RELICS

It has long been the case that most of the musicians I admire are either dead, mad or in jail. Over the course of the last few years that sense has become even more acute as the half-centenaries pass of bands I saw in my youth. Several bands I have seen lately seems to contain one or more elderly survivors of the late 1960’s with varying degrees of success.  These are not so much ‘tribute acts’ but might be better termed’ tributary bands’ which lay some claim to lineage from the original. I have seen several at a sort of British Legion club locally which is perhaps an appropriate venue. There I sporadically join with other ageing veterans in an ongoing act of remembrance. It’s 100 years since WW1 ended and 50 years since I attended the first of the free shows in Hyde Park. As senility sets in, turning out for these bands is perhaps more a ritual - ‘lest we forget’- rather than a futile attempt to relive our long lost youth.

I recently saw Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets at The Roundhouse, an old railway shed. Most of the crowd looked as if they had come to spot trains. The audience was 90%+ elderly males who collectively couldn’t muster enough hair to stuff a pillowcase. Another consistent feature of these gigs is that there is always a hundred yard queue for the Gents and not one for the Ladies. The Roundhouse itself has been much spruced and sanitised in the 50 or so years since Nick Mason first played there with Pink Floyd. Not an incense stick or collapsing jelly to be seen anywhere and extremely unlikely that magic sugar cubes had been consumed by any of the attendees. Many looked like they were mainlining Horlicks. It was, nonetheless, a very enjoyable evocation of Pink Floyd in their psychedelic heyday, a period now largely eschewed by  the other two surviving members, David Gilmour and Roger Waters. Nick Mason has pulled a clever stroke in recognising that there is a significant audience for that early material which can be mobilised by invoking his status as one of the two surviving founder members of Pink Floyd.  The demand for it might not be solely nostalgic and confined to those old enough to have seen the original band perform it back in the day. Those primarily familiar with Pink Floyd’s work after Dark Side of the Moon may be curious to hear what made the Floyd great initially. There is then the possibility that the aged devotees of earlier Floyd music will in course be supplemented by much younger folk.

The economics of Heritage Rock are such that some of its older and wiser protagonists might therefore enjoy a dotage which is more financially rewarding than the prime of their music careers. One has to remember that Nick Mason was so hard up in the 1980’s that he had to mortgage one of his Ferraris. Getting a few thousand blokes to blow much of their Winter Heating Allowance on tickets for a revival show is a very astute move. Another band I saw recently was MC50 led by Wayne Kramer, an exuberant celebration of the MC5 which he founded in 1968 with the late Fred Smith. The MC5 disintegrated after three albums in the late 60’s and Kramer subsequently did drug addiction and jailtime. He re-emerged as an articulate and amusing raconteur and bandleader and now has a crack team of (slightly) younger grunge/ thrash musicians and a singer who is a most remarkable facsimile of the late Rob Tyner. In the late 1960’s the MC5 were occasionally one of the greatest rock bands ever but were seldom consistent or reliable in performance. The tributary act, MC50, is currently the greatest rock band you probably have never heard of. The show I attended was populated with a similar crowd as that at The Roundhouse, all paying north of £50 a head. We had our moneysworth as soon as the band struck up and sent the audience’s comb-overs flapping. The floor was littered with discarded deaf-aids.

At the opposite end of the spectrum Live Dead 69 played just down the road earlier in the year. There were only about eighty people at the show, again mostly elderly blokes.That band included Tom Constanten, who once played with the Grateful Dead and others who had played with members of Jefferson Airplane and the like. Constanten joined the Dead in 1968 and left in January 1970. He played on their second and third albums and the majestic Live Dead. The set I saw this year was predominantly drawn from the later Skull and Roses live album by the Dead which he did not play on. The ‘tributary’ aspect was then altogether more tenuous and the billings of ‘ex-Grateful Dead/ Jefferson Airplane/ Starship etc.’ , whilst accurate, slightly overstated . Unlike Mason or Kramer these were not founder or lifetime members of the bands referred to. They nonetheless delivered  very competent renditions of songs associated with the Grateful Dead, an undertaking which itself presents a number of particular challenges. Not least is the fact that the several remaining founder members of the Dead have continued to perform in various combinations  since the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995. The afterlife of the Grateful Dead is itself the subject of a whole book – Fare Thee Well by Joel Selvin- a lengthy piece of scuttlebutt. A recent incarnation, Dead & Co, has featured the execrable John Mayer on guitar and three original members of the Grateful Dead. Why this is altogether less acceptable than having a bloke from Spandau Ballet fulfill the Syd Barrett role in Saucerful of Secrets needs further thought. I’ll get back to you on that. For the moment you can take it that I will not be going to San Francisco  to see a washed up popstar play the songs of Jerry Garcia. I will, however, be going into town to see Gary Kemp jigging around to Astronomy Domine again next Spring.

At the same venue just down the road I also saw a band purporting to be Man ( the ‘Welsh Grateful Dead’) recently. That troupe was fronted by Martin Ace who did indeed play the bass guitar with Man in several of their many incarnations. Given their constantly changing personnel  the ‘tributary’ element is even more problematic in this case. The only consistent member of Man was Mickey Jones who died in 2010. His son, George, now fronts a band called Son of Man which plays the same songs but has no original members of Man in it. They appear, however, to be more popular in Man’s original home territory than the band led by Martin Ace. On the other hand there are many who fondly remember the music played by the original Man band(s) who take the view that it is a good thing that several bands perpetuate that. In short, an audience who are less concerned  with the pedigree of band members.  Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead and many other major bands have spawned countless tribute acts. Some of these have built a sound and profitable following with no claims on authenticity relating to original membership. Many appear motivated by a genuine love of the original artists and seek to faithfully replicate their music. Some are extremely competent in their undertaking. Others introduce an amusing or satirical element to their performance or render the original music in an entirely different genre but are no less skilled in so doing.  A bluegrass band playing Pink Floyd numbers does have the virtue of some originality but the joke can wear rather thin and make for a long evening. All that Saucerful of Secrets, Dead & Co and the like offer over a skilled covers band  is perhaps that sometimes tenuous connection of one or more members with the original band. Neither the tribute nor tributary band might offer much by way of originality if they merely seek to replicate the sound of the original. However, there seems to be a market for such replication.

An altogether more innovative affair was David Byrne’s American Utopia show wherein some of Talking Heads greatest hits are rendered as musical theatre. As a mere youth of 66 Byrne is still engaged in a process of reinvention rather than regurgitation. I have not previously endorsed behaviour involving rigorously choreographed dance routines but tip my hat to Mr. Byrne for once again confounding another of my long –held prejudices. So, whilst there is only one member of Talking Heads on stage performing some of their songs from the early 1970’s the overall feel was different from the shows described above.  It was not an homage to a long defunct band but a radical reinterpretation of some of their songs. The demographic of the audience was broader with more of a gender balance i.e. more couples  and a lower average age. That is not to say that there were a lot of young people there which is a shame. American Utopia is a show you could take your grandchildren to see if your pension stretched that far.