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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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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/

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Felt Hammer Free Jazz

CREDIT: Jim O’Bryan

A living chapter of the legendary Cleveland punk scene comes to Memphis this Friday when X__X (pronounced Ex Blank Ex) roll through town with current Cleveland rocker Obnox and semi-local heroes True Sons of Thunder. Formed in the late ’70s, X__X mostly gets lumped into the weirdo Cleveland art-punk scene that spawned the Cleveland Confidential compilation LP and served as home to bands like Pere Ubu, the Styrenes, and the Electric Eels. While the Electric Eels (the precursor to X__X) would receive a release on the iconic punk label Rough Trade (home to bands like Stiff Little Fingers and Essential Logic), X__X have always been seen as more of an obscure punk band, possibly because of how short the band’s life was. X__X did leave two singles as proof they existed, but both records came out after the band called it quits.

Now, nearly 40 years after they were originally active, X__X is back with an album on Smog Veil records called Albert Ayler’s Ghosts Live at the Yellow Ghetto. The record dropped in November of last year and features liner notes from Byron Coley (the rock critic behind Forced Exposure). Recorded in August 2014 and January 2015 at Negative Space in Cleveland, Albert Ayler’s Ghosts Live at the Yellow Ghetto was produced by the band and John Delzoppo and features eight tracks of weirdo Cleveland noise, including a cover of the title track “Ghosts” by free jazz artist Albert Ayler. The album features John Morton (founder of X__X) on guitar, vocals, theremin, didgeridoo, and electric sitar, Andrew Klimeyk on guitar and vocals, Craig Bell on bass, and Matthew Harris on percussion. After recording Albert Ayler’s Ghosts Live at the Yellow Ghetto and a few one-off shows, the band decided to book a tour and recruited Lamont “Bim” Thomas (of This Moment in Black History, Bassholes, and Obnox fame) on drums.

Jim O’Bryan

Cleveland’s X__X

Thomas is also a relic of the Cleveland noise/art-punk scene, releasing multiple full-length albums a year through labels like 12XU, Smog Veil, and ever/never under the name Obnox. Just as X__X dabble in all sorts of genres to create their brand of not-easily-digestible music, Obnox has also been known to enter some weird territory, taking elements of hip-hop, roots rock, and heavy metal into the recording studio while being beholden to none. While still considered underground, Thomas is no doubt reaching legendary status with his creative output. He’s collaborated with artists like Orville Neeley (Bad Sports, OBN III’s) and toured the country numerous times, performing at festivals like SXSW, U+N Fest, and Gonerfest in the process. Yes, it’s safe to say that Obnox and X__X were made for each other, making this pairing of left-field instrumentalists that much more exciting. Seeing as both Thomas and the gents from X__X call Cleveland home, my only question regarding this collaboration would be: What took so long?

Rounding out the bill is one of the best bands to come out of the Memphis punk scene in years, the never-normal powerhouse known as True Sons of Thunder. While the band was seemingly on every local show during their early years (a time when bands like Dead Trends, Staags, and Sector Zero represented a small but talented punk scene), it wasn’t until True Sons of Thunder dropped the now-classic Spoonful of Seedy Dudes LP that non-Memphians started paying attention. In a 2013 interview with the Flyer, True Sons of Thunder guitarist Joe Simpson summed up the band’s existence rather concisely:

“We couldn’t do this anywhere else. We are a product of this city. At the same time, our music doesn’t make sense to the people who live here. The funny thing is, people who don’t live here understand what we are doing, but no one here understands it, only we do. That’s been the funniest thing: The people who buy our records don’t live here. But we don’t really care, and maybe that’s the most Memphis thing of all. We don’t give a shit about being liked.”

While it might be true that your average Memphian doesn’t understand what True Sons of Thunder are all about, those who did would readily admit that their presence is missed. Thankfully, the band hasn’t called it quits for good, and they are usually reliable for a few Memphis appearances a year. The band also has a single on Goner Records and the amazingly titled Stop and Smell Your Face LP, both of which are recommended. This one is going to get weird, so plan accordingly.