Delaney and Bonnie, Or, the Ambiguities of Professionalism

Uncut magazine has a feature article on Delaney and Bonnie (April 2011), by John Robinson.  For a short period in 1969, American roots rockers Delaney and Bonnie had very famous Friends: Dave Mason, George Harrison, and Eric Clapton. Delaney and Bonnie and Friends were a short-lived but powerful rock band, as their still exciting 1969 live concert record testifies; the story of their rise and fall bears on crucial changes in rock music generally at the end of the 1960s.  

  

Even if you haven’t heard Delaney and Bonnie records, you’re likely familiar, perhaps too familiar, with the music they inspired. Delaney and Bonnie’s brand of rock and soul serves as the musical palette for George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass (1970). Joe Cocker and Leon Russell would hire the D&B group for the renowned Mad Dogs and Englishman tour (1970). Clapton took the group sans horn section to record his first solo album; eventually this smaller group became Derek and the Dominoes.  The Stones brought Delaney and Bonnie’s horn players, Jim Price and Bobby Keys, to the South of France in 1971, to record Exile on Main Street; they would also augment the band for their big-grossing 1972 world tour.  

If this were a COOL music blog, this would be the place where I made sure you know that I hate all these records: but I’m not cool, and these are some of my very favorite rock albums. However, what interested me the most about the Uncut feature is the insight it offers into why Delaney and Bonnie mattered so much to British rockers of the period, especially to “reluctant rock stars” (Robinson) like Clapton and Mason, both seeking refuge from high profile, commercially successful bands (Blind Faith and Traffic, respectively).

There was, of course, the music that Delaney and Bonnie made: Southern music, “roots” music long before the term existed.  Their back up group wasn’t an integrated rock band, like Taj Mahal's or Love, but they band made music grounded in blues and R&B, and Delaney and Bonnie themselves had toured with soul revues in the early 60s. And unlike most white rock groups in the 60s, Delaney and Bonnie had a horn section.

Yet music alone doesn’t seem sufficient to explain the fascination of British rock superstars with the relatively obscure duo. If the Band took the risk of seeming old-fashioned by posing with their parents for the sleeve photo of Music from Big Pink (1968), D&B would take the even more unfashionable route with the cover of Accept No Substitute (1969), and pose, husband and wife, with their kids on their knee. The Delaney and Bonnie group seemed to fuse the rock band with capital “F” family, creating a hyperreal image of folksy community. No formality, or standing on ceremony; it was all down home. Delaney himself appeared to justify all the hoariest metaphors of organic music-making: a madly prolific songwriter at the time, songs seemed to “flow” from him. Crucially, at a time when British rock was primarily linked to the counterculture "underground,” and rock music dominated by studio wizardry and instrumental pyrotechnics, Delaney and Bonnie stripped it down to songs, and good country people.  For the international rock star who felt alienated from rock as big business, here were “roots.” 

It is well known that Clapton was inspired by the similar back-to-basics music of the Band to leave the hard rock powerhouse, Cream. It is less often noted that Clapton’s subsequent group, Blind Faith, was pretty far from being Cream’s opposite. Their repertoire also included long form songs, with extended improvised sections ("Can't Find My Way Home" being the concise--and eerie--exception). Its true that Blind Faith wasn’t a band of constantly battling soloists; it was a looser, far less competitive, combo than Cream. However, the new group was also about the triumph of technique and expertise in rock, and in its own way just as maximalist as Clapton's former band. No wonder Clapton would leave Blind Faith (while on tour!) to join Delaney and Bonnie, their opening act; here at last was the clear alternative to the Supergroup, and state-of-the-art British rock as well.

This is where the irony comes in. Flash technique, instrumental prowess, and improvisational skill were precisely what the British players, especially Clapton, brought to Delaney and Bonnie and Friends. The rise of the ‘star player’ as part of a transatlantic cutting crew of rock stars, not only indicated the resurgence of individualism in rock, it also meant the demise of the very notion of the old, ‘organic’ rock group (Robert Christgau said as much at the time, in his “Living Without the Beatles” article).

To their celebrity admirers (and musical cohort), Delaney and Bonnie seemed proof that domesticity and rock professionalism could co-exist. However, when Delaney and Bonnie brought their marital tensions to rehearsals, or worse, on stage with them, it quickly meant the end of the “Friends.” The entire band would defect to Joe Cocker as soon as their  their short but remarkably successful UK tour, late 1969. “I don’t care if you’re an attorney or a rock star,” Delaney and Bonnie keyboard player Bobby Whitfield recalls in Uncut, “if you take your personal life and bring it to work, it ruins your work every time. That was the bottom line.”  You know something’s up when the archetypal wild man rocker Bobby Whitlock starts talking about “the bottom line”! (How did Whitlock manage to outlive Delaney? Crazy.) My speculation is that it was the "betrayal" of the ideal that caused the real tension here, and led to the mass defection. (The drugs probably didn't help, either). Not surprisingly, the rock professionals ended up on top; Delaney and Bonnie were pretty much finished, personally (the marriage ended) and career-wise.

So: for a short period, British rockers were tempted away from a rock culture organized around musical technique and “star” performers by a potent fantasy of organic musicianship. The moment passed, almost as soon as it arrived.

Warhol, Punk, Postmodernism, and Magic

Finished reading Gary Indiana’s book, Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World (Basic Books, 2010) and feel a whole lot smarter (whether or not that's the case, Indiana certainly did all he could do) Wonderfully written, mordantly funny, it’s crammed with insights on every topic it treats: not only Warhol and the Factory, but modern art, underground film, and postwar American history and culture. “The single most devastating lesson of the late 1960s and early 1970s was that progressive institutional change in American society would not be permitted to happen”--think about that one, and you’ll start to see the cultural landscape of 1960s music, film, and literature differently, as well as discern some links between art and politics that you might have missed.  

I was especially struck by Indiana’s observations on Warhol’s celebrity artist-persona, as a means to “[indict] boredom, apathy, emotional emptiness, partial autism, and ugliness by exhibiting those negative qualities in his own persona.” In this respect, Warhol also provided a blueprint for 70s punk rock, with its various devices for confronting aspects of a world that you feared, despised, or wished to change.

The result of Warhol, and punk rock’s, sophisticated play with personae was mostly an absence or lack: the glamorizing of blankness. Indiana realizes that a large part of Warhol’s legacy was the flattening of culture, remarking that the artist “functioned as one of the progenitors of a corporate monoculture and greatly assisted the liquidation of the double culture of below versus above.” The world that Warhol envisioned, that he gestured toward, would eventually replace the one the world that pre-existed his art work. The blank persona began as a mode of critique, but the world did the unexpected, and became the critique.

Was the ascent of postmodernism what Warhol and the punks had in mind with their cultivated acts of negation? My sense is that something more ancient, and more ritualistic, was going on: an attempt to embody evil, with a mind to capturing, and thereby controlling, it. Both Warhol and the punks utilized strategies that resembled magical or occult thinking. These modern magic acts, however, seem prompted by the utopian wish to imagine art, to quote Indiana, “absent the brutal realities of capitalism.”  

Maybe it’s not that Warhol, and punk rock, created postmodernism, but that the failure of their various ritual practices brought postmodern culture in its wake.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 2011

I don't think of rock as young person's music in the sense that only young people can make it: but watching this year's broadcast of the induction ceremony for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I admit I thought a lot about Time, and the havoc it wreaks on rock musicians and music. At 70, Darlene Love gave a fantastic performance: Tom Waits, too, with Marc Ribot on guitar, slicing and dicing behind him. Yet Waits is a special case, isn't he: looking and sounding like a Weird Old Guy was the whole point from the beginning. A  big part of Waits' initial appeal was that he reminded the rock audience of all that was weird about the pre-rock age, lest they forget or condescend.

Post-surgery, rock shouter Leon Russell (listen to the hair raising screams from Leon's 1972 3-record live recording) could barely muster the energy to sing a ballad: and some sadist made him sing "Delta Lady"! Luckily, we only got a (still too long) ten second clip of that... For me, the Alice Cooper performance was equally sad. The costumes looked great, the original band (sans the late Glen Buxton) was back, Dennis Dunaway looked and sounded perfect: but the Coop's voice was shot. Luckily-?-Rob Zombie was on hand to do an Alice imitation for a verse of "School's Out." And Neil Diamond demonstrated in a horribly treacly performance exactly why it took the H of F so long to induct him, although he was a rock/pop songwriter of the first rank.

Dear, how sad. Well, lucky for us, and thanks to YouTube, we can take refuge from the melancholy state of Rock present in mindless nostalgia.  Here are two clips to help you do that: both of the Alice Cooper group from the early 70s. The hit singles from the band in the early 70s are a pitch-perfect amalgam of Beatles melody and Stones raunch. "Hello Hurray" expresses the exhilaration of rock performance, of the Rock Show, better than any song I know. As I've been known to loudly proclaim to strangers after a drink or two, I think Cooper in this era was hands-down one of the best rock singers ever. His voice could convey menace: but also humor. He was versatile, too, as you can hear:

As it turns out, Cooper didn't write this: it's by Rolf Kempf, a Canadian singer-songwriter, and the song was covered by Judy Collins (!) before Alice did it. It fits perfectly in the Alice canon, though. According to drummer Neil Smith, the aim was to mix "Alice Cooper and cabaret" --which makes it doubly appropriate for this blog!
  And here's the Who-like "Elected." I always misheard the line, "kids need a savior, they don't need a fake," as "don't need a Faith": a line I thought was worthy of Pete Townshend. The song's great, anyway.

He got us the vote, and he told us about school. I remember, Alice: and thanks.

The Moodies

I'm writing an essay on British rock bands of the 1970s who adapted music hall form to their own uses (I know, it's a stretch for me). It's an excuse to tunnel more deeply into the 70s, a time when rock bands and contemporary conceptual artists alike were rethinking the meaning of performance. There were a lot of interesting efforts to mix rock and theater, Bowie perhaps being the most famous: but there were scores of others.

One of the bands I plan to feature is the Moodies, a group (five women, one man) who sang an eclectic range of music: pop standards, doo-wop, variety song, and other pre-rock pop.  The women sometimes dressed as men, in order to sing 'macho' rock songs, and to up the ante, imitated male drag artists. T Moodies' gender-bending performance quickly generated a buzz among other the art rock intelligentsia: Malcolm McLaren, Brian Eno, David Bowie ( the quasi-kabuki look adopted by some of the Moodies was lifted from Bowie himself, in his days as a mime in Lindsay Kemp's panto troupe), and one of the first (and greatest) critics to cover pop music for the daily press, George Melly.

But the fan following wasn't just about camp or irony; without the instrumentation of the classic rock combo, and their defiantly amateur, confrontational ethos, they clearly anticipated UK punk.  Eventually, the record companies noticed the Moodies too: but the major labels couldn't figure out how to translate the Moodies' brand of visual performance on vinyl, and the group disbanded without making a record. The Moodies also came to soon for the age of music video. 

The group has recently garnered some attention in the UK at least, thanks to The Wire (an excellent biographical essay by Michael Bracewell in the March 2010 issue). Click on the link to download a recent interview with all the band members but one, on Resonance Radio:

http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/3770/

What fascinates me most about the interview is the uncertainty that the band maintained, even cultivated, regarding what they were doing: were they a vocal group, or art school prank? Was this a socio-political theatrical, aimed at shocking audiences with gender subversion: or was it just dress-up night? Art or a Goof? Clearly one thing it was, was postmodern, though as Richard Williams remarks on the broadcast, no one quite knew what THAT meant in the early 70s (aside from Bowie, Eno, and McLaren).

Check out the audio clip of the Moodies hosted at The Wire site while you're there: a haunting cover of "(Remember) Walking in the Sand," reminiscent of the moody, campy melancholy of Soft Cell: sans electronics.