Author: Diane Griffin

Diane is a writer of Fantasy, an intermittent blogger, and a generator of nonsense.

The Donnas — American Teenage Rock ‘N’ Roll Machine

Just kids!

I popped Rush’s Feedback CD into the box right after this twenty-some minute blast. The source material is from a different era, but I can hear the two sets as though in conversation with each other. Rush was playing a set of cover songs from their youth: The Donnas wear their influences so much on their sleeves that you can spot many quotes, even though the record is a set of ten originals. I hear the Ramones here, of course, from the power-chord guitar, to the band naming themselves in a Ramones-like way, to the chant of “Rock! Rock! Rock ‘n’ Roll!” halfway through the very first track. I hear a very strong Joey Ramone influence in Donna A.’s singing, as well.

The whole record is infused with holler-backs to the Ramones, the Runaways, and even the New York Dolls. There are so many nods to other bands that it caused me to seek out Feedback, because at first blush, that’s the level of nostalgia this album exudes.

But this record is made by kids in their fledgling moment, a second album and possibly their first foray into a “real” studio, looking forward more than they are backward in time. That they’re stiff and a little awkward is testament to their youth, that they’re going at it full-force is testament to their ambition.

I have to admit, though, that it is a little bit jarring to hear a band so committed to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Dream™ at the very late date in which this album came into being. They seem sincere, though, not weighed down with post-modern irony. And the subject matter isn’t flights of fancy about them becoming huge stars, it’s about their daily — or rather nightly — existence. It’s about partying and playing music right where they are.

These kids’ honesty and immediacy is the saving grace of the project. Where Rush is escaping into a more innocent era, The Donnas are in their moment, living, not reliving, even as they hark back to their influences.

[ED]

Rush – Feedback

Rush’s covers ep.

Those Rush guys, on a knoll.

Cleaned the lens off my boom box and put The Donnas‘ American Teenage Rock ‘N’ Roll Machine, and then this. Rush covers eight songs from the late sixties here, from right at the birth of AOR, though everything on the record was released as a single by the originating bands. Ostensibly, these are things they played in their high school bands and early bar band days. It sure sounds like it. Rush had been a band for, like, forty years at the point when they made this record: what does forty years of international touring do for a band? What does a band that has been generating material prolifically for all of that time retain from its origins? Here’s Rush’s answer: everything’s intact and enhanced.

Just in this moment, I’m listening to the silence after a straight-up cover of Cream’s record of Robert Johnson’s Crossroads, still lost in Alex’s record-finale wah wah guitar solo. I’m in awe: it’s fast, clean, and funky, unlike anything in modern rock.

I find that I wish they’d done a couple more songs, so that the final product could have the feel of an album. The sonics are very much of the time when the original singles were of-the-moment. The bands and songs for this record are The Who’s “The Seeker,” The Yardbirds’ “Heart Full of Soul” and “Shapes of Things,” Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” and “Mr. Soul,” Cream’s “Crossroads,” Love’s “Seven and Seven Is,” and Blue Cheer’s “Summertime Blues.” Such a great, if short, list of tunes!

Still, I wish there was a Hendrix song on here, something off of Zeppelin I, or maybe a Vanilla Fudge track (my fantasy track would have been “My White Bicycle”) so that it had the feel of a full album.

What it does have, in spades, is the feeling of a band born in that time. I can just imagine them at a kegger at McGill University doing this exact set, making fiddy bucks and feeling good about it, and I can also imagine them dumping any one these tracks into a live set at any time during their run. This is a revisit of their early days as a cover band, and also a mark of how far they’ve come.

[ED]

More Weird Music I Listen To

Musing about my latest obsessive listening habit

I’ve been on a Cluster kick of late. This after a Black Sabbath phase and then an early Cure spree.

If you don’t know, Cluster is a German minimalist experimental duo that was most productive in the 1970s, having derived out of a trio called Kluster but continuing on through the two-thousands, until Deiter Moebius died in 2015. The other half of the duo, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, is still with us, still releasing new music at the age of 86. I’ve been listening to them since the late 70s, having discoveren their experimental, particular/peculiar sounds after being introduced to their records by a friend in his college dorm room over herbal supplements of a recreational type common to the college dorm rooms of the time. In fact, listening to their music can sometimes invoke strange sense memories for me; recently I was listening to Roedelius’s solo CD Durch Die Wüste and suddenly I had the smell of bongwater in my nose (I do not own, and never have owned a bong. My college friend, however, was a major proponent of the water pipe as a delivery device for the smoke of herbal supplements of that recreational type we were both fond of.)

I’ve also listened to Cluster 71, their first album after Conrad Schnitzler left the group, Zuckerzeit, and Grosses Wasser, plus Roedelius’s Offene Türen, all pretty much consecutively. Each of these albums is unique. Cluster 71 is distorted, droney soundscapes; Zuckerzeit is proto-electro IDM, a real precursor to that style and very influential; Grosses Wasser is disciplined, calm like water but still quite catchy, possibly my favorite of their output; Offene Türen is dramatic and fiery, almost Kurt Weil-like, though still simple, and centered, as all of Cluster’s music is, on the idea of the minimal drone; and the above-pictured album is, once again, a unique experience, a blending of a mid-seventies rock aesthetic and Cluster’s distinctive drone. If you come to DDW after being familiar with much of the rest of this ouvre, it will surprise you, as it did me, by being very far from what one would expect from them, but completely within their unique wheelhouse.

You may have noticed that I am not distinguishing much between Roedelius’s solo work and Cluster as a group. I know that may be confusing, but the sensibility of all of this music is so insular and distinctive that it really is a thing unto itself. I would also include Moebius’s solo work and outside collaborations from both band members either collectively or apart from each other, such as the band Harmonia that is the two members of Cluster and Michael Rother, guitarist from peer German minimalist band Neu! and other efforts as well. It all feels of a piece to me: a sound that is sometimes imitated, but original and definitely belonging to Moebius and Roedelius. It embodies early electronic music, a kind of progressive rock aesthetic, classic minimalism that can extend backward in time to the work of Erik Satie, and also sits off to its own little sideline. Some have also called it “new age” but I would beg to differ, because the point of this music is less to calm and center than to open and challenge. It creates a space that can be meditative, but it contains discord and plays with expectations in a way that any music I would think of as “new age” studiously avoids.

Don’t be surprised if I write about this band and its various offshoots again (and again), they’re seminal to my tastes in music.

[ED]