AC/DC

Snagged from Andew Mueller's site, w/out permission

LIKE all the best rock’n’roll stories, it probably never happened. And, like all such time-served legends, the details change subtly according to who is telling it, but the essentials are constant and the truth it illuminates is important. It is said that, in the course of promoting one of AC/DC’s records, the band’s lead guitarist, Angus Young, was accused by some or other journalist of “having made eleven albums that all sound exactly the bloody same." “That’s just ignorant,” bristles the Angus Young of our pub fable. “We’ve made twelve albums that all sound exactly the bloody same.”
  If this never happened, it should have. If it did, then Young is rare indeed among rock musicians in having such a lucid awareness of the essence of his own genius. As AC/DC prepare for a British tour in support of “Stiff Upper Lip”, their seventeenth album that sounds exactly the bloody same, it should be understood that it is precisely this rigid reductivism that makes them great. AC/DC’s 27-year-long creative stasis is not, as might be assumed, the result of chronically limited imagination. It is, rather, an acceptance that they got it right the first time they tried, and that there is little point in attempting to improve on perfection, though they have certainly repeated it: “If You Want Blood”, “You Shook Me All Night Long”, “Rock’n’Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” and “Let’s Get It Up” will all echo down the ages like feedback.
  Never recorded a ballad. Never hired a string section. Never written a lyric remotely relevant to the real world. Never grown up – and, for that reason, never grown old. Loved across all boundaries of fashion and music, and just as universally influential, AC/DC are the greatest rock’n’roll band on earth, the best there ever was or will be. The interior life of anyone who does not relish the prospect of seeing them live next week must look like Swindon on a damp Tuesday night.

THE manifesto to which AC/DC have remained faithful all these years is their 1975 debut album, “High Voltage”, which no home should be without. Three of the musicians who played on it are still with the band: the Glasgow-born, Sydney-raised, Young brothers, Malcolm and Angus, whose elder brother (and frequent AC/DC producer) George had already enjoyed success with The Easybeats; native Australian drummer Phil Rudd. On “High Voltage”, all the now-familiar elements are present and correct: the metronomic bass and drums, the ringing open chords of Malcolm Young’s rhythm guitar, the hyperactive soloing of Angus Young’s lead, and a swaggering, rasping vocalist (more or less reformed hooligan and fellow Scottish Australian Bon Scott, at this stage) delivering words that were roughly equal parts richly self-mocking braggadocio (“Gonna be a rock’n’roll star. . . I hear it pays well”) and puerile, if often hilarious, innuendo.
  Even the look had already been decided upon. Malcolm Young still performs in the faded jeans and white singlet that would have been sensible for the sweaty Sydney pubs in which the nascent AC/DC learnt their trade (and has used only two Gretsch guitars from the outset.) Angus, more famously, persists with the school uniform that seemed funny at the time (he was just 16 when “High Voltage” was released.) On the cover, he is pictured clasping the Gibson SG he has not been seen without since.

  AC/DC’s immutable devotion to their founding principles is best illustrated by their response to the death of Bon Scott, whose prodigious consumption of alcohol caught up with him in February 1980. A lesser band would have packed it in completely, or altered course substantially, or recorded a sombre, Proustian rumination on mortality by way of tribute to their fallen comrade. . . or, basically, given the slightest indication that they’d been knocked out of their stride. Not AC/DC. Within a year, they had hired a new singer, Newcastle-born Brian Johnson, who sounded exactly like Scott, and recorded and released the global chart-topper “Back In Black”, which included a track called “Have A Drink On Me”.
  This awesomely single-minded constancy has been the key to AC/DC’s massive popular appeal, allowing them to transcend the shifts in musical fashion that often prove fatal to those foolish or uncertain enough to pursue them. It has also helped that AC/DC’s oeuvre is dazzlingly simple to deconstruct. Their canon is, fundamentally, a vast collection of rewrites of Free’s “Alright Now” and The Rolling Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash”, almost always rendered in the key of A. This ruthless boiling down of rock’n’roll to its barest bones makes AC/DC records irresistible to anyone learning to play guitar – it is no reflection upon Malcolm Young’s exemplary rhythm playing that a recognisable “Highway To Hell” is possible after barely an afternoon’s tuition.
  By keeping it simple, and keeping it pure, and keeping it up for so long, AC/DC have become a touchstone for musicians representing every genre of modern music. Their influence is unsurprisingly discernible among modern heavy metal acts, especially Guns N’Roses and The Cult, but AC/DC’s reach extends much further, into the realm of alternative rock (the opening chords of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” could have been one of Malcolm Young’s choppy progressions) and hip-hop (The Beastie Boys’ incalculably important 1986 debut album, “Licensed To Ill”, was riddled with borrowed AC/DC riffs and shared a similarly juvenile lyrical sensibility). More anecdotally, the two furthest-gone AC/DC trainspotters this correspondent has ever encountered have been a Christian country singer, and a songwriter best known for dance-influenced pop.

A JOY forever though AC/DC’s albums are, the band are at their best on stage. Though the music is delivered with their customary rigorous lack of embellishment, they allow themselves some latitude with the visuals, creating what amounts to a glorious two-hour vacation from common sense. Previous AC/DC stage sets have included an exploding staircase, a wrecking ball, an immense inflatable woman (to illustrate “Whole Lotta Rosie”, AC/DC’s immortal tribute to the fuller-figured female) and a battery of cannons to accompany “For Those About To Rock”, without doubt the most stylish marriage of music and artillery since Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture”. If you don’t have a ticket, find someone who has a spare and marry or kill them as seems appropriate.
  It is perhaps the most eloquent of all tributes to AC/DC that, despite being a long-serving veteran heavy metal band, they have never been the target of any cleverer-than-thou parody – there is not a trace of AC/DC anywhere in “This Is Spinal Tap”, and they, along with late-80s American noiseniks The Butthole Surfers, were the only band who ever elicited unequivocal admiration from Beavis and Butthead. Quite right, too: AC/DC are as pure, elemental and beyond criticism as the air we breathe and the water we drink. One forward-thinking municipal authority in Spain has already named a street after them; the debate about the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square should go no further.

Essential Listening

Unfortunately, there is yet to be a proper AC/DC compilation.  And they've never really made a single, consistently great album.  Yet all of their first decades-worth of albums, at least, have some essential tracks.

No. 1 choice up front is Back In Black, which is as close to a consistent, track-by-track gem as they've ever gotten.  After that, judging proportion of classics vs filler, in order, I would recommend Let There Be Rock, High Voltage, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Who Made Who, Powerage, Highway To Hell, and Flick Of The Switch.  After the 80's I haven't really paid attention.

Since the band doesn't - and, apparently never will - authorize their material for online download, if you want to build your own perfect AC/DC compilation, you'll have to get creative.

Essential Reading

AC/DC: Maximum Rock & Roll: The Ultimate Story of the World's Greatest Rock-and-Roll Band 
Highway to Hell: The Life and Death of AC/DC Legend Bon Scott
Rockers and Rollers: A Full-Throttle Memoir (by Brian Johnson)
AC/DC: High-Voltage Rock 'n' Roll: The Ultimate Illustrated History 

Links

AC/DC Official Site
AC/DC Wiki
AC/DC Allmusic

ABSOLUTE GREY

Snagged from Scorgies.com

If continents can drift 20 centimeters farther from each other over 20 years, imagine how a volatile rock band can scatter in that time. The drummer to San Francisco. The bassist to Maine. The guitarist to Seattle. The lead singer to Ithaca. Twenty years ago, those four pieces were Absolute Grey, one of the best, most happening bands that Rochester has had to offer to the music world.

It was beyond music, even.  “It was multimedia in its earliest, roughest form. That’s how pretentious we were back then,” recalls bassist Mitch Rasor of a show at the Pyramid Arts Center.

“We had a big crowd, and on all of the walls and the ceiling we were showing these films we had made, and our friends who were filmmakers had made, to go along with the music. It was complete immersion, it was everywhere, and I was standing in the middle of it all, almost forgetting I was playing.”


Twenty years later, folks who weren’t at Scorgie’s – the center of the local rock universe, but now a shut-down, silent club on Andrews Street – probably don’t know what the fuss was all about. “There was a buzz going on about this particular band,” says Dave Anderson. “There seemed to be something exciting about them….”


Absolute Grey had the goods. And the fact that the band still has fans to this day – such as R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, who’s quoted on a sticker on the Greenhouse reissue jewel box claiming    “I still have the original LPs” – is Exhibit No. 2 that Absolute Grey is more than a passing moment.

They loved ‘em in Germany, where a two-CD retrospective was released 10 years ago. They adored ‘em in England, where a review of Greenhouse that is to appear in today’s London Sunday Times reads, “Squint a little and Greenhouse is stupendous….” The Scorgie’s tracks secure “Greenhouse its own little space on the lost classics shelf.”   This of a band that released only four albums in its brief lifetime, the last two on a label in Greece. We’re talking Greece the country, not Greece the Rochester suburb.

So what happened?

Rasor and Matt Kitchen, the guitarist, were students at Pittsford Sutherland High School. They went off to college. End of band, it seems.   “Beth and I tried to convince them that it was obvious we had something going on,” says Pat Thomas, the drummer; Beth was Beth Brown, the band’s incandescent lead singer, a torch shining through her band mates’ darkness. “And one more year might have been all we needed to bring it up to the next level.”  As it turned out, it’s been 20 years to bring it up to the next level.

Perhaps the band’s premature end was also inevitable. After graduating from Sutherland, Brown was working as a clerk at Record Archive when Greenhouse was released. She was 23 and Thomas, who had moved here from Corning, was 24. But Kitchen was only 16, and Rasor 15. Yet they were already perfect rock stars. “I was too radical,” Rasor says of being kicked out of art class. As sophomores, he and Kitchen took charge of the school yearbook and used Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the story of a man who awakens to find he’s been turned into a cockroach, as the theme. “It was all gray, with pictures of, like, the chess club over decomposing leaves,” Rasor says. “The total opposite of what a yearbook is supposed to be. The seniors were furious.”


The members of Absolute Grey saved their fury for the band: “We fought like cats and dogs.” Brown and Rasor both use that phrase. “We were so pretentious, we’d fight over poetry,” Rasor says. “We took ourselves so seriously. We were so spoiled. It’s like I wrote in the liner notes to the CD that was released in Germany: ‘Somehow we managed to overcome all the advantages we were handed in life to start this great band.’”

Anderson agrees with Rasor on that point. “The guitarist and bass player were from Pittsford, and I think Beth was, too,” he says. “They had an air of arrogance about them, I must say. Matt had a very condescending tone, especially for a young kid, I thought. He was very serious; he was very intellectual about everything. “He was the main songwriter. They were very moody, atmospheric tunes. It was kind of a downer trip, overall. But in a good way. The name says it all. Absolute Grey.”

They could see nothing but gray. Anderson recalls being in the attic studio during Greenhouse. Brown was in the basement, recording some vocals; something about the acoustics, or her needing to be alone. And he could hear her crying as she was singing her part.

“You know how they say the light in the south of France is best for painting?” Rasor says of the fuel of collaboration. “Well, being in a band… it’s the best. Being able to take ideas and turn them into songs the next day is a great, especiall in high school, when you’re filled with all of this teen angst.” Absolute Grey plunged into the Scorgie’s scene, dominated by local bands such as Personal Effects. Paul Dodd, that band’s drummer, ran Earring Records, a small label that had already released music by the Wilderness Family, the Essentials and the first Colorblind James Experience album. He agreed to release Greenhouse as well. “I remember Pat,” Dodd recalls. “He was a real hustler.”

Hustler, as in aggressive. Among the many talents of Absolute Grey was professional focus. “There was no money attached, no contract. It was just a name. A co-op. A commune. A collective,” recalls Peggi Dodd of Earring’s relaxed business ethos; she was Peggi Fournier then, a keyboardist in Personal Effects. And she was a teacher at Sutherland. Rasor and Brown had been among her Spanish students. They even recruited her to play keyboards on two Greenhouse songs. “I’d come see the band,” she says, recalling the music as “somewhat dark.”

Conceived in an attic, Greenhouse was born in the basement of Scorgie’s in the winter of ‘84. “There was a huge blizzard, and I was so worried that people wouldn’t come because the weather was so’horrible,” Brown says of the record-release show. “But the place was packed, everybody was partying, and I was so gratified.”


Less than a year later, Rasor was a student at Oberlin College in northeastern Ohio when he heard that the college radio station – which didn’t even know that the guitarist from Absolute Grey was on campus – had selected Greenhouse as its indie album of the year, over the likes of R.E.M.’s Murmur. But that was really the beginning of the end.


“I think I can speak for Matt,” Rasor says. “We both knew we wanted more of an academic career, an arts career. Absolute Grey was about to go somewhere, but it was not quite the train we wanted to be on for all that time. I’m a little more comfortable in a library than onstage.”

Absolute Grey proved to be a springboard for Rasor and Thomas in music. Rasor has found a way to combine his interests in architecture, landscaping, graphic design, writing and music – he’s working on his 23rd album, some of which are solo efforts – with a company called MRLD, just north of Portland, Maine.

Thomas lived in Denmark for a year, then used his Absolute Grey connections for a move to California, where many of the survivors of the ’80s psychedelic-rock revival lived. He now runs a San Francisco label, DBK Works, that re-issues classic records on vinyl. And new works as well, including his own solo records and, obviously, Greenhouse.  Kitchen spiraled off into a different orbit, setting down his guitar in favor of a fiddle and a civil-service job, a wife and a daughter in Seattle. The other three members of the band describe him as ambivalent about Absolute Grey,  Brown? The band’s star, with her blend of folk-rock and wailing-punk vocals, has taken the oddest – most frustrating, even – road of them all. “I’m disappointed and angry,” Thomas says, “that she never went on to do anything without us.”

Brown moved to Boston, enrolled in art school, drifted to Ithaca and started a sign-painting business, then moved to the Berk-shires and opened an art gallery. By then, she had a daughter – Indiana – with a German immigrant named Knut Schmitt. Now she’s back in Ithaca. She and Schmitt went their separate ways years ago. Yet in a strange twist, she’s not only caring for their daughter but also the 54-year-old Schmitt, who now is battling early-onset Parkinson’s disease.

Indeed, recently Brown has been writing songs. She will be on the new Absolute Grey release. But her focus is on recording her own music, probably with Anderson’s Saxon Recording, and will return to Rochester this year to find some like-minded musicians to help.

It took 20 years for Brown to take the next step after Absolute Grey. “I didn’t want to do music for a while,” she says; the guitar was packed away. “You know how 2-year-olds are. They mess with stuff.”

Now Indiana is 8. The guitar is out again. Brown, who always collaborated, has discovered she can write songs on her own. “This is going to be a powerful record,” she says. “I can’t wait to do it.”

“You really need to leave that guitar out on the stand. So you can just pick it up. Anytime.”

Essential Listening


Greenhouse

The other albums sound interesting, too, but are all O.P.

Absolute Grey Wiki
Allmusic Absolute Grey

THE AVENGERS

Snagged w/out permission from Alibi.com - article by Marisa DeMarco

Penelope Houston, frontwoman of the punk ’77 band The Avengers, says in the early days, there were plenty of women on the scene. "A lot of the bands around Los Angeles and San Francisco had female performers, female musicians and singers. I wasn't the only one around." Still, she says, she would like The Avengers to be compared to other punk rock bands without any reference to gender—period. Houston can't escape an awareness of her sex, but it's not without payoff. "Women starting bands and performing because of The Avengers is always really gratifying to me."

Punk ’77 is a term that houses bands from around the year punk first blew up. That was back when no one had much of an idea of what they were doing, before a template took over. But there were only a few years before punk became subject to its own laws. "There are some sounds and behaviors that got codified," Houston says. "You see that in 1980 when hardcore came along."

The first few years, there weren't any regulations, and the bands from that period were vastly unlike each other. Nuns, Crime, The Mutants, The Dils—all very diverse San Francisco bands, different looks, different sounds. "When hardcore came along, it just turned into a homogenous thing. The rules started being made and they're still being followed to this day."

But don't idealize the early days of punk too much. "We didn't have the radio. There were very few clubs for punk. We never actually played off the West Coast back in the day. It wasn't possible. We didn't take it for granted that we would be able to go anywhere or get played anywhere or have a record made." Punk bands had to create their own clubs and sleep on each others’ floors after playing those limited venues. Actually, not much has changed there. The Avengers will still be couch-surfing for at least half of their 2007 tour.
The Avengers’ music has endured for 30 years, though the band was only around for two. The original group formed in June 1977 and played until June 1979. The band's last show was with the Sex Pistols at Winterland, having headlined dates with X, The Go-Go's and the Dead Kennedys. In those two years, The Avengers released one three-song EP on Dangerhouse Records. After the band split up, White Noise Records put out another four-song record. A full-length self-titled LP, a collection of previous recordings, came out in 1983.

An assemblage of live and studio material, Died for Your Sins, was released in 1999. Another official release, American in Me, hit the streets in 2004 and a revitalized Avengers (Houston and original guitarist Greg Ingraham atop a new rhythm section) performed a couple shows to support it. "Then suddenly we were getting invited to Europe and London," she says. "It's snowballed. The interest in having us play live just continued." The Avengers are playing all the classic material on this tour, and Houston says she hasn't felt comfortable writing any new Avengers songs. "Singing these songs is cathartic. It feels good to me now. We're in a political situation where being righteous is the right thing to do," says Houston, who raked politics and religion over the coals in her youth.

After the band's breakup in 1979, Houston performed as a folk artist, because the idea of singing in a really quiet situation was frightening and exciting, she says. "Back then, I sometimes felt like I was just screaming and screaming and screaming and people were hearing only every fifth word or something." Before The Avengers ended its run, Houston remembers telling people they were a folk band. "What I meant by that was folk as music belonging to the people, music made by everyday people. That was one of the defining things about punk—it brought rock music back to the users. It brought it down to this level where everyone could participate."

Essential Listening

Avengers -the album pictured at right, contains the cream of their crop, and more.  All the essential tracks are here. You can get it direct from Penelope Houston's website.

Died For Your Sins has some alt takes and live material, and some worthwhile rarities. Also available at Penelope's website.









Essential Reading:

Punk '77: An Inside Look at the San Francisco Rock n' Roll Scene, 1977
Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day


Penelope Houston's Website
Avengers Wiki
Avengers Allmusic