Vampyros Lesbos Sexadelic Dance Party
(Rhino)
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Part of rock ‘n’ roll’s appeal, over classical music, say, or jazz, is the myth that anybody can play it. Punk claimed that rock began with “do it yourself”; the business and egos came later. But the truth is, a band can go only so far with undisciplined, formless jamming. It’s easy to make like Blues Traveler–choose three chords to play over and over, have every band member jam really fast for a while, then figure out how to end the song half an hour later. But Blues Traveler can get away with this only because they occasionally have lyrics to hold your interest when the music gets boring. It’s much harder for instrumentalists. Some supremely talented guitarists–like Buddy Guy or Stevie Ray Vaughan–avoided complex organization, fully exploiting the rigid basics of the blues genre by developing a flashy style. Everybody else has to make arrangements, the musical equivalent of building an outline before writing an essay.
Good pop songwriters know all about this–they use traditional verse-chorus-verse structures to get their points across. But more than any singer-songwriter, the great instrumental pop musicians must rely on planning and structure because that’s all they have. They can’t hide sloppiness behind provocative lyrics or a good singer. In the M.G.’s classic “Green Onions,” subtle guitarist Steve Cropper had to know exactly when organist Booker T. Jones was going to finish his short solo before starting his own. In Pavement’s terrific 1994 instrumental “5-4=Unity,” somebody had to plan when the big piano riff would stop and the dramatic spooky guitar would float in at the end of the bar. (You can hear it, too, when musicians fail to outline: when the Beatles loosened up on their spontaneous 1965 blues jam “12-Bar Original,” released on “Anthology 2,” they inevitably ran the song into the ground.) To work, these things need to be planned in advance.
Perhaps trying to live up to his “guitar hero” status, in concert Dale stretches “Miserlou” and his other great songs into extended jams. But by removing organization from the priority list, and with no lyrics to spice things up, his songs become repetitive and dull. Yet Dale, who just put out a pretty good new album, left a wide legacy. It’s all over Cowabunga!: from the echoey plucking of guitarist Rich Fifield in the Astronauts’ “Baja” to the more recent playful romps of Finland’s Laika and the Cosmonauts and Saturn’s Man…or Astroman?. When the Cosmonauts perform, they wear Hawaiian-style shirts with little planets all over them, and they lean over their instruments with precise determination, as if they’re working on a cure for cancer. What comes out are spectacularly frivolous rhythms whose only purpose is to make you smile, dance, and maybe surf.
