ROCK, ETC.
Rock fans have certain stock complaints, and one is that there is no decent live rock scene in New York. The Fillmore is a cross between Philharmonic Hall and the subway at rush hour. The clubs offer prohibitive prices and the vibrations of a dentist's drill. Once in a while, something nice happens in Central Park or Tompkins Square, and people will talk about it for months afterward. But mostly rock talk in New York is wistful, punctuated by many mentions of Woodstock and (last year) San Francisco and (this year) Mill Valley.
One place nobody muses about is Queens. Queens -- yech! A lot of rockheads, including me, have tended to define both their generational revolt and their spiritual progress in terms of their migration from Queens to Manhattan. But a favorite pastime of Americans is rediscovering their origins -- that's what the whole rock renaissance is about, after all -- and this may be the year we find out that Queens has a soul. Didn't Jimmy Breslin promise, "If elected, I shall go to Queens?" Aren't the Mets contenders? Queens is where the working class calls itself the middle class. It's the scene of the epic teenage rivalry of the fifties, between the "rocks" and the "collegiates." It's the home of the original sawdust pizza. Rock belongs to Northern Boulevard as much as, if not more than, to Second Avenue. And Queens has something Manhattan doesn't have -- lots of open space.
This fact has not escaped rock promoters. Last summer, two producers brought a number of major groups to the Singer Bowl, in Flushing Meadows. The concerts were an artistic flop; the stadium was too large, the sound was terrible, and the problem of musical theater-in-the-round was solved -- or, rather, parried -- by means of a revolving stage, which allowed each spectator to get a good look at the performers every three minutes or so, a system that does not facilitate rapport.
This year, the Singer Bowl concerts have been taken over by Music Fair Enterprises, the company that runs the Westbury Music Fair. Howard Stein, a young producer who was hired to organize the shows, has screened off a section of the arena and made improvements in the sound system, and prospects look good. At the same time, however, Music Fair Enterprises has outflanked itself by delegating Stein to take on a much more inspiring project -- a series of rock dances in the open-air (but roofed) New York State World's Fair Pavilion, also in Flushing Meadows. The first of these was held on Friday, July 11th. It featured the Grateful Dead and Joe Cocker, and it was quite simply fantastic. If the management continues to do the right things, rock at the Pavilion could become an institution. For the sake of the music and the culture -- and for the sake of Queens -- I hope it will.
I rode to Flushing on a chartered bus that MFE had hired to lure the skeptical press to the outlands. The bus driver got lost, and we took a little tour of Corona (coming withing eight blocks of my old junior high school). Then, to make up for his lapse, he began to speed. It was no use -- we were late anyway. But by this time the bus had become part of the adventure. It was the Who's Magic Bus, the Magical Mystery Tour bus. We jounced along eating brownies and shouting instructions to the driver.
At the Pavilion, it soon became evident that the rest of the crowd shared our expansive mood. They kept coming in, thousands of happy kids -- almost five thousand by the end of the evening. The Pavilion was large enough to accommodate everyone without strain. The ground level served as a huge round dance floor; on the balcony there were tables and chairs, the food concession (the main culinary attraction was tacos, a beautiful idea, though the reality was mediocre), and a nice view of the park. The atmosphere was totally relaxed. As in the San Francisco ballrooms, people were free to dance, crowd in front of the stage, sit in a corner, wander around, eat, or do whatever else impulse dictated. There were no intrusive guards or cops.
The music was great. Joe Cocker and his band did an excellent hard-rock set that included a spectacular rendition of "Let's Go Get Stoned" -- redundant advice for most of the audience, which sang along enthusiastically. During the break between sets, someone backstage had the good sense to put on Beggar's Banquet, and a large group of spectators got up to dance to the Stones. Nothing like that had happened at a rock concert -- in San Francisco or anywhere else -- for a long, long time.
Later, when the Dead were about to come on, there was some squabbling between a solid bloc of dancers who stood in the middle of the floor -- and insisted moralistically that everyone else do the same -- and the people sitting behind them, who complained that they were cutting off the view. After a few minutes of edgy exchange, Bob Weir came onstage and announced, as the Dead do whenever they can, "The management of this place told us you can get up and dance if you want to, so why don't you get up and dance?" That did it. The dancers won; the sitters got up. They were probably glad they did.
The Dead proceeded to perform for more than two hours. They played a lot of new material (notably "Don't Murder Me," a witty country-western song), some standards (including Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle," with Pigpen doing a pretty fair vocal), and several cuts from their new album, Aoxomoxoa; my favorite was "Mountains of the Moon." Through it all, Jerry Garcia, in his red polo shirt, beamed at us. It was the season of love all over again.
The Dead were the perfect group to launch this latest and best exercise in the nostalgia that has been hitting the rock community lately. Dancing. The summer of love. Queens. We still need that ambience, those memories. It's not enough to stare reverently at Eric Clapton's nimble fingers. I only wish the admission price could be lower. Three dollars is reasonable compared to what city places charge, and you get more for your money; still, it's not exactly proletarian.
I didn't appreciate just how good the Pavilion concert was until the following night, when I attended the Madison Square Garden debut of Blind Faith, the new Eric Clapton-Ginger Baker-Steve Winwood combine. (The group is rounded out by a relative unknown -- bassist and electric violinist Rick Grech.) The best part of the evening was that it was short, though this irritated me, theoretically, as one more example of the promoters' indifferent greed. For the prices the kids paid (the cheapest seats were four dollars), they deserved at least a half hour more of music. They also deserved, and didn't get, adequate sound, an alternative to the atrocity of the revolving stage, and an environment that was not conspicuously hostile and policed. Clapton played well, as usual, but Winwood's voice did not come through, and, as for Baker, his show-offy drumming just makes me nervous. In spite of the shoddy production, the audience was ecstatic. Hundreds of teenagers rushed the stage, screaming like Beatlemaniacs. I don't understand it. I'm sure the Emperor has no clothes, but there must be an aesthetic of nakedness I'm not getting.
(by Ellen Willis, untitled article in the "Rock, Etc." column, from the New Yorker, 26 July 1969)
https://archive.org/details/gd1969-07-11.127258.sbd.kaplan.flac16
See also:
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2015/04/july-11-1969-new-york-state-pavilion.html
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2017/10/july-11-1969-new-york-state-pavilion.html
*
Ellen Willis had visited San Francisco in fall 1968 and seen the Dead; unfortunately she did not write about them, but she wrote a piece on the other bands she saw:
THE SCENE, 1968
I had been in San Francisco a week, was preparing to visit the new Fillmore West for the third time, and asked a friend from East Bay to come along. He wasn't really in the mood, but he had a hard time saying no. "I feel as if I ought to go," he said. "As if it's culture." I'd been experiencing a similar sense of obligation, but dismissing it as a rather banal occupational disease. Yet, after all, it's just a matter of degree: I'm not an art critic, but if I went to Florence I'd feel duty-bound to see a lot of paintings. Rock and roll was the lazy man's music. Who worked at liking Little Richard? You dug him or you didn't.
I hadn't quite realized how much things had changed until I found myself going to concerts here and in Berkeley (a) to pay my respects to the cultural capital of white pop music, (b) to gain insight into what the new groups were doing, and (c) to see Steve Miller live, because I was afraid I had misjudged his first album (he turned out to be as bad as I thought -- third-rate honky-tonk with a fuzztone -- but then the night I was there he had to cope with a bum sound system and was without his rhythm guitarist). The only group I went to see for its own beautiful sake was the Grateful Dead.
Even now there is more and better music going on here than anywhere else in the country. The Bay Area has long been an amazing reservoir of musicians. In 1964, they were sitting around the Berkeley campus playing for fun. Now, apparently, they've all joined rock groups. In the past week or so, at least fifteen local bands, most of them completely unknown elsewhere, have performed at the Fillmore West, the Avalon, the Oakland Coliseum, the Berkeley Community Theater, and various clubs; of those I've seen, the worst are well above the level of the average third-billed act at the Fillmore East, and the best need only practice, good advice, and luck to be really great.
But, for all this talent, the cultural capital is not what it was when the earliest groups were defining a new consciousness. Such intensity is always difficult to sustain, and the circumstances have not been favorable. Haight-Ashbury has passed to the hoodlums and the meth addicts, the growing political urgency has made music seem less important, and the media, after publicizing the scene to death, have lost interest in it, which is even worse. It may be that the mystique of community that characterized San Francisco rock was based at least partly on wishful thinking; Grace Slick was never exactly the hippie next door.
Yet for me and a great many other people, in and out of San Francisco, it was very exciting, and I am not happy to see it replaced by what amounts to a mystique of musicianship -- a reverence of the sort that makes entertainment "culture." This attitude has its roots in the increasing conversion of white rock from a vocal into a primarily instrumental music -- a trend that originated in San Francisco, though it is by no means confined here. (Eric Clapton has said that Cream uses a voice as just another instrument; Ten Years After, the best of the English blues bands, appears to have the same philosophy.)
The most striking casualty of this development has been the eclectic sensory experience that dance floors and light shows were set up to provide. At the Fillmore West, almost everyone sits on the floor and watches -- one scarcely visible corner is reserved for dancing, as if on principle, just as so many of the groups offer token vocals on principle -- and the light show has become an unobtrusive backdrop. The audience wants to concentrate on what the performers are doing with their instruments.
The best and most polished group I've seen here, It's a Beautiful Day, is totally involved with instrumentation. Not one of its six members -- four men and two girls -- can sing rock. They lack the basic prerequisites of volume and enthusiasm -- especially the lead singer, who also plays the violin. But they are excellent musicians (except for one of the girls, whose function is obscure; she shakes a tambourine now and then, but that's about it). Their sound is built on intricate, shifting rhythmic patterns that reminded me of the Kaleidoscope (a band that isn't very well known but should be), and it is so varied and unfailingly interesting that the vocal vacuum doesn't matter.
At the other extreme is a group of five girls called the Ace of Cups. Everyone sings, and each singer is better than the last, ending with the bass player, Mary Gannon, who has a perfect rock voice, strong, mellow, and idiosyncratic. She and three of the others are essentially belters, but the fifth voice (the piano player's) is soft and torchy -- an effective contrast. Their melodies and arrangements are excellent. But they can't play at all. (This is not surprising. There are plenty of female rock singers but, for some reason, virtually no girls who play instruments seriously.) They pick at their instruments as if at unwanted food on a plate -- especially the drummer, who provides almost no beat. The lack of virtuosity is no problem in itself -- in fact, given my prejudices, it is refreshing -- but the lack of drive is. Their singing is so good that I hope they can overcome this handicap; that they've been performing for a year without learning more is disturbing.
Other groups I've enjoyed are Creedence Clearwater Revival, a workmanlike hard-rock band that is a bit more established -- it has an LP out and a hit single, "Susie Q" -- and the Cleveland Wrecking Company, which is in the wall-of-sound tradition, with a lot of well-integrated electronic noise a la Byrds. . .
[ omitted negative review of "one group I hated, Black Pearl" ]
Except for the Dead, the big groups have been out of town. The Airplane has been in Europe with a twenty-seven-man entourage, and Big Brother recently gave its last local concert to feature Janis Joplin, who is going out on her own. The Airplane doesn't belong to San Francisco anymore; it belongs to the world, like the Beatles and white Levis. As for Janis, she has always belonged to herself. I hope she'll be well and not lose her incredible voice too soon. Incidentally, both groups' latest albums -- the Airplane's Crown of Creation and Big Brother's Cheap Thrills -- are classics. Not only that, they are pure, immediate pleasure. The Grateful Dead's new album, Anthem of the Sun, does take some getting used to, but I find myself enjoying it more and more. Sometimes I think the Dead are the only really happy people left.
(by Ellen Willis, from the "Rock, Etc." column, the New Yorker, 2 November 1968)
Reprinted in the collection Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music.
Ellen Willis (born 1941) was the first pop-music critic at the New Yorker in 1968; she wrote mainly about rock music, and I recommend her collection of music reviews. (She lost interest in music criticism after the '70s and later became known as a feminist and cultural/political writer.)
ReplyDeleteSadly from my point of view, she didn't write about the Dead except for the couple paragraphs here. It's a bit frustrating to have her describe a concert tour of San Francisco reviewing several of the bands she saw except for the "beautiful" Dead, whom she clearly admired! I'm not sure whether this is due to space limitations in her column, or because she felt the Dead were already well-covered in the New York press and she wanted to mention more (then) unknown San Francisco bands.
I couldn't pin down the exact dates of the shows she saw there (since several bands were playing multiple shows), but it was in late Sept/early Oct '68.
She points out one shift happening in rock shows - in San Francisco, people have stopped dancing and are now just sitting and concentrating on the playing. (Willis was rather uncomfortable with this, and the increased focus on instrumental virtuosity in rock.) And in Queens, there is a little war going on between those sitting down and those dancing. (We can hear the shouting on some audience tapes of the time - "Sit down!")
She says Weir told the audience to dance at the start of the 7/11/69 show, but it was actually Garcia: "Now folks, we understand from the management of this little establishment that if you want to, you can dance. [cheers] And I'll tell you where we're at behind it, the whole thing is it's really nice to play when people are dancing. We do dig it. [Phil: When you can see 'em!] So it's cool to dance." (She points out that the Dead often made this announcement at their shows.)
The three reviewers of this concert I've found each mention a song missing on the tape - Christgau said the encore was Cosmic Charlie, Annie Fisher said there was an "acoustic" encore, and Willis said they played Mountains of the Moon (and "several cuts" from Aoxomoxoa, whereas only one such song is on the tape). One or all of them could be mistaken; there's no way to determine.
The original articles had very long paragraphs (the entire Queens piece was five paragraphs), so I added more line breaks.
Also of interest, Willis wrote a full article on Moby Grape in June 1968, praising them as one of the finest San Francisco bands and hoping they'd make it big (though she was disappointed with their second album).
Delete"The most popular San Francisco groups...have made their reputations largely by word of mouth and unsolicited publicity. Primarily live performers, they had an enthusiastic local following, as well as a host of long-distance admirers in the Eastern diaspora, long before they recorded. Furthermore, this presold audience came from an unusually articulate and evangelistic section of the population - that is, hip teenagers and bohemians. The record companies could not have asked for a better grass-roots promotional apparatus. (Similar conditions have enabled the Doors, a very different sort of bohemian group, to become the hottest pop stars in America without benefit of a spectacular public relations blitz.)"
She also wrote a review of Moby Grape's June 1971 appearance at the Fillmore East ("a good show...they sounded very much like their old selves"). The occasion was the closing of the Fillmore East - but Willis admits, "I was never very fond of the Fillmore East. Sitting in a confined space for three hours is not my idea of how to relate to a rock band, but, beyond that, there was usually something tense and sullen in the air, as if everyone were getting ready for a bust or a riot; the spirit of San Francisco lost something in the migration.
"Still, Graham did what no one else had managed - he created a continuing, dependable outlet for live rock in New York - and his detractors have never given him enough credit for that. The fans who accuse him of ripping off 'their' music do not appreciate how much hard work, shrewdness, and money are involved in producing a successful rock concert, nor are they willing to face how basically rock is a capitalist art. If it weren't for businessmen, we wouldn't have rock shows at all, and Graham has been a better businessman than most. Though his prices were not low, his customers could at least count on seeing and hearing a well-produced show. Today, that is not something to be taken for granted. All over the country, people are paying five dollars or more (usually more) to sit on floors or in bleachers in enormous arenas with terrible acoustics and obstructed views... It's enough to make me sentimental about the good old Fillmore - which is no easy task."