Tag: Derv Gordon

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The Equals Endure!

Derv Gordon with So What (Photo: Lily Chou)

While Gonerfest is known for bringing cutting-edge bands to Memphis, one can’t forget the keen sense of history that also informs their bookings. This week’s Gonerfest 21 is a good reminder of that, with the opening night’s headliner being Oakland’s So What fronted by Derv Gordon, the original lead singer of The Equals, a band founded in 1965. They could have hit it big in America like so many during the British Invasion, had they ever bothered to invade. But, being one of the first multiracial beat combos ever, they had mixed feelings about that.

“We didn’t want to tour the U.S. because we wouldn’t have been able to cope with this ‘no Blacks’ business and not being able to stay in certain hotels or whatever,” Gordon recalls today, speaking from his home in England. “Still, ‘Baby, Come Back’ made the Top 40.” But with no U.S. touring, they never made it big here.

Though The Equals’ blend of freakbeat, soul, ska, and bubblegum rock was plenty cutting-edge (and plenty infectious) at the time, having a group with both Black and white players pushed the envelope even further. Booker T. and the MG’s may have been the only such small combo to precede them. But The Equals were more of a rock band, paving the way for later groups like The Foundations, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Love. And while they did find greater success in Europe and Asia, race still factored into everyday London life. Harassment by the cops was a regular feature of life for Black Londoners, and that in turn led to the creation of one of The Equals’ most enduring songs, “Police on My Back.”

“I left the guys at rehearsal and went to a main railway station to get some cans of drinks,” Gordon recalls, “and as I walked into the station, two huge men, one on each side, picked me up, lifted me off the floor, and said, ‘You’re nicked.’ I said, ‘I’m what? Why am I nicked?’ They just said, ‘You’ll find out,’ and they took me across the street to the police station. I was there for what seemed like forever. I gave them all my information, then said, ‘Excuse me, can you tell me why this is happening to me?’ A policeman says, ‘You resemble someone who murdered his girlfriend.’”

Gordon cleared things up only after requesting that his band be brought in to vouch for him. As they entered, “I could see them coming in with big grins on their face,” Gordon recalls. “Bastards!” Humor aside, the incident was a wake-up call for them. Soon Eddy Grant, The Equals’ lead guitarist and main songwriter (who later gained worldwide fame with his solo hit, “Electric Avenue”), would pen arguably the best song about being on the lam, later made famous via a cover version by The Clash, with its heartfelt cry, “What have I done?” And Gordon’s voice brought the phrase to life.

The band had other politically charged songs, including 1970’s anti-war “Black Skin Blue-Eyed Boys,” but their primary focus was on fun and groove, with charging rock riffs paired with infectious beats and Gordon’s fiery, soulful vocals, often portraying whimsical characters: “Soul Brother Clifford,” “Michael and His Slipper Tree,” “Viva Bobby Joe.” And while their sound got heavier and funkier by the late ’60s and ’70s, The Equals always kept things short and sweet. “I don’t think Eddy enjoyed doing long guitar solos,” quips Gordon now. 

That makes The Equals’ music perfectly suited to the D.I.Y., short-and-sharp vibe of so many Gonerfest bands. And that’s an aesthetic shared by retro-stomp rockers So What, with whom Gordon first played in 2017, including an incendiary performance at Gonerfest 14 that year. Gordon feels they’re the perfect group to play Equals songs: true to that original stripped-down spirit, but with their own self-described “junkshop glam/bubblegum/proto-punk insanity.” Gordon notes that So What’s bassist, Sean M. Lennon (not the son of a Beatle), “is the only bass player I’ve ever heard actually do all the bass runs in ‘Police on My Back.’ And Jason [Duncan, singer and guitarist] actually knows more about Equals songs than I do!” 

Gonerfest 21 runs from Thursday, Sept. 26th, through Sunday, Sept. 29th, at Railgarten, featuring dozens of bands. Visit goner-records.com for more information. So What takes the stage at 9:30 p.m. on Thursday, and Derv Gordon joins them at 10 p.m.

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Music Music Blog

Gonerfest 21 Lineup Announced

Derv Gordon & So What, 2024 (Credit: Lily Chou)

Today, Goner Records announced the initial lineup for Gonerfest 21, which will take place at Railgarten this September 26th – 29th. Once again the Goner team have managed to craft a roster that’s both historically rich and cutting edge, drawing on bands, MCs, and DJs from around the world.

The festival has always had an international bent, and this year is no different, with performances by African desert blues collective Etran de L’air, Japanese garage punks Angel Face, and Kiwi psyche rockers Bailter Space on the slate, not to mention a reliable Australian contingent, including Split System, Gee Tee, Michael Beach and RFMC.

But the most stellar international artist would have to be Derv Gordon, front man for Swinging London’s now legendary outfit The Equals, back in the ’60s and ’70s, now performing those songs and more with the Bay Area’s So What. The band promises to offer “stompers, hand clappers, and all the riffs that matter” on their Facebook page, and indeed they do, especially when paired with Gordon.

After the young/old outfit’s incendiary appearance at Gonerfest 14 in 2017, The Memphis Flyer wrote:

“So What did a fine job of staying true to the old Equals arrangements, harmonies and all, but with a bigger, louder sound courtesy of Jason Duncan’s Gibson SG through a Marshall. Derv’s voice was in fine shape, from crooning to belting to singalong mode. Most of your favorite Equals tunes were revived and given a new jumpstart by So What: ‘Diversion,’ ‘Police on my Back,’ ‘Michael and his Slipper Tree.’ Of the latter, Derv confessed that it was originally written as a ‘nutmeg tree,’ until Derv himself made the more enigmatic lyrical change. The crowd was revved up, joining the band in nearly every chorus of every song, not satisfied until the encore brought the house down. Clearly Memphis is Equals territory.”

The Rip Offs, also headlining, attained a legendary status of their own in the ’90s with a unique approach sometimes dubbed “budget rock.” Garage rock legends Jon Spencer and the Cheater Slicks were also announced today. Here’s the complete list so far: 

The Rip Offs, Derv Gordon and So What, Etran de L’air, Angel Face, Gee Tee, Jon Spencer, Split System, Cheater Slicks, Schitzophonics, Bailter Space, Michael Beach, Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band, Pull Chains, Tube Alloys, Sleeveens, Th’ Losin Streaks, Sex Mex, RMFC, Feeling Figures.

For more information and to purchase tickets, go here.

Derv Gordon & So What, Oct 9th, 2017, at the Hi Tone.

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Music Music Blog

Gonerfest 14: Saturday

A Saturday afternoon in September was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract known as Memphis embrowned itself moment by moment. I settled into day three of Gonerfest 14. For the record, let it be known that we enjoyed glorious weather. Murphy’s drew us in with the promise of delicious suds in the open air.

Know from the start that this is a selective chronicle, damned from the start by too much of the world imposing itself to allow me a full day of frivolity. And yet, while I regret missing the enigmatic Hartle Road bringing the ‘Ssippi synth sound, not to mention their worthy predecessors, I can report that Cobra Man tore the place up with manic electro-funk, and even converted a once-retiring teen boy to crowd surfing on a sheet of plywood. The Heavy Lids lived up to their name with pounding ferocity; everyone was raving about them. “Sick of Being Sick!” Hash Redactor chilled things down with a dose of angst, focusing on the texture of their sonic guitar drones. They proved a perfect palate cleanser for the main attraction: historic proto-punk sonic sculptors X__X.
Alex Greene

X__X

Now, I wouldn’t call them historic to their faces, time-worn as they may have been. On second glance, one could see that X__X helmsman John D. Morton’s face was not time-worn, but marked with random Sharpie scribbles. On third glance, one could see that they were actually tattoo marks made to look like Sharpie scribbles. With things going so meta, Morton donned a tinfoil hat, resembling a Hershey’s Kiss with a Gibson Thunderbird. They soon played themselves into a time and space where age was meaningless. Unpredictable bursts of rhythm and guitar riffage might be in sync, then go pointedly off the rails, then return, as Morton chimed in with wry anger. If mad ranting is an art, with poet John Giorno being the Picasso of the form, then Morton could be its Monet. He cut an almost hippie-ish figure with his loose clothes and earth tone beads, which gave a sense of the kinds of contradictions one was likely to embrace, growing up in the 1970s rust belt as he did. But if there was any hippy idealism in the group’s striving for trance-inducing noise, it was forever foiled by the sounds of the factory floor.

At one point, Morton’s banter even seemed to acknowledge a twisted debt to hippiedom: “Ah, the Summer of Love was magical, it was when I got my first golden shower. It was so beautiful… I was alone.” Musically, free form assault and even playing with power tools would give way to a blessedly simple rock riff tune, with echoes of the Dead Boys and chants of “Transmogrification!” Then back to more twisted sounds, perhaps a chant of “Don’t wear sandals!” concluding with the Dylan quote, “twenty years of schoolin’ and they put ya on the day shift!”

All in all, a satisfyingly dark, layered, and rocking time was had by all. The only dim spot from these incandescent players was a theremin sitting front and center before Morton, waiting to be played. A few tantalizing seconds were heard early in the set, the arcing sound of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” seemingly ready to be unleashed amid the industrial clamor. But no, the theremin only stood there, mostly unplayed. As I left, I saw a solitary tear falling from the elderly electronic instrument.

Golden Pelicans

As night descended, the partiers shifted over to the Hi Tone. When I arrived, ever the unfaithful correspondent, everyone was raving about Traumahelikopter. So What, who would back the Equals’ Derv Gordon later that night, were playing a set of their own, great choppy power pop replete with harmonies. Then Vanity took the stage with a bit of New York grandiosity; yet all previous bands were swept away by the hurricane force winds of Florida’s Golden Pelicans. They mercilessly pounded Memphis down like a crushed can of Schlitz. Coltrane Duckworth, local lad about town and bassist extraordinaire, took to the crowd surf with aplomb, resting his head on his hand like Betty Grable in repose as the audience bore him along to the riffs of accelerated sludge. Viva Golden Pelicans!

Memphis threw its hat in the ring with the formidable Jack O’blivian and the Sheiks, who combined the sonic attack, common enough during the festival, with honest-to-god songs. Seth Moody was on board for extra sax and synth zing. Jesse Davis joined on tambourine. One highlight was Jack’s masterpiece, “War Child,” played tightly with abandon. The set was bookended by brilliant covers, opening with Roxy Music’s “Remake/Remodel” and its earworm chorus of “CPL 593H!!”, closing with a fast and ferocious “I See No Evil” that gave Television a run for their money.

Jack Oblivian & the Sheiks

Next came the enigmatic intro by the night’s emcee, Dan Rose, “The Detroit Hammer,” who had crafted a ritual to situate the festival headliners in the twisted times we are living through. A slow beat of dread pounded as he took the stage in a wolf’s head, calling out and calling down the powers of Babylon that lord over us at the moment. If some in the crowd got testy, waiting for the big beat to begin, most were gobsmacked, held in suspense. It all ended with Rose leading the room in the chant, “Let’s go to the moon! At the Equals show!” — a line from one of many brilliant Equals tracks.

Derv Gordon & So What

Derv Gordon and So What took to the stage. “This is the oddest intro I ever had!” proclaimed Derv, and in a flash the band were laying full throttle into “Softly Softly.” So What did a fine job of staying true to the old Equals arrangements, harmonies and all, but with a bigger, louder sound courtesy of Jason Duncan’s Gibson SG through a Marshall. Derv’s voice was in fine shape, from crooning to belting to singalong mode. Most of your favorite Equals tunes were revived and given a new jumpstart by So What: “Diversion,” “Police on my Back,” “Michael and his Slipper Tree.” Of the latter, Derv confessed that it was originally written as a “nutmeg tree,” until Derv himself made the more enigmatic lyrical change. The crowd was revved up, joining the band in nearly every chorus of every song, not satisfied until the encore brought the house down. Clearly Memphis is Equals territory.

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Music Music Features

Gonerfest 14: Getting real gone with trailblazers old and new.

Memphians have come to embrace it like a change of season: Every year in the first full week of fall, the Australians appear. And the Kiwis, the Italians, and the Japanese. It’s as reliable as Death Week, which is fitting: These are all Goners, and like Elvis they want to “get real gone for a change,” though not quite in the way intended by the King. There will be screaming, riffs galore, and chants, but the direction of any band in particular is unpredictable. Thanks to the curation of Goner Records’ head honchos Zac Ives and Eric Friedl, unpredictability is guaranteed.

Anyone thinking the Goner worldview can be reduced to a formula need only explore the wildly diverse releases they’ve promoted, from Harlan T. Bobo to the Barbaras to BÊNNÍ. Better yet, check out two of the headliners of this week’s Gonerfest, John D. Morton of X__X and Derv Gordon of the Equals, both in their own way representative of a certain pioneering spirit more than any genre tag.

John D. Morton

Having grown up in a backwater, I can appreciate the bleak feeling of a typical Midwestern existence in the early ’70s. In Cleveland and Akron, artists were beginning to chafe at this zeitgeist, and, perhaps because of their isolation from cultural centers like New York or London, things got very weird. Weirdness, the unheimlich, the unsettling, was really the point. Later, the rising stars of the scene like Devo or Pere Ubu would be considered founding fathers of punk, but, as Morton says, “the whole term ‘proto-punk’ is like — how can there be proto-punk if there isn’t punk? But that’s how it works, it’s a backward appellation. We were just doing the music we wanted to do and what we thought we should do.”

In fact, just as those bigger names were emerging from Cleveland, Morton’s own group, the electric eels (no caps), was no more. But by then the eels had staked out a sonic territory wedding anger to semi-chaotic noise rock. “Agitated,” one of their biggest “hits,” captured the electric eels at their peak in 1975, with rhythmic blasts of noise guitar topped with grunts, a sneering vocal (“the whole world stinks!”), and clanging lead guitar lines, but it wasn’t released on a single until three years after the group’s demise.

By 1978, Morton had moved on to the more conceptual X__X, which took the absurdism to new heights. One song consisted only of the band striking a pose for a few minutes. Another, “Tool Jazz,” involved the musical, rhythmic use of power tools, echoing a similarly inspired use of such tools by the embryonic “art damaged” Tav Falco that same year in Memphis. But after five gigs and a handful of recordings, even that group was kaput, and Morton had moved to New York to explore visual art and more hedonistic pursuits.

The decades flew by, with respect for the nascent Cleveland scene only growing, until a compilation of their ’70s recordings was released in 2014. This prompted the formation of a new X__X configuration, with Morton joined by Craig Willis Bell, an alum of Rocket from the Tombs, the band which spawned both Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys. Since then, they’ve recorded new material, and Morton, as an artist using the tools at hand, is running with it. For him, it’s all a continuation of his original impulse to disrupt complacency. “How I ended up a professional musician I’ll never know,” he says. “But, you know, go up and do the work. Everything that’s gone on in my life in the interim, and you know I’ve done some music and art, did a lot of other things, and it’s like, ‘So this is what we’re doing today.’ It’s a continuum.”

Derv Gordon

“We wanted to be a blues band,” says Derv Gordon of his first days as lead singer with 1960s beat boom group the Equals, which also included Eddy Grant. “We were big fans of B.B. King, Albert King, Muddy Waters, and so on. But then we realized that we weren’t going to be a very good blues band. And if I’m gonna stand on stage, I need to be the best at what I’m doing. After that, we wrote all our own stuff. Because the thing is, if you write your own stuff, no one can say that you’re playing it badly. It’s yours. When you write it yourself, you are the original.”

The Equals were never huge in the U.S., charting mainly in the U.K. and continental Europe. With recordings of “Police on My Back” by the Clash, “Baby Come Back” by UB40, and “Rough Rider” by the English Beat (which the Equals released as the Four Gees), it was mainly covers of their distinctive sound that led music fans to dig into their back catalog.

Born in Jamaica, Gordon moved to London at an early age. By chance, his family settled near the famed Finsbury Park Astoria Theatre. “They had some great artists there,” says Gordon. “Stax Revue was there, the Ronettes, the Crystals. As kids we used to sneak in through the side door because we couldn’t afford the entry fee, and we would watch all these great performers. When I saw Chuck Berry, that’s when I decided, this is the life for me. This is what I want.”

Eventually, he and his brother Lincoln fell in with Guyanese expat Grant and London natives Pat Lloyd and John Hall, and the Equals plied the club circuit as one of the only interracial bands of the era. “We performed in a soul club in London. Artists like Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke, and Rufus Thomas would perform there, and we would be the resident support band and back them up. So we picked up a lot of stuff from these artists.”

The group didn’t fit easily into any one genre, however. Not wholly soul, rock-and-roll, or the rock steady/ska of Gordon’s homeland, it was a beguiling blend of all that. Nowadays Gordon is honoring that catalog with a new band from San Francisco, So What. “They really do know their stuff. But the idea wasn’t to do it exactly like the records anyway. It’s a different take on the songs. Their style is more modern, but the foundation is there.”

Gonerfest 14 begins with an art exhibition on Wednesday, Sept. 27th at Crosstown Arts, with performances from September 28th-October 1st. X__X performs Saturday, Sept. 30th at Murphy’s, 6:30 p.m. Derv Gordon performs that night at the Hi-Tone, 1 a.m. For a full schedule, go to www.goner-records.com/gonerfest/