Phrase of the Week #3 (Gino Soccio)

[Marcio**]

Wresch: Why do you choose disco and not rock or jazz?

Gino: I did do a little of all that before I did disco. The reason I went over to disco was that it seemed to be the only type of music where I could really be free. There are no limits to what you can do with disco. With other kinds of music, I felt it had already been exploited, that I couldn’t contribute as much to something like rock.


Gino Soccio, 1979









''Gino Soccio: Beyond Bach"

:D

[usagi-san]

I replied to this yesteday; I don't know what happened. Anyway, a shorter version: I have 4 of his albums and I can see how he would say this; he was quite adventurous within disco (The Visitors, There's A Woman etc.) and when his music later branched out again, too

[Paulo]

Great find Marcio!

I always felt the same concerning Gino's words:

I think rock music was creative during the 60's and 70's.

But after punk took the scene by assault, rock music got predictable and narrow-minded:

After punk, any rock song longer than 4 minutes and having more than 3 chords would be an heresy. This made rock worse because now it could not be expanded and explored. But who said music is TIME? Who said music is 3 minute HIT-SINGLES?

In the 90's things got even worse in the alternative / indie rock scene: now everybody sounds like everybody else. It seems rock is stuck to a formula and can't get rid of it. But still rockers dare to called their music ALTERNATIVE. But if it is alternative, then it should be better and more original than the mainstream music, which isn't the case.

But DISCO (and even HOUSE) were never restricted. There were never TIME/LENGHT restrictions nor MUSICAL restrictions... not to mention the remixes which would always expand and explore the possibilities of a theme.

That's why I could never understand the narrow minded brazilian press when they declared that "Disco was about making money, not about real music" and that "Disco artists were musically irrelevant".

It seems to me that STING, BONO, JAGGER, THE EDGE, JIMMY PAGE, ROBERT PLANT, DAVID GILMOUR, ROGER WATERS, LINKING PARK, FOO FIGHTERS... have a lot more money than

GINO SOCCIO WHO?
WILLIAM MICHEL WHO?
LAURIN WHO?
JEAN MARC WHO?
SANTA ESMERWHO?
ALEC WHO?
BORIS WHO?

[ComputerDisco]

I have a somewhat different take on that, having come to music from the punk world.

I think the Punks were responding to what they saw as music that was no longer about anything, and which was no longer the kind of thing that you could get up on stage and play without lots of practice.

Punk really got started around 1972/1973 with Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers and "Nuggets" - a collection of 60's Garage-rock tunes by the Kingsmen, the Standells, and ? and the Mysterions. The compilation was issued by Lenny Kaye, who later became a key part of the Patti Smith Group. Punk was also an outgrowth of the more growly, snarly glam bands like the New York Dolls - as well as outcasts like Iggy Pop.

I think the song that really galled all the Punks was "Hotel California" by the Eagles.

That song came out in 1975 and was basically all about the apathy of contemporary rock. They'd gone from Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young's "Ohio" protest song to "Hotel California" and "Fox on the run" in a meager four years. This was also around the time when progressive rock became a popular thing and you had bands like Pink Floyd staging huge shows and making 10-minute guitar and keyboard solos and the like.

You really couldn't perform Rush or Yes on a stage at your local bar and you certainly couldn't do something like the Who's "Baba 0'Riley" - not only could you not stage it, most people who ended up in the punk movement couldn't possibly afford the equipment needed to play that song (a $3500 ARP synthesizer was used in that song - about the price of a new Buick at the time - even the Who never played the synth parts live).

In essence, I think that Rock had started to really lose the elements of surprise and simplicity and the feeling that you could go up on the stage and perform it. I think this really started with the Door's "light my fire" which was 7 minutes long and contained huge guitar and keyboard solos. It wasn't the same thing as Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, or the Kingsmen and that's what the Punks wanted to get back to.

If you listen to the Ramones' first album, it's basically garage rock and stuff like the Archies only with the distortion turned all the way up and a bad attitude. None of the songs are over two minutes long, all of them have heavy distortion, there aren't really complicated lyrics and the guitar solo has been banished. Talkingheads did the same thing only they went for complex lyrics with simple melodies and no distortion. Blondie was a sort of blend of the two before "Heart of Glass."

Three things happened to make punk what we think of as a popular culture phenomenon. The Ramones toured the UK in 1976, Sex Pistols were formed by Malcolm McLaren in the UK that same year, and Punk took off thanks to McLaren's publicity and the Pistol's flair for relevant lyrics that appealed to Britain's disaffected youth. Within a few short months of the appearance of the Sex Pistols at a show near Picadilly circus, the punk movement and look were firmly established in the UK and sometimes seen in the US media to show how "outrageous" punk was.

But Punk became the Sex Pistols once Punk took off in England. To put it easily, Tina Weymouth (or it might've been Chris Frantz) of Talkingheads said "We just couldn't compete with those haircuts and those clothes. For many people that was more of a draw than the music, so Punk became very delinated by the British reaction to it."

Similarly, toward the end of the seventies some bands were adopting a more populist sound - like the Cars. The Cars, featuring the drummer from the Modern Lovers, were Television lite. They had simple lyrics about boys and girls and they had nice riffs with a minimum of solos and chords. They had chart appeal and could be played by anybody. They didn't alienate like Punk either. The Punk bands who sounded like the Cars but had more serious lyrics were instantly wiped off the map.

And in the end, Punk burned itself out and incorporated disco into the New Wave.

But there were multi-chord, over-produced, ten-minute rock songs long before Punk came along. Punk was a response to those songs and those who were playing them. The punks didn't want to hear the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt on the radio all the time, they wanted to hear music that mattered to them - so they made their own.

It's worth noting that Punk and Disco are very similar in that they both assaulted the mainstream rock world and succeeded in changing the popular sound. Many punk acts, specifically Talkingheads, were big fans of Disco and some later incorporated disco rythms and even some players - Bernie Worrell was a common player on 80's Talkingheads records as well as the Tom Tom Club side project from Weymouth and Frantz. And some of them played on early hip-hop records (Frantz was Kurtis Blow's drummer). Hip-hop being an outgrowth/stepchild of Disco. Blondie earned fame early as a punk band but later became one of the staples of places like the Mudd Club with their disco hits. They even ventured into some mild techno and hip-hop in the 80's.

Even the Ramones made an attempt at adding strings in 1980 when they were working with Phil Spector.

Anyway I didn't mean to get all long winded. But suffice to say that Punk grew out of a resentment of the malaise of 70's rock and the growing disaffection of urban life in the 1970's - especially in recession-wracked New York and London.

[usagi-san]

Great insight & info, Paulo and Computerdisco! Although you made a few errors, Computerdisco. The Eagles' "Hotel California" was released in 1977, not 1975, the band Talking Heads is 2 words, and it's Chris Franz, not Frantz.

[ComputerDisco]

Franz I think I knew. I forgot that "Hotel California" was later.

In any case, alot of the US punks really hated bands like Yes and Emerson, Lake, & Palmer. Their sounds were too complicated for them to play or reproduce and often their music had little or no meaning. Again, to them the words and sounds of simplicity and fun meant more than musical perfection and songs about philsophy and space.

For the UK Punks the "target" of most ire was the Bay City Rollers and band like them - who were enormously popular but total fluff. I guess that fluff doesn't play when you've got 20% unemployment and garbage piling up on the street. The UK punks also became very tired of the glam rock scene during this era as David Bowie gave way to Elton John. After Bowie and T-rex quit the Glam scene it quickly descended into a hangover that grew slowly into Punk. Of all of those artists, only the New York Dolls (who were outcasts in the US anyway) and Marc Bolan of T-rex ever embraced Punk.

It's a pity Marc Bolan died when he did - not only because he was supremely talented but also because he really seemed capable of uniting Rock, Disco, and Punk and had just scored his first hit in four years in mid-76 with the mildly danceable (but not disco) "I love to Boogie." He had already publicly embraced Punk and all the Punks seemed to like him - unlike, say, Brian Ferry.

[BrunoRepublic]

not only could you not stage it, most people who ended up in the punk movement couldn't possibly afford the equipment needed to play that song (a $3500 ARP synthesizer was used in that song - about the price of a new Buick at the time - even the Who never played the synth parts live).

Actually, the synthy parts throughout Baba are not synthesizer at all, but a humble Lowrey (sp?) home organ that had a nifty arpeggiator feature.

Pete did indeed use a very expensive ARP 2500 synth, but I don't believe he had it for Who's Next (the synthy parts in Won't Get Fooled are a Hammond organ run through a VCS-3 synth).

[paul]

Good stuff ComputerDisco.
Any insight on Elvis Costello and how he relates to punk? I really don't like the guy but I'm curious about him.

[paul]

Hey Quinny. After reading what Paulo said about disco in Brazil, I had a thought. :lol: I know you're into this confrontational thing betwen generations and in your view disco didn't do it. It seems the confrontation was there, everywhere, though the music itself wasn't about that. At odds were really the mindsets of closed minded people versus the rest of us who liked disco and really didn't pay any attention to them. A sort of passive-aggressive confrontation. Does that work for you? :D

[ComputerDisco]

Elvis really belongs to a slightly later era than the 1976-1977 Punk Explosion even though his first big record came out in '77.

I identify his sounds with the cooled down tunes of Joe Jackson and other outgrowths of the Punk explosion. But his ideas and his lyrics were very punk, even if his sound was not what got defined as "punk" back then in the UK. If hard-core punk was the representation of bored, disaffected, angry teenagers, then surely Elvis and Ian Dury were the representation of bored, disaffected, intellectual and/or romantic teenagers.

The same audience was turned on to the Pretenders around this time, perhaps the "band" that Elvis most closely resembles.

I guess that what I'm saying is that Elvis wasn't a Punk per se, but he happened to come around right as Punk was cresting in the UK. His first songs had strong social appeal with the punks as he was an outcast just like them and he also sang unconventional songs about stuff they could relate to. Some of his early records incorporated a minor reggae skank too - or at least what he called a skank. I personally don't hear it but that's just me and I've never been big on Elvis. He's not bad though.

On a related note - Reggae was big with punks, most UK clubs when punk first started played mainly Reggae for that audience and then the Punks started covering Reggae songs like Junior Murvin's "Police and Thieves" which was a hit for the Clash. There just weren't very many Punk records around and the Punks liked the sound of Reggae plus they identified with the social injustice that brought Reggae to prominence in the UK in the 70's. Just as the British Invasion bands had once covered Motown hits, the Punks covered Reggae hits and worked with Reggae producers like Lee Perry. In the meantime Bob Marley scored a crossover hit with "Punky Reggae Party." These weren't ever hits in the USA and they weren't huge hits in the UK either but the Punks were listening to them.

[paul]

Thanks ComputerDisco. 8)

[Paulo]

Hi computerdisco

What you said is perfectly accurate, if speaking from the punk generation point of view.

But as Einstein has already proved, all things are relative.

The fans of older 70's rock doesn't see it in same way... for many people (and I agree with that) Malcolm McLaren saw a window of opportunity... he saw a possibility of making money out of this rebelious thing. He invented the punk movement, the punk look and even the sex pistols. Punk was a big hoax which (unfortunately) worked.

And as it gained press support and approval, all high musical standards conquered by rock music before were thrown away.

Punk spreads its effect to this day, but it also led rock to the sterile state rock is today. But that's the point of view of an older generation. The new one is very happy listening to Linking Park or whatever passing silliness going on the rock-biz.

[Paulo]

Paul wrote:
At odds were really the mindsets of closed minded people versus the rest of us who liked disco and really didn't pay any attention to them. A sort of passive-aggressive confrontation.

Even when DISCO went global, the press was already saying bad things. The problem was that the whole world was going to the clubs.

It was only when disco reatreated and went back underground, that the press (in the wake of the "male/energetic" punk/new wave attitude) began tagging DISCO to words like "gay-music", "silly", "trivial", "shallow", "futile as gays".

There was already this thing about PUNK x PROGRESSIVE ROCK. But as PUNK, NEW WAVE and POST-PUNK gained strengh, it became ROCK x DISCO.

From punk rock onwards, the rock press became excessively sarcastic and hostile to anything not loud, agressive and guitar oriented.

Paul mentioned the passive x agressive confrontation: It seemed no one in the press had courage to go against everyone else and defend disco. I can't believe such minority of very few people like us liked it.

It is not only a matter of older generations against newer generations. I think music has always hidden an underlying prejudice about BLACKS x WHITES, GAYS x STRAIGHTS. Not the music itself, but the attitude and image connected to it.

[QUINNY]

Paul: I haven't been following this thread closely, so that's why I haven't got involved. What I would say though, is this.

If you believe that Disco was a reaction against the ongoing social, political and economic situation of the early '70s, then Punk was its ugly, petulant cousin. Both these music forms were expressions of rebellion taken to different degrees and therefore yes, Disco was the more passive of the two, but, it was still an act of rebellion (for a white guy in an overwhelmingly white society).

However one caveat must be pointed out.
In using the word Disco, you have to take it in its widest context and include all danceable black music of the era. Anything that was danceable and my mother or father wouldn't like, was the music that fostered the act of rebellion, albeit rebellion with a small 'r'. Pure Disco, as embraced mostly by the U.S.A. was the antithesis of this rebellion, because much of it appealed to all generations.

In the whole context of music and its social impact, Punk is one of the major influences along with the emergence of Black Music, which would finally become a major influence with House Music and Hip Hop. The Funk of the '70s was the seed of House and Hip hop, NOT Pure Disco, which was IMO, just a minor tributary, except possibly in the context of Gay liberation. I don't believe it did that much, outside of the U.S.A, to bring various factions together. However, House Music and beyond has had a massive effect.
Maybe this does mean that Disco was finally rejected in the U.S.A. because of its Gay following. Who really knows?

[Nano]

I wouldn't call disco rebellious music (it was more of a phenomenon than a movement) but certainly it has many things in common with punk, basically when you put them against the ambitions and seriousness of the prog rockers.
I remember the rock press of the era were caught off-guard on both punk and disco, because most rock writers were fascinated with prog rock and jazz fusion. Remember, the annual polls included categories like "best guitar player", "best drummer"... I even remember some mags pulling out a "best other instruments player" category for people like Ian Anderson who played flute! :)
I didn't have access to the US and UK press by then, but I'm sure the local mags copied their stances to the letter. With punks, the rule was to dismiss them because they didn't know how to play the instruments (it was always pointed out that Sid Vicious recognized he didn't when he joined the Sex Pistols). In the first years there was even the thought that all could be a hoax from some clever producers (I still have a 1976 mag calling the Ramones a fraud! :o ).
With the disco phenomenon, the thing was worse still: the mags directly ignored it. No record reviews, no interviews, only some side-sneerings on articles dedicated to the REAL rockers, say, for example, Keith Emerson or James Taylor And some small pill about how some foreign press had decreted the "death of disco" (this happened several times).
Then came new wave and the point of view grew a bit broader. I remember very well muy surprise when a local mag did an article on Prince, who had released the "1999" album (most early Prince records had been released locally, and also been club hits, but the mags had ignored them). Of course, they felt Prince had made something of a "rock" record. Then "Purple Rain" came out and he was on the cover of Rolling Stone.
This thing about disco could be extended to all black music released then, with the only notable exception of the grittier products of Atlantic and Stax (Isaac Hayes, Aretha) or the "concept" albums of soul stars like Marvin Gaye. Funk, I think, was ignored in its entirety.
So, I don't agree with Paulo on this one. For me, "punk vs. prog rock" was a confrontation, but within the boundaries of the rock scene. The "rock vs. dance" confrontation was a broader one and it already existed, at least since the psychedelic era (when Beatles, Kinks et al stopped to do dance records). It went on and survived well at least into the early Nineties (when the Nirvana boom was viewed as a reaction against house and hip hop).

[Paulo]

Nano wrote:
So, I don't agree with Paulo on this one. For me, "punk vs. prog rock" was a confrontation, but within the boundaries of the rock scene. The "rock vs. dance" confrontation was a broader one and it already existed,

But I didn't say the opposite!! I said exactly that.

This is what I meant: Even went disco went global, the press was already saying bad things. The problem was that blacks, whites, gays, men, women were going to discos, so there was no way of tagging the music to a "gay thing" ONLY.

But when the world stopped attending, disco became synonym to gay music (futile and shallow gay music - these were the words here in the press).

But I didn't meant to say that before DISCO, there was no prejudice against black music. But it was directed to BLACKS.

I am aware that before DISCO, black music was ignored and not well spoken. Only Rock and Prog-Rock reign supreme. I just didn't say that in the previous post, because I didn't want to extend myself to the point BEFORE disco

Rock music has always called itself "rebelious" and "socially engaged", but it has hidden within itself an underlying prejudice against BLACK MUSIC and against DISCO/DANCE MUSIC. But is it really against BLACK MUSIC? Or is it, in fact, against BLACK PEOPLE? Is it really against DISCO MUSIC? Or is it against GAY PEOPLE ?[/b]

[ComputerDisco]

I think it would be easy to dismiss punk as a Hoax if you only looked at the Sex Pistols.

McLaren really did set out to create his own little punk world and create controversy wherever he went. He started with the New York Dolls in 1975 - he took over as their manager and dressed them in red leather with communist flags draping their shows, even though these cross-dressing glam guys didn't care a whit for politics. All it did was hasten the demise of the band.

In the Sex Pistols he found a bunch of very inexperienced kids in a band using equipment they stole from a David Bowie concert at the Hammersmith Odeon. He fired the lead singer and the band's founder (Wally Nightengale) and added Glen Matlock as the bassist - Matlock was an assistant in his shop that he ran with Vivienne Westwood - who was responsible for the "look" that the Sex Pistols had.

Then he found John Lydon one day when he was in the store (the shop had been called "let it rock" but then the name was changed to "Sex" and the clothes it sold went from sort of teddy-boy glam clothes to punk and fetish gear).

So in essence, they were a pre-fab group. And they hated eachother. John was from one part of London and had his crowd, Glen wanted to be a pop star, and Paul Cook and Steve Jones were the only parts of the original band and they just wanted to play. McLaren manipulated the members so that they never had any money and were always fighting and fueding, until finally Matlock was fired and replaced with Sid. By then they'd recorded most what they would release, and anything that was recorded after that featured Steve Jones doing both guitar and Bass, because Sid didn't know how to play.

Lydon has often accused McLaren of having been complicit in keeping Sid doped up on Heroin to keep the madness flowing from Sid. When they went on tour in America, Sid stayed with John and was clean - until McLaren took him out on the town in San Fransisco before the final show. He came back smacked up and Lydon decided to call it quits.

Now - alot of this behavior wasn't necessarily McLaren's doing, and here's where the hoax argument falls apart.

The original New York bands were not pre-fab groups. They were people who began playing on their own and playing at any dive bar that would have them - namely CBGB's and Max's Kansas City. Two places that became the epicenters of Punk in New York.

The Ramones and the remnant New York Dolls were the first band to really come along in this movement - then followed by Television and others.

But it was these two band which would most directly influence what the Sex Pistols and UK Punk would become. The Ramones because they came to the UK and basically gave birth to UK punk right then because it was the first time anything like it was seen in the UK, and the Dolls because their members - specifically Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan, would eventually bring down the Sex Pistols.

These were real bands in the sense that they were not pre-fab like the Sex Pistols, who were no more than a Punk equivalent of Boney M, where some members were there for decorative purposes only.

The Ramones' sold-out performances in 1976 gave birth to bands like X-ray Spex - which appeared around the same time as the Sex Pistols and the UK punk explosion. The Clash was formed in the wake of the Ramones performance and they were the main rivals to the Sex Pistols - they had more talent but less anger and less exposure at first. Like the Sex Pistols at least one member of the Clash (Paul Simenon) was, at first, primarily window dressing.

Once the movement really caught on - and it really did in the UK, like wildfire - it then spawned a whole host of interesting and sometimes terrible bands. Then some took the divergent tracks of Goth (Bauhaus, Joy Division), Reggae (the Slits, the Clash), Ska, etc. Just as the American bands started to diverge into art-rock (Talking Heads), Disco (Blondie), and other areas.

UK Punk was not only the Sex Pistols by the end of 1976. Although the most popular of all UK Punk bands, they were not the whole scene and in many cases could not carry the whole scene because eventually they had to tour in secret as the S.P.O.T.S. (Sex Pistols On Tour Secretly) because they were banned in many areas. Instead it was the Reggae-Punk clubs that really carried the torch and all the little bands that came and went like the One-chord-Wonders, the Buzzcocks, Jilted John, etc.

It was a real social rebellion. I'm not sure that it really achieved anything. It surely did not achieve Johnny Rotten's goal of changing the apathy of the British Public with regards to the plight of unemployment. Nor did it make Malcolm McLaren a gajillionaire. Nor did it last very long. By 1979 Punk was dead even in the UK and the hangers on were embracing the New Wave sound. The very last gasp was the Clash's Iconic "London Calling" in 1980. In a way, it suffered the exact same fate as the rock of the sixties that protested the social and political injustices of that decade. Eventually it became mainstream and everybody did it and it didn't really have any significance.

The band that best exemplifies this is Generation X. This was Billy Idol's first band and they had a few hits in the UK. But they were a boy band masquerading as a punk band and they were even more Pre-fab than the Sex Pistols had been. They existed to make Punk palatable to a pop audience. Idol left them in search of more individual credibility in 1981. The Billy Idol song "Dancin' with myself" was originally written for Gen X and recorded by them. Any sense of real rebellion was abandoned forever with the Clash's "Combat Rock" album.

Anyway, bet you're wondering what happened to the New York Dolls...It was the remnants of the Dolls - a band known as the Heartbreakers - which brought the chaos of the Sex Pistols' world to a fever pitch and which set the tone for Punk's eventual flame-out.

They toured with the Sex Pistols on their first tour in the UK (before S.P.O.T.S.) and by all accounts, the Pistols - other than Johnny Rotten (Lydon) - worshipped Johnny Thunders. Jerry Nolan brought with him Nancy Spungen, who was desperate to get her hooks into a rock star. When she grew tired of Jerry she set her sights on Sid. We all know how that ended.

The Sex Pistol's self-destructive behavior and the chaos they thrived on ultimately destroyed the band and one of the members. The same was true for the wild early days of UK punk. It burned itself out because that chaos appeals to people who are just into hooliganism without hearing the message. The same people who listened to Generation X and though it was real punk would cause alot of problems at shows and events, the "real" bands ceased to want any part of it. So you ended up with bands that turned away from it, like Siouxsie and the Banshees. She was one of the Sex Pistols' original entourage and Sid was originally in this band (so was Robert Smith from the Cure, actually). By 1981 she was making melodic, haunting, semi-goth rock, after her first hit single - "Hong-Kong Garden" had been a pure punk hit.

After the Pistol's imploded John Lydon distanced himself from the whole thing and created the more music-oriented Public Image, Ltd.

Anyway, it's early in the morning and I'm going off on tangents here. But anyway....