Thus the year’s most militant call to arms would come not from a musician but from Beat poet LeRoi Jones (who later renamed himself Amiri Baraka). He’d already crossed the line in last year’s spoken-word piece “Black Dada Nihilism,” backed by the jazz of the New York Art Quartet, in which he calmly exhorts the listener to rape white girls and their fathers, and cut their mothers’ throats.
“When Malcolm was murdered,” Jones said, “I began to hold all white people responsible, even though in some part of my mind I knew better. But it was this heinous act … that made me pack up and move to Harlem and sever all ties with most of the white people I knew, many of whom were my close friends.”16 That included Jones’s Jewish wife and two daughters.
He opened the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in April with federal funding from Project Uplift. Apparently, the government wasn’t scrutinizing his poetry. In his manifesto “Black Art” he roars that poems are bullshit unless they have teeth, can shoot guns, assassinate. He wanted poems like fists and daggers that beat “niggers,” stabbed “owner-jews,” pulled out the tongues of cops and killed them in the alleys, and set fire to “Whities ass.” He wanted a black poem and a black world, he concluded.
The Black Arts movement pushed for black studies in universities and celebrated soul food and African-style clothes. Jazz composer Sun Ra’s Arkestra performed at Black Arts events that summer, and Baraka called Sun Ra the resident philosopher.
It was Sun Ra, along with fellow avant-garde musicians such as Ornette Coleman and Archie Shepp, whom John Coltrane followed into the LSD-inspired reaches of free jazz. Coltrane chose to get inaccessible to the masses on the eve of his greatest mainstream success with last winter’s A Love Supreme. The musicians investigated dissonance, overblowing, and screeching at the highest registers of their instruments. Bebop had once been incomprehensibly insane to an older generation, but now had become the new status quo, so the vanguard had to keep pushing farther out.
The albums of Sun Ra (born Herman Poule Blount in 1914) seemed ready-made for the acid enthusiasts who loved to gaze at the psychedelic dreamscapes of Marvel comics such as The Fantastic Four and Dr. Strange. The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volume One holds cuts such as “The Cosmos,” “Other Worlds,” “Nebulae,” and “Dancing in the Sun.” His next album, The Magic City, was recorded live in the loft of famed Nigerian drummer Olatunji. Sun Ra’s concerts would last five to six hours, and eventually the Sun Ra Arkestra formed its own commune.
Sun Ra’s saxman, Farrell “Pharoah” Sanders, joined Coltrane for his next album, Ascension. Recorded in June with ten other musicians, it was one forty-minute piece—not something you could put on in the background like A Love Supreme. Its frantic, atonal squonks left many mystified but a devoted contingent mesmerized. In October, on his album Om, Coltrane chants the Hindu Bhagavad Gita and, with Pharoah, the Buddhist Tibetan Book of the Dead; there is debate in the jazz community whether Coltrane and his band were tripping when they recorded it.
Increasingly, Coltrane incorporated elements of African and Eastern music. In August he named one of his sons after sitar player Ravi Shankar, with whom he was planning to study before his untimely death two years later, at age forty, from liver cancer.
Jones/Baraka writes,
Trane carried the deepness in us thru Bird and Diz [bebop founders Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie], and them, and back to us. He reclaimed the Bop Fire, the Africa, Polyrhythmic, Improvisational, Blue, Spirituality of us. The starter of one thing yet the anchor of something before … Trane, carrying Bird-Diz bop revolution, and its opposing force to the death force of slavery and corporate co-optation, went through his various changes, in life, in music. He carried the Southern black church music, and blues and rhythm and blues, as way stations of his personal development, not just theory or abstract history. He played in all these musics, and was all these persons. His apprenticeship was extensive, and deep, the changes a revealed continuity.17
* * *
The rage in Baraka’s poetry prefigured the anger that hip-hop would give voice to two decades later in its political and gangsta phases. Meanwhile, the forerunner of the rapping technique, toasting, was in full bloom in Jamaica as part of ska culture.
Ska was created the same way American music was: through African forms mixing with European forms. It sprang from Jamaican folk music, called mento. Mento coalesced when Nigerian and Ghanaian slaves mixed the music they had brought with them with the music that Spanish and British plantation masters forced them to play.
Calypso was from a different Caribbean pair of islands, Trinidad and Tobago. It formed when music from the Nigerian and Kongolese slaves mixed with French music that stretched back to the troubadour days.
Americans were stationed in Jamaica during and after World War II, and the islanders began to mix mento and calypso with American rhythm and blues and jazz.
Mento and calypso both used the upstroke (hitting the guitar strings up toward the ceiling) instead of the more traditional downstroke. Then ska turned the R&B shuffle beat backward to highlight the offbeat. Hitting the guitar with an upstroke on the offbeat was called the skank, and the horns and other lead instruments would follow the skank.
Dancing to ska was called skanking. The style looked like running in place while you hooked your elbows while kicking out one foot and then the other.
“Sound systems” were trucks with turntables, huge speakers, and a generator. The deejay would take his truck into the Kingston ghetto and have a street party, blasting music and selling food and booze. Thousands of people would show up.
Prince Buster, one of the originators of ska, said the first ska songs were by African American sax player Willis Jackson, instrumentals such as “Later for the Gator,” “Oh Carolina,” and “Hey Hey Mr. Berry.”18 But when American labels begun diluting R&B with white pop and country to appeal to white American kids, Jamaican sound system entrepreneurs started making their own records, mixing R&B with their own island’s genres. Nobody had any money, but everyone would work on everyone else’s sessions.
Sound system owner Clement “Coxsone” Dodd had visited the states and heard the wild American disk jockeys and encouraged his deejays to emulate them. In proto-rap style, they began chanting over instrumental tracks by bands such as the Skatalites, going “ska-ska-ska,” “ch-ch, ch-ch, ch-ch,” or grunting.19 Historian Clinton Hutton says, “[The deejay] could cover the weaknesses in a selection with live jive, with toasting, with scatting, with bawl out.”20 Count Machuki started beatboxing “peps” over parts of records he thought were boring.21
The Orange Street corridor in downtown Kingston was the ska epicenter, with clubs and record stores like Coxsone’s Muzik City and Prince Buster’s Record Shack. The Motown of the scene was Beverley’s Restaurant and Ice Cream Parlour (also a record shop).22 Four years earlier a thirteen-year-old Jimmy Cliff had convinced Beverley’s owner, Chinese Jamaican Leslie Kong, to produce his song “Hurricane Hattie.” Kong started his own label, Beverly’s, and soon Desmond Dekker joined the roster. Dekker worked at a welding plant with Bob Marley, and Cliff helped record Marley’s first singles, “Terror” and “One Cup of Coffee”/“Judge Not” for Beverly’s.
Dekker’s current singles included “Generosity,” “Get Up Edina,” “This Woman,” and “Mount Zion.” Regarding the last tune, Rastafarians believed that their leader, Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, making them all descendants of Israel. They believed Haile Selassie would lead them back to paradise in Zion.
The Maytals had sung backing vocals on one of Dekker’s singles from a year before, “King of Ska.” Their lead singer was Frederick “Toots” Hibbert, a raspy Otis Redding type who grew up singing gospel in Jamaica. In 1965 Toots and the Maytals released their debut album, The Sensational Maytals. The Maytals’ backing group was the Skatalites, the house band at Coxsone’s recording facility/label, Studio One.
Prince Buster had one of
the top ska hits of the year with “Ten Commandments.” (The title of his hit “Madness,” from two years earlier, would be taken as the name for the English ska band that would reach the Top 10 in 1982 with “Our House.”) Alton and the Flames released one of the major anthems, “Dance Crasher,” imploring “rude boys” to be gentlemen and not break up the parties. Rude boys were ghetto delinquents who tried to look like American movie gangsters or jazz musicians by wearing sharp suits, thin ties, and pork pie or trilby hats. Sound system owners would pay rude boys to start fights at rival parties, hence their nickname “dancehall crashers.”
Ska made enough inroads into the United Kingdom that the Beatles attempted to imitate it in “I Call Your Name,” though it’s doubtful anyone would recognize the song as ska today. Mods became fans of ska tracks such as the Skatalites’ “Guns of Navarone” and Prince Buster’s “One Step Beyond.” The U.K. label Blue Beat released a lot of Jamaican singles, and gradually the term blue beat became generic for ska among the mods.23 Many mods shared neighborhoods with Jamaican and West Indian immigrants and adopted the look of the rude boys. The mod movie Quadrophenia features them as part of the scene.
While representing Jamaica at the World’s Fair in New York City, Jimmy Cliff met Chris Blackwell, an English producer who was making a name for himself releasing Jamaican music in the United Kingdom. (Later, Blackwell’s label, Island, would be the home of Bob Marley and U2.) Blackwell had already convinced one of the stars of the late 1950s Jamaican scene, Jackie Edwards (“the Nat King Cole of Jamaica”), to move to England and write songs for him. Blackwell agreed to manage Cliff, and Cliff arrived in London in the fall, just as one of Jackie Edwards’s songs, “Keep on Running,” was recorded by a white band that Blackwell managed, the Spencer Davis Group, with Stevie Winwood.24 Edwards’s version on his own album, Come On Home, is terrific, a mix of Motown with intimations of the reggae sounds of Cliff, Johnny Nash, and Bob Marley to come. Edwards wrote the Spencer Davis Group’s next two hits, too, “Somebody Help Me” and “When I Come Home.”
Cliff’s in the background of “Keep on Running,” pumping up the band in the intro with “Yeah! All right! Okay!”25 He toured with them in autumn, and with the Who and Jimi Hendrix the following year. But his journey got rough; landlords told him to move out of their buildings because of the color of his skin. Snow was hard for a Jamaican to deal with as well.26 His later anthems, such as “Hard Road to Travel,” “Sitting in Limbo,” and “Many Rivers to Cross” sprang from this trying period. One of the few people Cliff could relate to was Eddy Grant, a bleach-blond Guyanese. Grant formed a band in North London that year with another black guy and two white twin brothers—hence their name, the Equals.
* * *
Bob Marley’s father was a plantation overseer of Welsh descent who married an eighteen-year-old Afro-Jamaican when he was sixty-one. The two separated after Bob was born in 1945. The father paid child support but didn’t see his son, and died when Marley was ten.
Marley’s mother lived with the father of Neville Livingston, who would later change his name to Bunny Wailer. Their parents had a daughter together named Pearl. Marley and Bunny were tight, and in 1957 they started listening to the American R&B coming over the airwaves from distant U.S. radio stations—doo-wop groups such as Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the Platters, and the Drifters. Lennon and McCartney were doing the same thing in Britain at the time.
When Peter Tosh (born Winston Hubert McIntosh) met Marley and Bunny, the fact that Tosh had taught himself to play guitar and keyboards inspired them to learn how to play instruments as well. Tosh popularized the “chik, chik” guitar sound of reggae. (He later had a son with Bunny’s sister.) 27
The three formed a vocal harmony trio and sang on the corners of Trench Town, in Kingston, coached by a popular singer named Joe Higgs, who gave free lessons. First they called themselves the Teenagers, but since Frankie Lymon’s band was already called that, they soon became the Wailing Rude Boys, then the Wailing Wailers—“wailing” to express the angst of living in the ghetto.28
In 1962 they sold seventy thousand copies of the eminently danceable “Simmer Down,” a message to the rude boys to control their temper and stop turning to crime. They released seventeen singles in 1965 alone, including “Rude Boy,” where their doo-wop roots fuse with reggae skank. Their output that year included numerous Beatle covers such as “I Should Have Known Better,” “And I Love Her,” and “Ringo’s Theme,” the instrumental version of “This Boy” from the American A Hard Day’s Night soundtrack album.
Jamaica did not have the same copyright laws as the United States, so the group took the Impressions’ “People Get Ready” and turned it into an early version of “One Love.” When Marley redid it in 1977, he slowed it down—comparing the two versions illustrates the difference between ska and the later form, reggae—and renamed it “One Love/People Get Ready,” crediting Curtis Mayfield. The Wailers also did a version of “Like a Rolling Stone,” with very different lyrics.
By the end of the year, ska had started evolving into rock steady, the link between ska and reggae. In rock steady, the beat slowed down and the piano and bass took over for the trombone. The lyrics became more political as well. A ten-year-old boy named Clive Campbell was there at the dance halls, absorbing how the deejays did it. After his family moved to the Bronx two years later, he changed his name to DJ Kool Herc, got his own sound system with two turntables, and started toasting for free at block parties, helping to ignite the hip-hop revolution.
22
Warhol Meets the Velvet Underground and Nico
Their partnership paves the way for an assault on homophobia, repression—and sanity.
Andy Warhol and his director, Paul Morrissey, wanted to make more movies, but they needed cash. A businessman had offered to pay Warhol for the right to use his name in association with a nightclub that was set to open soon, and Warhol and Morrissey started thinking that managing a band to play in the nightclub might be a good way to raise money.1
They first considered approaching the Fugs, along with a folk duo who often played with the Fugs called the Holy Modal Rounders. Velvet Underground guitarist-bassist Sterling Morrison called the two groups “the only authentic Lower East Side bands.”2 The Fugs’ Ed Sanders owned the Peace Eye Bookstore and published Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. The band’s Tuli Kupferberg was a poet who had been immortalized in Ginsberg’s Howl for jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge (though it was actually the Manhattan Bridge, and the jump necessitated a body cast for his spinal injuries). Kupferberg had named the group the Fugs because Norman Mailer had used the term in his book about World War II soldiers, The Naked and the Dead, as a euphemism for “fuck.” The Fugs First Album was recorded in June and featured the eerily gorgeous “Carpe Diem” about the Angel of Death, “I Couldn’t Get High,” “Boobs a Lot,” “Slum Goddess,” and a cover of Romantic poet William Blake’s “Ah! Sunflower, Weary of Time.”
Both bands were filmed playing at the Factory. But Warhol and Morrissey had a sense that they would be too difficult to deal with. They kept looking for a group to manage.
* * *
Christa Päffgen was a German model who renamed herself Nico and had a supporting role in Federico Fellini’s masterpiece of decadent pop society, La Dolce Vita. She met Dylan in Paris in the spring of 1964. He had sung the praises of La Dolce Vita’s Anita Ekberg in “I Shall Be Free No. 10” and was no doubt happy to meet another starlet from the film. Nico accompanied him to Germany and Athens while he wrote much of his fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. The track “Motorpsycho Nitemare” features a woman who looks like she stepped out of La Dolce Vita. Nico later claimed Dylan wrote “I’ll Keep It with Mine” for her, but then again, both Joan Baez and Judy Collins claimed that, too.
A year later, Nico hooked up with the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones. The Stones’ manager, Andrew Oldham, took her on as a client and decided to give her the same treatment that had launched Marianne Fai
thfull’s career. In late May he produced her cover of folk singer Gordon Lightfoot’s “I’m Not Sayin’,” with Jones and Jimmy Page on guitar. Oldham and Page wrote the atmospheric B side “The Last Mile,” which mourns lost childhood like the singles by Oldham’s other chanteuses Faithfull and Vashti.
That month, when Nico was in Paris, she met Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, and Warhol’s assistant, Gerard Malanga, at the nightclub Chez Castel, where What’s New, Pussycat? had been filmed. The film’s stars, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, and Ursula Andress, were hanging out that night as well. Malanga gave Nico the number of the Factory and told her to visit the next time she was in New York.3
Around that time, Dylan’s (and Lightfoot’s) manager, Albert Grossman, heard Nico’s single, along with a demo she’d made with Dylan, singing “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” and offered to manage her if she came to the States. So she flew to New York and went to the Factory with Brian Jones. Morrissey thought she was “the most beautiful creature that ever lived.”4 He and Warhol wanted to use her in movies and maybe something musical.
According to Morrissey, “Grossman would come to the Factory to listen to Nico practice, but he got more interested in Edie.”5 Grossman began to speculate that Sedgwick might have a future as a Hollywood star, so he, Dylan, and Bobby Neuwirth began discouraging her from making more films with Warhol. Sedgwick began to resent that Warhol had never paid her for her appearances. His films didn’t make any money—he had to sell paintings to fund them—but that didn’t appease her.6 By the end of the year, their relationship had grown tense. Warhol superstar Viva said, “When Edie left with Grossman and Dylan, that was betrayal, and he was furious.”7
1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music Page 28