Slade and the Who

 

Here are more notes toward the 70s rock and music hall paper; I argue that 70s British rock groups appropriated music hall style as a symbolic protest against the hegemony of 60s art rock as well as counterculture politics.  


The first section of the paper is on Slade, who I regard as the forerunner of the music hall revival in early 70s British rock.  Although Slade was clearly in the same hard rock tradition as the Who, there were crucial differences. There were few pretensions to art in Slade's music; unlike Pete Townshend, the Who's chief songwriter, none of the members seemed to be on a spiritual quest. Slade didn't truck in counterculture posturing either; in fact, they gained their initial notoriety in the English press by dressing as skinheads, the mortal enemy of hippie. 



Part of the essay will focus on the image of the band constructed by the British rock press. Slade's popularity with teens came to signify a broader, generational divide in the British rock audience. Mick Farren's review of the Stones' Exile on Main Street (in the underground paper It) is typical; Farren interprets the success of bands like Slade and T. Rex as evidence that the Stones had lost a hold on younger audiences, going as far as attribute the bleak, depressive mood of the record to the Stones' own awareness of their obsolescence.  


The controversy about Slade was a new version of the old art versus entertainment debate. More specifically, it pit the new intellectual approach to rock against less cerebral modes of fandom. Slade quickly came to represent the popular/populist rejection of the experimental trend in British rock that emerged in the late 1960s, with its aspiration to art. The revolt against rock modernism was also the rejection of the bourgeois values enshrined at the heart of the music: the belief in the intrinsic value of musical virtuosity, in rock music as intellectually improving. It's not surprising then, that the representation of Slade in the music press was filtered through class.  



Nick Logan's 1972 interview with Pete Townshend provides a snapshot of the self-questioning that Slade's success provoked among the rock intelligentsia. The quotes below are from a reprint of the essay in a special issue of Uncut magazine.   

The interview is remarkable for several reasons, not the least of which is Townshend's lucid view of the role that fantasies of classless slumming played in his early songwriting.  "You hear skinheads saying, 'There we all were, marching down the King's Road--it was the most incredible sight you've ever seen': but I recall the same feeling.... What was so great was the unanimity of it, the way I could blend in and be one of them. There was no class thing." At the same time, Townshend has a clear view of how class divides rock musicians from their audience. When Logan asks Townshend if he wants to "reach and speak to those people again...[just] as Slade, arguably, do now," the songwriter's response is unambiguous: "I never ever spoke to them. I like to think I entertained and spoke for them at that time." He adds,"I am a student, all my friends are students or ex-students....its much easier for me to write songs and speak for students than working-class teenagers." 


Although Townshend demonstrates his deep insight into the class dynamics of British rock, he also reinforces some class prejudices at the same time, hinting that Slade and their audience are a bit "thick," compared to the middle class that Townshend writes for.  Although he likes Slade and regards them as a "group in the Who tradition" (interestingly, he also places the Faces and Marc Bolan in the same tradition while complaining that Bolan willfully obscures his pedigree), Townshend can't resist adding that Slade are "not so clever, much simpler, less complicated. They are four Rogers, if you like--there isn't an intellectual in Slade." 


Four Rogers! Ouch. Townshend's remark recalls Lester Bangs' similar comment on Slade: "They're just like the Beatles, if they were all Ringo." Unlike Townshend, Bangs defiantly positions along himself with Slade on the populist side of the art/entertainment divide, at the same time doing a bit of slumming himself. To be a group of all Ringos or Rogers is not-so-subtle code for being "mere" entertainment in a rock world where having art pretensions is both recognized and  rewarded.

Long Postscript. The Logan interview captures Townshend in a rare moment of self-esteem: "the good thing I'm going through at the moment is a kind of renaissance in songwriting, which is a strange process. Suddenly, I found myself writing songs as if they could have been written in 1965." 


Well, not quite. In the 60s, Townshend was preoccupied with Mod kids; nearly (only?) a decade later, he's more interested in the idea of youth subculture (he's just beginning to conceive of Quadrophenia, a concept album about Mod), counterculture, and the struggle against authority.  Songs like "The Relay" and "Let's See Action" are highly encoded representations of counterculture insurgency, about a shadowy revolutionary underground that has slipped the yoke of "Control." As the idea of youth revolution becomes more unreal, Townshend's image of insurgent youth also becomes more abstract, encrypted.  (I just ordered Richie Unterberger's new book on the early 70s Who; I'm worried that he will confirm my suspicion that Townshend's idea in Lifehouse of a tribal youth underground living outside of the grid was lifted from Philip Jose Farmer's reactionary anti-Welfare State allegory, "Riders of the Purple Wage" (1967). I really hope I'm wrong).  

"The Relay" has likely been forgotten even by Who fans, but it remains one of my favorites, if only because of the wonderful interplay between Moon and Townshend on the track. Moon does his usual job of holding down the beat without keeping time; sadly, he took the secret of how he did such feats with him to the grave. Townshend's guitar playing here ingeniously combines rhythm and lead, just as he did on the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again."  The results aren't as quite as spectacular, or grandiose, as that: but it's pretty close. 

Back to Slade: their links to music hall tradition are more evident in performance, in their highly interactive live shows, than on record. Luckily, there's some great footage of early Slade live on YouTube: more about this in my next post.