Not yr Father's Sgt. Pepper, but 20 years ago, or more, from today. Why are decades shorter than they used to be?
Last night I played a Starfuckers album and I was thinking, this is really annoying but at least it doesn't sound like anything else. So today I crack open this new double vinyl
from Eclipse1 and throw on side one, recorded in 1982, and yup, there it is, the same choked-off little bits of notes, odd, immediately smothered hacks at the strings suspended in empty space some random number of semidemihemiquavers away from where a proper beat would be, miscellaneous thumpings on what a proper beat would be if only they ever repeated themselves ... the whole Starfuckers schtick, except of course if this recording were a person it would be graduating from college next year, and SCG have the good sense to move on to something else after five minutes or so.
When I bought it, the guy at the counter at Amoeba (who was most likely not born yet when the band started) asked, “What do these guys sound like, anyway? I keep seeing the name but I’ve never heard them.” Unfortunately I wasn’t quick enough to give him a Brando “Whaddaya got?” So it goes, at least I got the blog running so I can foist it on you.
And I can actually answer the question here, because these aren’t among your totally heterogeneous SCG albums, they be kinda focussed: mostly, we’re deep in improv/free rock territory here,
the guitar now channelling Ray Russell, now Sharrock, now Lindsay ... the interplay sometimes reminding me of the Surman/McLaughlin Where Fortune Smiles, then again lapsing into a loping groove that makes me want to pull out my Mars Everywhere or Melodic Energy Commission records,2
or then of a miraculously remasculated Dead, until suddenly they start lurching around, wildly slashing at their instruments, the parts leaning on each other like a barfight where the combatants need to clinch to stay standing. Oh, and the pseudo-beat poetry is in force already too; “the stars are the semen of the little boy angels,” indeed.
What amazes me is how much they sounded like themselves already, on these earliest of their live tapes I’ve heard; aside from the fake ethno stuff, it’s all there already. How many of the Tuscon punks who saw these shows knew they were listening to hippie music (or worse yet, fusion)? How much guts did it take to play this stuff in that scene, in that time? And stubborn motherfuckers, they still sound like this, bless ’em.
(No, certainly it’s not quite hippie music, nor jazz … because there’s all this chaos, these rapid shifts from one mode to another (who was doing this rapid-fire eclectic collage at the time, beyond Zorn?) … but they’re in there for the hearing. Note to self: chaos sells.)
Nice stage outfits on that cover photo too.
