My mate Grant knew about a new Youth Club, which was being run in the local church hall on Friday nights. It was a bit sad really. There was a hearty young Christian bloke who had absolutely no idea of how to entertain young people other than vigorous painful games like cock fighting. No. You actually have a bunch of people being piggybacked who try to knock over the other people being piggy-backed onto a hard wooden church hall floor.
We did that for a while and then got sick of it and left him to it, to roam the streets being silly and pointing at car tyres so that people would think they had a flattie. Well, it seemed like fun at the time. The main attraction really was the two or three girls who hung around the periphery. Grant and Simon shared my unrequited enthusiasm for girls.
Anyway, we were there one Friday and the vigorous Christian bloke didn’t turn up, but a bloke Grant knew had one of those record players in a box that was about the size of a portable typewriter. He produced a strange looking LP record sleeve - mainly white, but with weird colour photo cutouts plastered all over it.
Clicking the switch to 33rpm, he lifted the tone arm and dropped the needle onto the lead-in grooves of the first track. A hiss, then nothing. Then a crash and the insistent machine throb of Jimmy Page’s Gibson Les Paul in unison with drums and bass: da-da-DA-da; da-da; da-da-DA-da.
Then Robert Plant’s air raid siren wail of Aiyeeahhhhh-ah! Immigrant Song.
I was hooked. Hairs stood up on the back of my neck. And said, “What the %#@*!? was that!?,” had a look around, and lay down again, stunned and bewildered.
I’d never heard anything like it and I was hooked. I instantly adopted Led Zep as my rock group and loyally bought every LP they put out.
The riff was all. Sure, the Beatles wrote great melodies and catchy choruses, but now the riff was king - that pounding repetitive metal musical phrase. Some of the 60s bands like the Kinks could still belt out a great one, e.g. All Day and All Of The Night, and You Really Got Me, and the Stones steadily churned out great catchy riffs with Brown Sugar, plus Jumpin’Jack Flash, Bitch and even the classic Satisfaction. But suddenly ‘heavy rock’ bands like Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Free and the Who were making amazing sounds which burned into your consciousness.
Jimi Hendrix had re-established the electric guitar as the rock instrument in 1967 with Hey Joe and Purple Haze, only a year after the Beatles were writing nursery rhymes like Yellow Submarine.
Unfortunately, the sudden hero status of guitarists went straight to their heads so that every local rock band would include a lead break in every song they did. This meant that the song would go verse/chorus/verse/chorus, then the guitarist would wind his amp up to eleven, step on the go buttons of all his effects pedals at once (Boost, Fuzz, Wah, Echo, Reverb, Death-To-Small-Mammals, Loosen-Amalgam-Fillings etc.), and do serious GBH to the high frequency auditory range of all within a ten mile radius. SCREEEEEE !! WEEEDLE-WEEEDLE, NYOW, NYOW- WOOKA-WOOKA !! And so on for about 15 minutes.
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