The Velvet Forum

actually, this is a pretty tuff question: beyond a certain age, a music fan is gonna have a pantheon more than a trinity....I know I do and depending on what aspect of the music, it's gonna be different.....like, as a guitar "player", it's Grampy Lou, Johnny Thunders and oh, Steve Jones, I guess...for writing, it's Lou, maybe Jim Morrison and That Guy...you know, That Guy Who Wrote All The Cool Songs....

Lists are hard:I don't know how rock critics do it.....

I often wonder about how serious those critics are when they make out their lists. It seems that a lot of times they make them or put them out just to start a controversy or to get people talking. It's all subjective anyway. Everybody has different likes and dislikes about just about everything. As long as it keeps everybody's interest, I say: let's keep talking - exchanges of ideas are almost always a good thing.

GroovyMusic wrote:Can you post some of their stuff? I'm curious.

Sorry . I really cannot post this stuff. I know what David Thomas thinks of this kind of thing and I respect his opinions on business.

I really would enccourage you to find Modern Dance and Dub Housing and the early singles. New Picnic Time is less rock, more psycho-geographic sound poetry but good.

mg196 wrote:

iaredatsun wrote:In these 'holy trinity' and 'who are the true offspring of the VU' blah blah contests why the hell doesn't anyone ever mention Pere Ubu?

Well, this isn't a contest. It's just asking what people feel are their top-three bands. In America, as far as mainstream rock writers were concerned, the "Holy Trinity" of Rock Music has ALWAYS meant Stones/Who/Zep. I was just askin' what ours was.

iaredatsun wrote:Its hard to think of another American rock band since the VU that explored aspects of Song-writing, making Rock Music and Sonic experimentation with anything like the breadth, the skill, the conviction and the inspiration Ubu did. Like VU they both defied musical conventions and were more interested in music than image.

Hmmm...Stooges, MC5, Sonic Youth, James Chance...

Although I do feel that EVERY band cares about their image as much as the music. Whether they express that image lyrically or with the clothes they wear differs from band to band (or band-member to band-member). Why did the VU never wear tuxedos? Why did the Dolls wear women's clothes? Why did Neil Young always wear jeans and a flannel shirt? Every group has an image - and it's deliberate.

But that was the point of my asking the question. What are the bands at the top of OUR family trees.

Interesting. I hadn't heard of this American Holy Trinity of British rock bands. Why did they choose a religious metaphor and a Christian metaphor at that? I guess it was before multi-culturalism. Why did they ignore stronger home-grown talent? I'm British and don't even like British rock music. Americians just do rock better.

mg196 wrote:Hmmm...Stooges, MC5, Sonic Youth, James Chance...

I said it was hard not impossible. (I missed out This Heat. I missed out Faust largely because I thought we were tallking rock and America.) I missed out Television and I missed out Devo and Talking Heads and Pattie Smith (I have my reasons for that too). I have records by all the bands you mention (bar MC5 who I actually dislike) and I discounted them from my 'same breath as the VU' hyperbole.

I think MC5 were revolutionary poseurs and really very one track-minded, musically. Sonic Youth said all they had to say with one album (Goo). I just don't like the sonic pallette they stuck themselves with ever since (and that famous guitar sound is clearly borrowed from the more experimental and brilliantly Britishly daft Swell Maps, I might add). For all their art-credentials (wearing other people's better art on their sleeves) I think Sonic Youth's music is pretty lame.

James White and the Blacks is very nice and edgy lounge jazz listening but limited in scope and actually I prefer Teenage Jesus for sending a clear 'f***-you' to the traditionalist strictures of Chuck Berry (i.e punk-rock) and then disbanding as soon as they were done.

Stooges I really really love but they developed kind of in parallel to VU and grew out of garage rock and despite Iggy Pop's claim that he was influenced by the likes of Sun Ra and Harry Partch I don't see strong avant garde influences apart from their flirtation with atonal free-jazz on Fun House. My thesis was based on the idea of a band that combines iconoclastic song-writing, great tunes and musical skill with avant garde musical influences and sonic innovation in the rock genre. Ubu are my contenders for successors to the VU in these terms. My opinion and I just wanted to ask - why are they ignored in favour of more obvious and less interesting choices?

Image. Yes, I agree. Image is deliberate and can be deliberately used and misused and just badly thought through. (Red leather camp comic flirtations with communist imagery even made the women's clothes look suspect in retrospect.) Image is important if it doesn't attempt to hide the music from our questioning gaze. No image is an image too but also a different use of the idea of image if used the right way. It says LISTEN. It says dont look at us in our cheap clothes and our ordinary haircuts. It says look at, if anything, the album cover art. It says the music is more important than, say, photographs of us wearing womens panties and lipstick. Wearing worn jeans with leather jackets is just as much a marketing device as wearing sequins if it is used as an image currency - an easliy assimilated fashion style that quickly gets appropriated by the mass market. (Note. Pere Ubu never once featured a photograph of the band on their album covers and yes David Thomas thought a lot about how the band were represented through the artwork and through deliberately not featuring band photos and by taking an interest in every aspect of the industry they were in.)

Image is important in the right hands and if we don't see right through it as 'packaging' hiding a tired and traditional rockist product.

USA Secular rock triangle:
VU (first 3 lps)/Stooges (first 3 lps) /Ubu (first 3 lps)

iaredatsun wrote:Interesting. I hadn't heard of this American Holy Trinity of British rock bands. Why did they choose a religious metaphor and a Christian metaphor at that? I guess it was before multi-culturalism. Why did they ignore stronger home-grown talent? I'm British and don't even like British rock music. Americians just do rock better.

Yeah, that metaphor was in heavy use throughout the 70's and 80's. Now, with The Who practically a distant memory and the Stones characitures, the use of the "Holy Trinity of Rock" metaphor carries a lot less weight. Zep have lost none of their mystique over here.

As for the fact that the metaphor uses religious terminology, well, multi-culturalism in America is something for the media and politicians. People haven't been able to define it since the phrase began about 15-20 years ago. If someone is Black, they're black - not African-American; a Jew is a Jew and a Muslim is a Muslim. A white person is not called a European-American! Your average Joe thinks multi-culturalism is a bunch of crap. Granted, I don't know how you Brits deal w/ the issue, but here it really is a media/politcally-driven thing.

Mainstream post-60's American Rock owes a tremendous debt to one or all of the "Big Three." At that time, mainstream American Rock was essentially blues/R&B based - and no bands have ever come close to doing it as well as Stones/Who/Zep. That's why the expression was used.

SIDE NOTE: Pete Townsend insulting Daltrey onstage now?! How cute. Go look at some child porn for more RESEARCH before your next gig.

iaredatsun wrote:I think MC5 were revolutionary poseurs and really very one track-minded, musically. Sonic Youth said all they had to say with one album (Goo). I just don't like the sonic pallette they stuck themselves with ever since (and that famous guitar sound is clearly borrowed from the more experimental and brilliantly Britishly daft Swell Maps, I might add). For all their art-credentials (wearing other people's better art on their sleeves) I think Sonic Youth's music is pretty lame.

DUDE! If you have the capability to play NTSC DVD's then PM me. I have a DVD that has a very good chance of changing your mind about the MC5.

As for Sonic Youth, they were pretty important over here...especially Daydream Nation, which every intelligent college kid had when I was going to school. A lot of their music IS impossible for me to listen to...but "Dirty Boots" is one of my all-time faves!

ANOTHER SIDE NOTE: Discussions like this are what forums are for! People should consider that when posting new threads!!

Kids I know can't believe that SY and Los Pixies were big fish in a smallish pond Back in The Day(tm).......


....August 23rd, 1989 was the day "College Music" became "Alternative"....

LCB wrote:....August 23rd, 1989 was the day "College Music" became "Alternative"....

LCB, where was that label given? Rolling Stone Rag...er...Magazine?

Oh, the greatest pop-song never heard? "Here Comes Your Man"

mg196 wrote:
DUDE! If you have the capability to play NTSC DVD's then PM me. I have a DVD that has a very good chance of changing your mind about the MC5.

As for Sonic Youth, they were pretty important over here...especially Daydream Nation, which every intelligent college kid had when I was going to school. A lot of their music IS impossible for me to listen to...but "Dirty Boots" is one of my all-time faves!

ANOTHER SIDE NOTE: Discussions like this are what forums are for! People should consider that when posting new threads!!

I love having my mind changed, mg196! I'll pm you.

Yes I know SY are so highly regarded and important for the USA but we're not so precious about them over here for some reason. (They did have the decency to employ my friends Morphogenesis to support them once when they played here but the SY audience weren't too please) .

I'm glad my rant hasn't offended but I wonder sometimes whether this group IS the place for such off topic riffing.
D

"I think MC5 were revolutionary poseurs"

Well as someone once wrote, "those were different times" and if I had to agree with a group's politics in order to hear the music, I'd be sitting in a room listening to shit produced by me. This is not something I would like to have to do.

As for Pere Ubu, I've listened to them and my response has tended to be, "so what?". I keep thinking that one day I'll hear what ubu fans are banging on about, but so far no good. And not having the band on the cover is hardly revolutionary is it? It's just marketing and it's the stuff that's inside that counts.