ENGLISH


Holes and Lights
A Rock Concert Special

by Dan Graham

"Beneath each word lies a sort of existential geology . . . a speech full of holes and full of lights." --Roland Barthes

Section 1

The Vanilla Fudge, along with the Velvet Underground, could be considered the avant-garde of the New York area. Elaborating the earlier electronic experimentations of London and Los Angeles based groups, the Fudge's performance sound suggests Edgar Varese wedded to the Stones. "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby?", a series of discontinuous punctuations of sound which occasionally succeed in canceling each other out when crossed by the extreme feedback or organ buzz. The use of the feedback produces a flat, static monotone devoid of interest at one moment, and at the next, jarringly present simply as noise.

Conjoined and over-laiden over all of this is a sensibility (particularly apparent in the drawn-out, over blown organ sections) of Brooklyn Italian American Barocuco: a coruscating, false, overtly 'sweet' ('rich' to sickening) which is a lugubriously (in) 'elegant' stylistic paste (its XXX equivalent is know as 'Hollywood')-to practiced by such New York City area groups as the Four Seasons, The Shangra-Las and The Young Rascals.

The Fudge's approach is mannerist. The Iyrics of their sets (unoriginally 'borrowed' from the past) are subjugated to the entire sound; re-arranged, chopped-up, ground-down, put-down or camped-up. "Bang Bang" is typical; the 'interpretation' is a male impersonation of Cher (who sounds like a flattened-out Sonny anyway): the words being reduced to a group of isolated, flat, staccato eruptions (bang! bang!) a little like the early Kinks. The 'interpretation' is interrupted in the middle by an ear-splitting block like a subway riding on a section of bad track. There is no movement during the built-up pseudo-climax of the opening staccato singing section. Then a false continuity (perhaps moving toward an end) is introduced by the anti-climax of an organ surge, slightly nauseating, only to be itself interrupted by the singing (just when it seems a mostly instrumental number of the usual length was concluding,) then the break suggesting a subway shriek, followed by repetition of the "Bang Bang" Iyrics, etc.

Each of these parts appear isolated-a separate sequence that doesn't add to a unity (much like the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" and "Heroes and Villains",) except that the Fudge additionally attempts the superimposition at the same musical moment of the discreet units as well as their disjunction.

The games played with "beginnings", "ends" and "middles" of compositions making difficult the determination of which way the music is spaced are carried by the Vanilla Fudge into the structure of their entire performance block. After they have concluded about three-quarters of the way through what is to be their next to the last piece, the lead singer interrupts to announce to the audience . . . that they are the Vanilla Fudge and that their last number will be a nine-minute version of "You Keep Me Hanging On". The set is resumed, ending in a prolonged organ hum, two minutes of which is the beginning (realized in retrospect) of "You Keep Me Hanging On."

Section 2
"The Seeds", who claim to have originated "flower music", began with their big hit, "The Farmer". "Flower music" apparently means American Indian refrains. "The Farmer" opens with an extended organ solo by Daryl Hopper "borrowed" from the background soundtracks of the Indian part in cowboy and Indian movies. Its even, "wallpaper" texture-flat and uninflected-nearly disappears in its utter obviousness. It's so stupid there is nothing to grasp: Hopper is a genius. Sky Saxon, the lead singer, does an Indian war dance when he sings; his singing, like his dancing, can best be described as "hoppy"-skipping word to word, barely touching ground surface, placing no weight on continuity or meaning.

Around the middle of the act, Saxon announced: "There's going to be someone walking around handing out seeds, just take them home and see what grows."

Many astrologists believe we are now entering the final "seed period" of the Christian-Piscean Age marking the transition to the coming Aquarian Age as Piscean attitudes of benevolence and unselfish-sympathetic love holding in checK a darker, sensation seeking side given to weaknesses of sloppy emotionalism are coming to fullest flower while the world goes to pot.

The performance closed with a cut from the Seeds' brand-new album which seems to be influenced by the Doors. "Fallin"' is perhaps an attempt at Judeo-Christian tragedy/shamanistic rock opera or can be taken literally. At the conclusion of the performance all performers fall down, concluding, "You're falling down" about thirty times. The audience booed.

The Byrds began their section with a hummed sutra chant, "We don't exactly know what it is; it's just a place we go sometime." The overpowering, sweetly harmonic texture of guitar and guitar feedback once synonymous with this group seems to have been thinned out in the direction of brittleness (at least in performance.) "I Think That Maybe I'm Dreaming" typifies this sharp, acerbic sound dominated in this instance by Mike Clark's superb drumming. There is a more integral use of dissonance in "Universai Decoding Kit" which combined bag-pipel-ike assonance with Everly Brothers Iyricism. "Lady Friend", the Byrds' last release, repeats the rolling circularity (sickening sameness as opposed to continuity) which characterizes the best of the Byrds' (and rock and roll generally) songs of the past:

"Here it comes again/
It's going to happen to me/
Here it comes/ . . .
It looks like the last wave a drowned in."

The Byrds seem a little bit "out of time"-they belong to a slightly earlier era. The group image of this group is pervasive, unlike the decentralized "associations" of the more recently formed Seeds and Vanilia Fudge. In their cases, each performer's musical part is conceived as separate from each of the other's; each musician is content to "do his thing". Such a separate but equal notion is carried into individual difference in dress style. While Daryl Hopper was made up as J.S. Bach (a girl teased from the audience, "Where did you get that cute bow?" The answer, "From the 17th century."), Sky Saxon wore a too-small circus bandleader's (Sgt. Pepper) jacket.