cracking album
http://open.spotify.com/album/73AaoFs1O8mNQ7TZnr4RAi
but even a fan would admit they were fat, bearded blokes with a Who fixation
I prefer
statuesque lumberjacks rather than fat and bearded.....I imagine their tourbus was fitted with some extra special shock absorbers.
First and second albums were better than Not Fragile which was a classic in its own right anyway, mates (see what I did there?)
Archie - see your Denver
and raise you a Fogelberg.
Taylor J. Yes. Croce J. No
I was only a bairn in the 70s
but surely most of those acts have made some fantastic records? (Frampton apart)
It makes me laugh though to imagine your thought process before posting it:
"Hmm, I think today is the day to get nasty about John Denver and Status Quo"
Aren't they the very definition of soft targets?
Missing the point
They're not targets for anything now. I mentioned them as examples of acts that were widely perceived as being Not Proper Rock thirty-odd years ago. (For the record, I never had any problem with 10 c.c., for example.)
But even on that basis
Quo were as 'proper rock' as it got back in '74 - in the same pile as Uriah Heep, Rory, Thin Lizzy and the like
Not
In my school.
Ah, you were too young to get it
Ask your older brother :-)
If only
I was 17 in 1974 - key age for knowing what's proper rock.
Noooo...
17 is the key age for *thinking* you know what is proper rock. 25 is the key age for actually knowing :-)
Uriah Heep
"Proper rock"? Screeching banshees more like, with worse hair and 'taches than the turkish ladies swimming team. I think Tony Fry (aged 17) would disagree with your synopsis, as would I, old man.
I was also 17 in 74.
Rock Snobs
At least Uriah Heep fans knew the name of one Dickens character and went around quoting Byron...
John Denver / Mike Mills
Separated at birth?
Never affected REM's credibility. Actually Mills also looks rather like Bill Gates.
Quo - reputation tarnished by later infelicities
Quo were definitely proper rock in the early 70s and remained so until about after Live Aid when Alan Lancaster and John Coughlan left and were replaced by a couple of blondalikes when they went all Radio 2 (old style).
I used to frequent the Free Trade Hall in Manchester around then and Quo were a breath of fresh (or beer smelling...) air saving us from drowning in Topographic Oceans or from men pretending to push lawnmowers across the stage. Only Dr Feelgood or The Sensational Alex Harvey Band could come close live then...or of course The Faces (note username)
I think you forgot one
Surely the ultimate FTH annual pilgrimage in the Seventies was to pay homage at the shrine of St Rory.
But, getting back to Quo, among my peers - who were all hardcore Hawkwind and Amon Duul II types, I should perhaps have mentioned - Quo were definitely Not Proper, and Rod and The Faces were only borderline. I suspect it was a combination of too many hit singles* and an apparent preference for Jack Daniels over Thai sticks that did for them. They were all too pubby and footbally by half.
(*Not there was anything wrong with being a singles band - I gave Slade a Nod of approval only the other day - but people had to make their mind up what they wanted to be viewed as: Proper Pop or Proper Rock.)
FTH 75
St Rory - my first proper gig. Front row. Nicked a bit of his mic stand and fitted it into MY mic stand during metalwork and which I still have today.
Gentle Giant
Yes, designed by schizophrenics and played by manic depressives. What was wrong with Simon Dupree anyway
I beg to differ...
...the Giant are Exhibit 1 in defence of the "Nothing Good Ever Came Out of Prog" charge. Time for a Word retrospective, methinks.
You can right go off people...
Barclay James Harvest + Orchestra. Marvellous it was.
If only I could find my loon pants and platform shoes, I would be right over there with my joss sticks and cries of WALLY!
All this time and
No mention of Sutherland Brothers & Quiver?
Not sure I agree
They were ineffably lame, yes, but I think they probably were Proper. The same goes for the Pat Travers Band, Eddie and the Hot Rods and pretty much everyone who ever played at Reading on the Friday.
Surely pre-76 Reading was the very exemplar of Proper.
By and large, only Proper bands played Reading - inevitably headlined by Rory, Lizzy and/or Quo with SAHB somewhere down the bill.
That's what I meant
You may be right about Quo, by the way. I'm beginning to think that my peer pressure might have been a bit more fundamentalist than the norm.
Reading 1975
Bloody Supertramp were on. Proper?????
Didn't know you were there, Nige.
But weren't Hawkwind great on the friday night!?
(Actually, please tell me whether they were, as I was, um, a little unwell when they came on........)
Highlight for me was Gary Holton and the Heavy metal Kids.
Hawkwind great?
Not really, Retro.
http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/it-was-best-times-it-was-worst-tim...
Can't bring myself to listen to Hawkwind after that. The very memory makes me want to curl up into a little ball, whimpering "Make it stop! Please make it stop!"
(Too lazy to type out the whole thing again, but I guess you can read the whole sorry tale by looking at my blog entries, Retro. There aren't that many.) (I'm not that interesting...) (Though that's one of my favourite anecdotes.)
Hmm, see what you mean
So vomiting back at the tent was definitely an improvement on your experience. I was more upset, at the time, at the missing of Stacia, but I was told she kept her kit on anyway.
I didn't learn, BTW, as my evening malaise re-appeared, as if by magic, for similar emesis during Yes and Supertramp, on the next 2 nights. Funny that.
Happy daze.
Emesis
They were never the same after Gabriel left.
Getting back to the tent,
barfing or not, would've been a welcome relief.
I'd have given quite a bit to have missed Supertramp, too, simply for tedium avoidance.
Can't remember Yes at all. Perhaps a little under-age drinking took place....
Heavy Metal Kids I remember solely for their Bay City Rollers tribute (really!): "Bye-bye, baby, good-fucking-bye...")
Now you're talking
I went to see Sutherland Brothers and Quiver at Greenwich Town Hall and resisted the peer pressure to leave after the support band. The support band (Wild Turkey) were "proper rock" as they were led by bassist Glen Cornick who had been in Jethro Tull.
Incidentally the singer in Wild Turkey, one Gary Pickford-Hopkins, later turned up on the album and live show of "The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Spiders from Mars*" with Rick Wakeman. Mind you, I wouldn't mind getting hold of Wild Turkey's album. I used to have it on tape. I wonder if I'd still like it as much now.
*I may not have remembered that title accurately.
SB&Q
at St. Albans Civic Hall. Great gig! Very under-rated and produced Tim Renwick, subsequently to become guitarist of choice for many big names. Their "Dream Kid" album still gets regularly played in my house.
you know when you old buggers
complain about punk and 'year zero' - well after reading some of the above names I can only say thank god for the pistols and the damned and the clash and the stranglers - oh hang on, they had keyboards so they were new wave, not proper punk, oh bugger...
Old buggers?
We are war veterans matey. We should have a special medal from the Queen for what we went through.
Mud, explosions, shellshock and risking our lives everyday so you young whippersnappers can live in peace and harmony. And that was just the Battle of Bickershaw. Aye.
I give you
Clifford T Ward, Leo Sayer, Sweet, Mud, T Rex etc etc. Beyond these shores Foreigner, Styx, Boston, Focus - fey was the fashion then dont you know.
Reading 75 (or was it '74?)
I well remember Hawkwind on the Friday night but the real memory for me of that night was Dr Feelgood in one of their first major gigs coming on just before. Wilko skittering manically sideways across the stage wings. Being "prepared for sonic attack" after that was somewhat lame.
Same festival - Soft Machine and Mahavishnu Orchestra on Sunday afternoon - most soporific. Spent the afternoon asleep under the Reading Evening Post.
I'm the opposite, Archie..
..it only takes a whiff of "style" for me to turn right off.
I only had to look at The New York Dolls for me to know they were crap, and boy, were they ever.
For me, it's beards and denim (with scowls) all the way.
A group should look like a cross between The Band and The Groundhogs. (I know..that's a "style" in itself.)
Prepare for orgasm
I don't get no Properer than this - beards, greasy hair, a low-slung gold LP Junior with "tooning issues", a wonky bass solo that even he gets bored with so he suddenly shifts it into a straight no-nonsense boogie, a wardrobe-falls-downstairs drum solo... it's got the lot! (Watch it all if you've got time - Unibomber's six-hour guitar solo - for want of a better word - around the 4-6 minute mark is just unmissable.)
How can something so terrible be so brilliant?
Or for a modern take on the style…
… look no further than the Buffalo Killers:
Nah
Canned Heat were college boys pretending: have a look at Woodstock:
(OK, maybe not Bob the Bear, he was the janitor..... And the science teacher on guitar)
Focus "fey"?!?!
Mahavishnu Orchestra "soporific"?!?! Actually, in defence of those views I have a theory that something happened in 1975/76 that turned previously gritty rock into wibbly blancmange. It's all down to the production, I think. It may be something to do with the way radio was going - that FM sound AMericans went on about, though I'm talking European/UK records here.
Take for example, Jethro Tull's 'Too Old To Rock'n'Roll' LP (1976) and compare the way it sounds to 1975's 'Minstrel In The Gallery'. Likewise, Focus's namby-pamby 'Mother Focus' (well, okay, that might have been 1975) and last-gasp gloop-fest 'Focus Con Proby'(1977). Even Rory's 'Calling Card' (1976) produced by Roger Glover sounds lily-livered and wet compared to the grit of previous efforts. And the final Mahavishno Orchestra LP 'Inner Worlds' (1976) is just dreadful - wishy-washy soul ballads and the flabbiest bass sound you've ever heard, even during the odd moments when John McL is trying to sound like the sonic assassin of yore (and ending up more like a fusion King Lear howling in cabaret-lounge futility).
The very worst, most flaccid, namby-pamby, blancmangey sounding record I've EVER heard, though, was on a TOTP2 a few years back - an Andy Fairweather Low single from 1975 - 'Wide Eyed And Legless' it must have been. Whether it was a specially recorded version for use on the show (as sometimes happened due to MU rules, I believe) or whether it was just a flabby, useless slab of muzak yoghurt I've no idea. I wonder is it on youtube...?
So, to conclude: by 1976 EVERYONE had turned into Barclay James Harvest, so punk, I guess, really did have to happen...
Blame...
FM radio, the Aphex Aural Exciter and the Yamaha String Synthesizer
Budgie
scraping the bottom of the cage here perhaps?
Saw them once in Stoke - ears still bleeding!!!!
Budgie will never be forgotten,
if only because they named an album "If I Were Britannia, I'd Waive The Rules"
Budgie Rule!
Two tales of the mighty Budgie from Oz.
One - they finally played here last year, and there were teenagers singing along to EVERY song! I recorded the crowd chanting 'Budgie! Budgie!' and used it as my ringtone for some months after.
Two - found a vinyl copy of 'Bandolier' in a dodgy secondhand bookshop in Adelaide at about twenty times the price of every other LP in the rack. Enquired as to why the expense? 'Because [apparently]they are a rare Australian band whose records you don't see very often...' And Fireman Sam comes from Outer Mongolia?
Budgie!?
Good album covers apart, aren't they just another of the landfill gritty rockers that clogged up the early 70s? I thought they were all sent to Coventry (or, as it is called for the purposes of this concept, Nazareth)
Both groups likely to be playing upstairs in a pub or in a working mens club near you soon. One original member and random nephews on bass and keys.
Budgie deserve a pass into the Proper pantheon....
for two reasons: (1) they were the only band to feature a bass player/singer who bore an uncanny resemblance to Maureen Lipman, and (2) they managed to come up with this riff:
Close but no cigar
I was beginning to come round to your point of view Archie, even if said guitarist was looking a wee bit smug, but then "Maureen" came in on the worst vocals since ever.......
I preferred
Strife. Or was it Stray? Could have been Strapps. No it was Stripplefefferdongledooda!
They played upstairs in pubs and working mens clubs
in their heyday.
Wasn't it Man that recorded a live album at The Padget Rooms, Penarth?
Won't hear a word said against them!
unless it is to say that they actually aren't quite as good as I thought in the early 70s in my mid teens.......
Bought Keep on Crinting (Best of Man) a year or 2 back, and apart from the songs from Be Good to Yourself etc was really rather diappointed.
Here's my favourite, anyway, you judge
"I like to eat bananas, cos they got no bones
I like marijuana, cos it gets me stoned"
Eeee... they don't write 'em like that anymore
The Cost Of Cod Rock
At the outbreak of punk ( a few months late here in Australia) I not only immediately refused to listen to cod rock, and verbally abuse any of its defenders, I also sold all records that might embarass me when the gobbing masses descended upon my place to drink and crank up the volume. I have since spent years trying to track these records and purchase copies once again - sometimes at a ridiculous cost. Out went 'Deep Water' by Grapefruit (re-purchased at 40 times the money I got for it - and its still terrible!), 'Share The Land' by The Guess Who; 'Jingle Jangle' The Archies; 'Cocker Happy' Joe Cocker; 'Sky' by Sky (the US outfit featuring the pre-Knack Doug Fieger); some Ten Years After album (was it called 'Watt'?)and many more. Still haven't found the Sky album yet, but if I do I'll probably pay an exorbitant sum as penance for my original crime of selling it...
Smokie
Surely the ultimate in cod-rock.
Still touring hereabouts
http://www.limerickblogger.ie/blog/2009/03/in-pictures-smokie-at-the-sou...
So cod they should have come from Arbroath.
Ask a scotsman what Arbroath is famous for.