Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard

by Roni Sarig

  Early on in this project, I was warned by a music professor, “Never claim someone was the first to do something – it’ll get you into trouble every time.” Sure enough, in this process of delineating the reference points and precursors to modern rock music, I’d repeatedly encounter artists credited with having discovered something completely original and revolutionary, only to dig a little deeper and find an earlier artist doing something similar. This doesn’t mean there is no such thing as originality, but it underscores the constant flow of ideas between artists and art forms that makes the subject of influence such a dynamic issue. A quote from an interview with one of the book’s subjects sums it up well:

  Hellos Creed, Chrome:

  Everybody inspires everybody else. Nobody has a corner on anything. So I’m not going to be all egoed out and say, “Yeah, we invented this kind of music.” Actually, we’re just one link in a chain. Maybe a rusty, unnoticed link, where the shinier links are on either side. I guess you’re doing a book about the rusty, unnoticed links, you don’t really have to write about the shinier links, because everybody already knows.

  KEY TO FEATURES IN THE TEXT

  The names of people and groups found in bold text are meant to signify cross-references. These artists have separate sections about them located elsewhere in the book.

  The discographies are for the most part complete. Certainly all studio releases appear, as do all officially released live albums and retrospectives. Occasionally, EPs that have been tacked on to CD reissues are only noted in the reissue’s commentary. Releases that are both long out of print and thoroughly unimportant are sometimes omitted as well. Names in parentheses before an album title signify either releases made under a name different from the main subject’s name (either as part of a band or occasional solo projects) or releases done as collaboration (indicated by “w/” inside the parentheses)

  In the parentheses following an album title are the label information and release date. The original label and year of release come first; the reissue (or most recent reissue) label and year, when applicable, come after the semicolon (a year without a label indicates that the original label also reissued the record).

  20TH CENTURY COMPOSERS

  There’s long been a clear separation in Western culture between so-called “high art” (characterized by classical music) and low art (as in folk, or popular, music). It’s made for a long-standing love-hate relationship between the two. Pop music fans see classical music as elitist; classical music audiences consider pop unrefined. At the same time, pop looks to classical music for what it can adapt and popularize, in hopes that some of the respect will rub off, and classical music looks to pop for freshness and informality, hoping to uncover and use pop’s secrets to widespread success.

  While ideas of high and low are very powerful social constructs, the actual division on a qualitative level is largely artificial and subjective. The differences between a symphony orchestra and a jug band are more about the training, professionalism, and cultural background of their members (and listeners) than about the music’s inherent worth. To a large degree society’s consciousness of “high” versus “low” indicates the insecurity of the middle class, who have traditionally overvalued the aristocratic culture they have striven to join and disparaged the folk culture from which they came. Passing freely between high and low – and often settling in an area somewhere between the two – are rock musicians with classical training, formal composers with their “ears to the street,” and many unprejudiced listeners who simply enjoy a wide variety of musical styles.

  This chapter focuses on some of the 20th-century musical personalities who are generally categorized as composers of high art and yet have exerted a sizable influence on recent rock music. Interestingly, all of these musicians were to some degree marginalized in the classical world (usually by choice), a fact that no doubt makes them all the more attractive as cult figures in the rock world.

  Some notes on terminology: New explorations in music that would traditionally have been labeled as classical make the word somewhat inaccurate, and perhaps terms such as concert music, art music, and serious music are better (though far from ideal – many rock and jazz musicians also play concerts and consider themselves serious artists). Whatever the reality, all these terms continue to be used to denote a tradition that, for better or worse, is regarded as distinct from popular music.

  Some modern music in the high art tradition is called avant-garde, or experimental. These terms are often used interchangeably, but are subtly different: “Avant-garde” is a general term for music on the cutting edge of culture; “experimental” refers specifically to music that is itself an experiment. For example, a piece of aleatory music is experimental because it is based on chance procedures, and therefore will turn out differently each time.

  Other terms used here that are interchangeable in general usage, though distinct in more specific ways, include atonal music, serialism, and 12-tone music. Each describes a major trend in 20th-century composition away from traditional tonality. For centuries, Western music has been written around a central note, or tone, and the seven other tones that appear in the note’s scale. Atonal, serial, and twelve-tone music are not centered on a single tone but freely use all twelve notes available in an octave. A further development, microtonal music, rebels against the entire European system of equal temperament (from which both the 8-tone and 12-tone scales derive) and explores (as non-Western music has always done) the infinite number of tones found between the notes on the scale.

  Not all developments in art music have directly impacted popular music; for instance, the vast majority of rock (aside from more extreme noise bands) still conforms to keys and traditional tonality. Indeed, it could be said that popular music (including folk, jazz, and rock) has had a much larger impact on art music than the other way around. Still, most major trends are in some way relevant to rock, whether they have trickled down from art music to pop, been soaked up from popular music by classical, or have impacted the entire spectrum of Western music. Key developments have included:

  The introduction of industrial sounds and noise: Composers have always incorporated the sounds of their environment into music, and with the advent of the industrial age, a new sonic landscape presented itself. As early as 1915, Luigi Russolo’s treatise “The Art of Noises” (a name later appropriated by a well-known ‘80s industrial pop band) defined a new esthetic where everyday street sounds – engines, sirens, clanging metal – would become music to our ears. Now, decades later, the proliferation of screeching electric guitars and booming drums (not to mention actual samples of these industrial sounds) in rock seems to be a logical end to a century dominated by noise.

  The influence of Eastern sounds and philosophies: Traditionally, Western music, high and low, has been programmatic – that is, built along some defined course from beginning to end (as in a song or a symphony). Recent strains of music (including aleatory music and minimalism) have adopted Eastern ideas that focus on exploring indefinite paths to see where they lead rather than arriving at a predetermined destination; they emphasize concept rather than result. The influence of non-Western music has meant a greater use of rhythm (particularly percussion) and repetition (the basis of minimalism). These developments have fed back into popular music through what we call “world music,” while newer drone rock and electronic dance music has adopted the East’s more linear, exploratory approach to composition.

  The emergence of electronic music: Recording technology, a 20th-century development, has changed the way we hear music in unimaginable ways. Recordings enable us to experience music from all over the world, and from every time period, repeatedly and inexpensively. This, perhaps more than any other factor, has shaped the way we make, hear, and think about music today. Beyond sound reproduction, electronic technology has also created new tools and techniques for composing music. The invention of tape recordings led to musique concrète, or tape music, where prerecorded sounds are ma
nipulated and combined to make new music. The ideas of tape music pioneers such as Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer are now used routinely in pop music through samplers, loops, and DJ turntables. More recently invented instruments such as synthesizers, capable of creating sounds electronically, are now commonplace in popular music as well.

  The distinction between high and low music is less relevant than ever: Current composers not only draw from popular music (as composers have done for centuries), they actually work within it: Philip Glass plays in a band, Glenn Branca writes symphonies for electric guitar, John Zorn improvises freely, Cornelius Cardew composes for untrained musicians. On the other side, as popular music searches for new directions, rockers familiar with classical ideas (from the Beatles and Frank Zappa to Sonic Youth and Soul Coughing) allow what they’ve learned to inform their own music. And as new connections are made between long-separated musical traditions, outdated cultural barriers will surely fade away.

  ERIK SATIE

  Erik Satie, from “What I Am”:

  Everyone will tell you that I am not a musician. That is correct. From the beginning of my career I classed myself as a phonometrographer.

  Erik Satie was the product of a late 19th-century period that prized virtuosity, but he was an unremarkable pianist and cared little for the showy displays of Romanticism. He was not as well known as contemporaries Debussy and Ravel, yet he was an acknowledged influence on both. A true eccentric, Satie collected umbrellas, and wore one of seven identical gray velvet suits each day (thus earning his nickname “The Velvet Gentleman”). He was a popular figure in cafes of Paris, as idolized by a younger generation of composers as he was reviled by critics. In many ways, Erik Satie was the world’s first alternative music star.

  Unlike any composer before him, Satie is significant as much for his approach to music as for his music itself. In this way, he paves a path for the many conceptual composers that have defined 20th-century art music. Though his work was seldom performed during his lifetime – and is only slightly better known today – Satie’s break from traditional ideas of composition influenced modern music styles from musique concrète to minimalism, from ambient techno to trip-hop.

  Eric Bachmann, Archers of Loaf / Barry Black:

  He was very minimalist and so spacious in a time when everything around was Romantic and elaborate. Something about doing less to make the music more focused and pretty, I would like to say I’ve learned that from him.

  Eric Satie (he changed the spelling of his first name later) was born in 1866 in the French port town of Honfleur, and moved to Paris at age 12 with his father, an amateur composer who owned a music shop. Soon after, the young Satie entered the prestigious Paris Conservatory, where he studied piano and composition. It was a disappointing experience for everyone involved. Feeling held back by the musical conventions of the day, he called the conservatory a “penitentiary bereft of beauty.” Unimpressed by Satie’s development as a pianist, teachers described him as “a very unimportant pupil.”

  By his late teens, Satie was frequenting the Bohemian cafes of Paris’ Montmartre district and playing piano in nearby cabarets. The lively, melodic “pop” music he performed would prove influential when, around 1884, Satie began composing. Over the next decade he would pen what has turned out to be his best known material.

  Satie’s early piano compositions – including Trois Gymnopédies from 1888 and 1890’s Trois Gnossiennes – are marked by their simple beauty and concise melodicism. Slow and hypnotic, but at times dissonant and full of unresolved chord progressions, these pieces sound strangely modern, even today. Their nonlinear, montage-like structure defied 19th-century rules of composition, and have more in common with modern collage styles. Tranquil and dreamy, the Gymnopédies have been adopted into the repertoire of New Age and Muzak, and seven decades before the minimalists adopted the modes and repetition of non-Western music, Satie’s Gnossiennes reveal an influence of oriental music (which he likely first heard, as did Debussy, at the 1889 World Fair in Paris).

  Eric Matthews:

  Satie’s always been a part of my listening habit. It’s tranquil, yet still harmonically challenging and exciting. He achieves a peaceful mood that I hope is in my music. The quietness, the solitude. It’s affected some of us [pop songwriters] very deeply and become part of our own moods in our music.

  With 1893’s Vexations, a short, neutral passage lasting one to two minutes, Satie created an important forerunner to avant-garde composition. Vexations’ directions call for it to be repeated 840 times, which requires up to 28 hours to play. The piece may be the earliest example of a loop, those repeating musical phrases so common in electronic music.

  Alex Patterson, Orb:

  At the end of the night, after going to the acid house clubs back in ‘88, coming home and putting Satie on was like touching heaven, really, on an ambient front. It gave me a lot of confidence to go in and put my hand on a piano and play sort of feminine chords.

  Vexations proved especially influential to John Cage, the leading figure in 20th-century experimental music. Taking literally Satie’s instructions – ”to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities” – Cage was inspired to compose 4’33”, a piece where the performer sits silently at his instrument. And in 1963, Cage organized the first ever complete performance of Vexations, using an entire stable of pianists, including future Velvet Underground member John Cale. A more recent reprisal, in 1993, featured Soul Coughing’s Mark De Gli Antoni and composer LaMonte Young.

  Words were central to Satie’s expression. He wrote absurdist prose, bits of which showed up in the titles of compositions (such as Dried-Up Embryos or Three Pear-Shaped Pieces) or were written on his scores as directions to the performer (for example, to play “like a nightingale with a toothache”). By the 1910s, these prose bits had become increasingly critical of 20th-century life. His Bureaucratic Sonatina (1917) contains ironic running commentary such as “he dreams of promotion.”

  In 1917 Satie composed the surrealist ballet Parade, a collaboration with Pablo Picasso (scenery) and Jean Cocteau (scenario). Parade utilized typewriters, rattles, steamships whistles, pistol shots, and sirens – sounds of the modern world. This musique mechanique would later be utilized by everyone from composer Edgard Varese to rappers Public Enemy.

  Mark De Gli Antoni, Soul Coughing:

  Satie was a big, big influence philosophically. The way Satie stuck a typewriter in the middle of Parade. Take a Soul Coughing song like “Sugar Free Jazz”: I was like, “Why can’t a seagull become a lead guitar?” [The sample] still sounds like a seagull, but if I place it where traditionally some other lead instrument would speak, will you for a moment stop thinking it’s seagulls and accept it as the lead melodic element, in a traditional song way?

  Three years after mixing outside sounds into Parade, Satie attempted the opposite: to write music that would itself blend into the environment. Furniture Music, as he called his series of compositions, was meant strictly as background music. It was functional music for a modern society, meant to soften an aural environment polluted with clanging silverware and car horns. It was, essentially, the root of ambient music.

  Satie was still largely an outsider when he died of liver disease (he was a long-time alcoholic) in 1925, at age 59. By then, though, a small group of French composers known as Les Six (including Darius Milhaud and Arthur Honegger) had acknowledged Satie as their spiritual father. While Satie’s work fell even further out of mainstream consciousness in the middle decades of this century, his music began to reemerge in the 1960s, thanks both to the influence of John Cage and to the popular recordings made by concert pianist Aldo Ciccolini of Satie’s works.

  In recent years, Satie has been discovered by a growing number of rock musicians. In one year (1995-1996) Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1 was sampled to great effect by both Folk Implosion (on the Kids soundtrack) and Drain, a side project of the Butthole Surfers’ King Coffey. As modern music catches u
p with Satie’s modernist visions, whole new generations are joining the Velvet Gentleman’s musical cult.

  SELECTED WORKS

  Trois Gymnopédies (1888).

  Trois Gnossiennes (1890).

  Vexations (1893).

  Pieces froides (Cold Pieces) (1897).

  Trois Morceaux en forme de poire (3 Pear-Shaped Pieces) (1903).

  Le piége de Méduse (Medusa’s Trap) (1913).

  Embryons desséchés (Dried-up Embryos) (1913).

  Sports et divertissements (Sports and Diversions) (1914).

  Parade (1917).

  Sonatine bureaucratique (Bureaucratic Sonatina) (1917).