Rock Rock

ROCK

Marshall Rubinoff

Music is emotional feeling channeled via sound to the listener's ear in order to recreate feelings. It is this criteria alone by which I judge what I hear. How does it make me feel? Does it get me high - -does it create new patterns in my mind which I've never seen before? If I know what is coming next, it takes some of the kick out of what I'm hearing. I want to be fooled, in the sense that I will be able to recreate, with the artist, the feeling of discovery. The ability of the artist can then be measured by how he shows you an object, or a sound, differently by closer inspection in order to expand your consciousness.

The Jimi Hendrix record.is so far the best record I've ever heard. It was so exciting because his music is just raw feelings disguised only vaguely inside the Rock idiom. He blows your mind continually with the unexpected taking you further and further into your mind so that the totality of what you are hearing is too great to really understand upon first hearing (in the sense of beginning - end: its structure) but compells you to just feel. The album sounds completely spontaneous and no matter what studio-electrical gimmicks were used, they only serve to enhance its absolute purity. Undoubtedly Hendrix never plays the same song the same way twice. There is so much room for improvisation, he can't help but grow with his music and just continue to excite our ears with his onslaught of sound.

Other groups I can classify with Hendrix for how they make me feel are few. The Moby Grape is one -- they knocked me on my ass when I saw the. They screamed and played, improvising, falling of the stage, and took my mind and body to the total freak - out stage of no control. Their record is a very poor example of their talents. The Grateful Dead, although they played a lot of their album material as it appeared on the album, were out of sight because they just were obviously enjoying what they were doing so much. You could hear them excitedly talking to one another in a long conversation that slowly built to a huge satisfying series of climaxes. They can take songs like Midnight Hour, getting into it and "talking" to each other so heavily that you couldn't remember via what structure-melody-song they used in order to get into it.

The MC-5 of course are so far-out because their structure has become more fluid as they've grown. They have developed into the most honest music around today. I never know what they are going to tell my mind each time I hear them, and they probably don't know either -- the trip is to flow with them and feel their feelings -- come, groan, scream and laugh -- love with them. It's a pity that they have been so fucked-up business-wise. They sometimes have equipment, sometimes not, get themselves hung-up with slick record managers who only want to get rich, etc. They are honest beautiful people, and I can't help being paranoid that they are going to be continually shit on unless someone takes care of them.

Naturally I can't be too objective about the Spikedrivers, but in everything we do there is room for improvisation, and I never sing our material the same way twice. Playing music has a reality all its own, and the dream-like quality of super-realness never goes away as long as you experiment and keep learning. I played in other groups that did the commercial -plastic trip, and the boredom is the same as the boredom of a factory gig where the sound has at least some variation.

I don't understand how a group like the Jefferson Airplane can play the same song the same way so many times -- it surely goes stale in their own minds. It becomes the whole structured trip of symphony cats I know who play the same stuff all the time. The only challenge is to see how fucked-up stoned you can get and still play the piece coherently. When a musician becomes commercially marketable he's faced with the challenge of keeping out of the trap of his own personally arranged uniformity. If groups I respect, like the Doors and the Airplane cater to the audience who want to hear their hits, then they're going to find themselves in trouble.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 12.

This leads to the problem of how to make a living when you can't sell your sound. I don't know the solution. Record companies will only record if they think the music is marketable and alcoholic joints want sane-sameness to help sell the beer. It winds up being a very weird shitty trip for most honest musicians between making music and being able to reach an audience to hear it.

RECORD TIPS: Big Brother and the Holding Company's record is a shitty production job on material that is over a year and a half old. In fact, the entire album is only 23 minutes long. Still, Janis Joplin's voice goes right through you and on "Light Travels Faster than Sound" Jim Gurley's lead and the whole cut is out of sight. . . ESP release of "Pearls Before Swine" is a backward trip of beautiful -pastoral -flute -harp sounds that serves as a background for some beautiful poetry. Reminds me of the Seventh Seal group that is no more. . . . Bee Gee's new album is too much Beatles oriented, but even if it's all phony, a hack musician package, I like their voices and don't understand why they don't close their eyes, get hot and sweaty and get into themselves. . . Procol Harum album is a nice blend, on some cuts, of the classical and rock idioms, although I find it lyrically pretentious and musically a dwarfed abortion of a good possibility. The organ player makes the album worth listening to, though. .. record by the Paupers is unbelievably shitty. I heard them in person and although they are caught inside the structure of tight rock arrangements, they are exciting, using three drums doing an African beat with electronic gimmicky guitar whistling overhead. Their bass player makes like he's fucking his bass and gets into it good -- I could have danced to them all night. Their manager, Grossman (Dylan's), has them into a success trip and it's all a little sad because I don't think they'll ever get a chance to turn on to the freedom of sounds beyond their already super-tight rock structure. I'm not jealous, but cautious, of the plastic slickness that often sticks to monetary success. Jimi Hendrix, Beatles, Stones, Donovan, Dead, Country Joe, Cream and others keep my mind swirling into the wholeness of us all. --MARSHAL RUBINOFF