The View From Nowhere

LOCAL MUSIC
The View from Nowhere

By Alan Goldsmith

I have two confessions to make. One, I love pop music. I don't mean just the stuff played on the radio. I mean REAL POP MUSIC. If there's a better single ever recorded than ABBA's "The Name of The Game," I really doubt it. Or anything ever produced by Phil Spector will send chills up my spine, even after hearing it a zillion times. I can't help it. There is something universal about a cool hit record that will transcend cultures, countries, sexes, age groups, etc, unlike most other art. Second confession. College white boys with guitars, too many music and philosophy lessons who buy into the myth that anyone can create art and anyone with a couple thousand bucks should put out a CD, drive me up the wall.

Jerking off sonically and melodically bores me to tears. More time spent experiencing life and less time reading Guitar Player magazine usually translates into way better music. Two chords are better than ten chords. One chord is best of all. So what in the world does this have to do with the local music scene? Five recent CDs from one singer songwriter and five rock-rooted bands both have me reappraising guitar smart-ass-isms (for a lack of a better phrase) and thinking about how my listening to local music connects to my love of pop.

Andy Boller is an old timer Ann Arbor music warrior who has played piano and done his solo gig in more dive bars than even he can count as well as his semi-legendary time with the semi-legendary Urbations (twisted jazzy funk dance band of the 1980s with scores of recorded history) a few years back. Boller spends his time between Ohio and Switzerland these days and just resurfaced on a new CD, "Face The Light Alone" (Bopological Records). It's a pop record from someone who knows lots of chords, knows how to appeal to a radio popbar hanging audience and has leamed a few things about life. Billy Joel and Hoagy Carmichael sort of hover over the goings on with Boller trying mostly to show what he can do on the keys and write lyrics that don't bite too hard. When he does, it's a nicely pleasant A-OK mix of tracts that wander a little too much to be played on any big-time pop radio station. When he tries to show everything he knows about piano technique, it's really weak.

But when he turns off the music major mentality and connects to his heart, it's a different story. There's nothing very dangerous here from the Billy Joel-istic "Hey Ho" and "The View From Pedro's Apartment" or the guided tour of leaving the bar band scene of Detroit behind in "Northern Lights." And neither is the backhanded ABBA tribute "Do You Have A Clue" a rough draft perhaps of a universal pop hit I mentioned before. But what he misses with the danger level he more than makes up for in emotional power. And on "Face The Light Alone" there are more hits than misses.

On "Urban Farmers Present: Music For the Peasants" (Uprising Records) by the Urban Farmers, we get the condescending attitude right from the title of the CD through all eight cuts. This all-instrumental/no lyric band does a see-the-world tour of music styles from garage-riff jamming on "Intifada" to the Afro-pop stylings of "Those Monster Trux" (what an oh-so-hip title). There are lots of semi-complex, slightly catchy things going on with the Urban Farmers but the overall effect is a release that sounds like rockers slumming in a string of multicultural neighborhoods who steal a little bit here and a little bit there. Not pop, lots of "I know more chords than you," and with a look-down-on-the-listener-sort of air, the Urban Farmers may have pleased themselves with songs for us peasants, but this peasant is a little restless.

If there was ever a soundtrack background music for an acid flashback rehab program, A2 band Only A Mother would have to be included. Their new CD,"Feral Chickens," is anti-pop music by music majors that is goofy, catchy and thoughtful. Like the Urban Farmers, Only A Mother goes shopping in the world music K-Mart too and picks up what you may expect a gallon of mideastern influences on "Warped," some spaced out tapeloop/Charles Mingus-via-The Residents jazz on "Mahogany Wood" and a Paris-cafe-sounding version of the Stones anti/pro-drug anthem "Mother's Little Helper." While this grad-student pop with a twisted edge sounds...inaccessable, it really isn't. Only A Mother has nothing on ABBA of course, but even if on "Feral Chicken" they know how to p!ay more off-the-wall discords than you ever imagined could exist, the final outcome is brilliant in an Ann Arbor sort of way. And kudos for inviting guest star Eugene Chadbourne along for the ride (who plays banjo on "A Little Blackout").

Still in the same artistic solar system as Only A Mother and the Urban Farmers but more - ha ha ha - commercial comes "mmm...good" by Liquid Plumber. Their press pack tosses out names like the Pixies and They Might Be Giants and there may be a slight truth to that. With an off-key sing/spoken vocalist and guitar/bass/drums that try to be complex and garage band at the same time, the band is more smart ass than Ph.D. candidate modern American composers. Liquid Plumber is more the anti-ABBA: Witness the CD kickoff tune "Reese Caro, the Collapsible" with its long pointless guitar intro that goes nowhere for over a minute before hitting the body of the song. Track to track, this collection of thirteen songs wanders to and fro with some angst, way more boring meanderings on the various instruments and cutesy lyrics and title that cry GROW UP FOR GOD'S SAKE. But...jerking off isn't always a crime and on one cut, "Beth=Great," the musicians, lyrics and planets all hit in sync to produce a smart (as opposed to smart -ass) and wonderful piece of work. On "mmm...good," this happens much too rarely.

Which brings us to China Doll. This band knows way more than all of you put together. They hang out in art galleries or dance clubs and not working-class, real-world bars. They probably go to sleep every night reading Recording Studio Digest for god's sake. But on the release of "Tango" in it's final form (I previewed an advanced copy here awhile back) it's everything I love, everything I dislike in music. It's one long synth, heroin-chic, dance-until-sunrise classic that does everything. "Tango" is a dance for the feet as well as the mind and is a brave jump into uncharted hook-filled pop. ABBA? I could imagine China Doll blasting from a boom box on some island in Greece or dance club speakers in New Zealand. It's doom-filled and loaded with a Zen-like hypnotic air; it's way smart but not in an insulting way and as close to gaining a world audience as you're going to see from an Ann Arbor band anytime soon. And it's wonderful pop music that you should run out and purchase.

Don't forget to send your comments, copies of your masters thesis, and anything of an artistic bent to: The View From Nowhere, AGENDA, 220 S. Main Street, Ann Arbor, Ml 48104, or e-mail to ALANNARBOR@aol.com. LOCAL

WHO: The Master Musicians of Jajouka
WHERE: Rackham Auditorium
WHEN: Oct. 21, 8 pm
INFO: Call 764-2538

Master Musicians of Jajouka Make A2 Debut
By Jamie Agnew
When I was in high school my friends and I were obsessed with Brian Jones--I'm not sure exactly why, probably the usual adolescent fascination with dead rock stars. Part of the legend was Jones' only post-Stones recording, something called "Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka." It was the only album on the Stones' discography we could never find, although one guy claimed that he'd heard it--a bunch of weird pipe music, electronic effects and some anonymous twanging which may or may not have have been Jones.

There it stayed, elusively, in the back of my mind, until later when, like all good college students, I got into the Beats. It was William Burrough's cohort Brion Gyson who had introduced Jones to Jajouka after all, and in his novel "The Process," he described it as a remote mountain village in Morocco full of mysterious master musicians.

Again Jajouka lay dormant but strangely resonant to me for quite some time, until one day a couple of months ago when I was rolling through Afterwords (a book store on Main St.), my mind in its best neutral gear, and saw a remaindered book called "Jajouka Rolling Stone" by Stephen Davis. I'd read another book Davis had written called "Hammer of the Gods," which (regardless of what you think of Led Zeppelin) is one of the best rock biographies ever written, and this book even had Brian Jones on the cover. For some reason I didn't buy it, then was haunted by the thought that it might disappear before I could get back there to snatch it up.

Luckily it was still on the shelf, and as I suspected it was wonderful, intoxicating book (mysteriously labeled a novel), part travelogue, part history, part musicology. It's basically the story of Davis' contacts with Jajouka, starting with his ill-fated assignment for National Geographic, and lasting intermittently for twenty years, through the musicians' loss of their traditional place in Moroccan society and their uneasy emergence as a viable international musical ensemble. The Master Musicians were the traditional court musicians of the Sultan of Morocco, the origins of their music told in a legend.

One day a nonconformist goatherd decided to sleep in a forest cave. When he awoke he heard an incredible, strange music which instantly intoxicated him. It was being produced by a strange Pan-like being, half-main, half-goat, known as Bou Jeloud. This creature taught the goatherd how to play his flute and survives today in the pagan abandon of the music and the costume one of the Jajoukans dons to cavort as the others play and dance. The musicians themselves are portrayed as a fun-loving bunch who smoke kif (marijuana and tobacco), drink mint tea, eat couscous, dance and jam all night long.

So finally I came to the music, an import CD called "Jajouka Black Eye," more flute-oriented and primitive than the Bill Laswell-produced "Apocalypse Across the Sky" which brought Jajouka to the world music crowd. (Brian Jones's album is even set for re-re-lease). When I played it in the car, my daughter with a four-year-old's prescience called it dinosaur music. It really is something ancient and other, spiritual, playful, very real soul, the kind of tunes you keep hearing in your head long after it's over.

I bored my friends and family for a month fixating on Jajouka, listening to it, reading about it, and bewailing my sad lack of kif, wondering where it was all leading. Then one day I saw in the paper a familiar photograph of a couple of pipe playing musicians and was stunned to find out that the Master Musicians were making their first-ever American tour and playing in Ann Arbor. The coincidence of their appearance here just as I was becoming immersed in them is too cosmic for me to take seriously. Let's just say the gods work in funny ways--one of which is for me to persuade you to come and witness and rock at a literally once-in-a-lifetime event when Bou Jeloud comes to Ann Arbor.