THE GRAHAM BOND ORGANIZATION
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Recording years |
Main genre |
Music sample |
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1964–1965 |
Classic UK R&B |
Early In The Morning
(1965) |
Page
contents:
- The
Sound Of ’65 (1965)
THE GRAHAM BOND ORGANIZATION
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Recording years |
Main genre |
Music sample |
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1964–1965 |
Classic UK R&B |
Early In The Morning
(1965) |
Page
contents:
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Album
released: April 2, 1965 |
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Tracks: 1) Hoochie Coochie; 2) Baby Make Love To Me; 3) Neighbour, Neighbour; 4) Early In The Morning; 5) Spanish Blues; 6) Oh
Baby; 7) Little Girl; 8) I Want You; 9) Wade In The Water; 10) Got My Mojo
Working; 11) Train Time; 12) Baby Be Good To Me; 13) Half A Man; 14) Tammy. |
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REVIEW
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Even worse, here are some of the judgements made by
those few RYM users who actually listened (or, at least, pretended to listen)
to the album in question: "The
Sound Of ’65 sounds very basic to
my modern ears", "the
rendering of the period rock and rolls (sic!) is excellent", "the
typical mid sixties jazz/blues rock combination", "rooted in the same kind of R&B sound
that inspired bands like the Zombies". Reading these brief
descriptions almost makes me wonder if I have been listening to the same
album — that is, of course, before I realize that most people (myself
included, actually) gradually work their way backwards to the Graham Bond Organization. For somebody weened on
Cream and Colosseum, on the fusion style of John McLaughlin and on the
blues-rock of early Jeff Beck and Led Zeppelin, The Sound Of ’65 may indeed seem «backward» and «generic». But
all it takes is putting yourself in the proper historical context — start
working forward toward this kind of
sound, comparing it with the general state of the British musical market in
1964 — and pretty soon you will have no choice but to acknowledge the gigantic leap forward that Graham Bond
and his friends had made with the kind of music contained therein. Sure
enough, maybe Cream and Colosseum would take these ideas and push them
forward in even more creative and passionate ways (and maybe they wouldn’t,
depending on what you count as genuine creativity). But it is clear as day
that the seeds of both these bands, and many, many other blues-rock,
jazz-rock, and experimental rock combos of the Sixties are to be found in the
depths of that weird, many-headed, self-destructive beast they called The
Graham Bond Organization. Let us begin with the simple fact that Graham Bond
himself, for better or worse, was the very first of that long line of Rock
and Roll’s Crazy Diamonds — before Syd Barrett, before Skip Spence, even
before Captain Beefheart, here was the first officially certified madman of
his generation who, for about a decade, succeeded in channeling his inner
demons into his music before the inner demons gained the upper hand and
succeeded in channeling him under the wheels of a Piccadilly line train.
Gruff, bearded, unkempt, overweight — the perfect antithesis to the image of
a young rock’n’roll hero — he was a constant presence on the London jazz and
blues scene since 1960, playing saxophone and, later, organ in various combos
(including Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated), before his unique demeanour,
imposing stage presence, and proficiency on his instruments allowed him to
build up his own personal combo, and what a combo it was: Ginger Baker on
drums, Jack Bruce on bass, and an equally young John McLaughlin on guitar.
Alas, not many recordings survive from that unique lineup, which lasted less
than a year altogether, and the ones that do are rather underwhelming (e.g.,
a live recording of
‘I’m Gonna Move To The Outskirts Of Town’ with the band still working out
their sound; much more interesting, with a lively McLaughlin solo part, is
this ‘Untitled Abbey
Road Blues’ from May ’63). By 1964, McLaughlin had left the band, and was
replaced by Dick Heckstall-Smith, another alumnus of Alexis Korner, on
saxophone — which left the quartet without a guitar player as such, and
prompted its renaming from the Graham Bond Quartet to the punny-titled Graham
Bond Organization. Yet despite Bond’s organ officially becoming the dominant
voice in the band’s collective sound, the Organization was nowhere near a
dictatorship. First, Bond himself was way too chaotic, messy, and
substance-dependent to effectively install any «administration» (much like
Syd Barrett, indeed), and second, with characters such as Ginger Baker and
Jack Bruce in your band, it would be hard to imagine how exactly they could
be «administrated». The group quickly turned into the Graham Bond
Disorganization, each of whose various members did exactly what he wanted to
do and pulled as much weight as he wanted to pull — which would quite
inevitably destroy the group in the blink of an eye, but during that one year
in which the eye was blinking, the anarchy resulted in some of the most
unique, progressive, futuristic, hard-to-classify music produced in that
year. One of the band’s major advantages was that, unlike
the majority of their British contemporaries, all of its members — not one, not two, but all of them — came from a strictly jazz background, which meant
(a) highly demanding standards of professionalism and (b) propensity for
improvisation, creativity, and unpredictability. In their McLaughlin days,
they did play a lot of jazz in their live sets; with his departure, however,
the accent shifted toward more commercial forms of music (blues, pop,
R&B) over which there still remained hanging a thick cloud of jazz aesthetics
and jazz discipline. (If somebody wants to go ahead and call The Sound Of ’65 the first ever
jazz-rock album, I have no problem with that, except it doesn’t really sound
anything like Blood, Sweat & Tears). This combination pretty much ensured
that they had no equals on the UK scene at the time — with the possible
exception of Manfred Mann, who could be comparable in terms of discipline but
were far more commercialized, shiny, and poppy than the terrifying
four-headed beast of the GBO. The feeling of a new, dangerous, hardly
categorizable force emerges already with the release of the band’s first
single, for the A-side of which they chose a song everybody was covering at
the time — Tommy Tucker’s ‘Long Tall Shorty’,
which you probably might know from the rather subpar Kinks version (with a
highly annoying whining vocal from Dave Davies). There is no really much one
can do with this kind of thoroughly generic rhythm’n’blues material, but the GBO
turn in what is probably the single most energetic and inventive arrangement
of the song ever recorded. Bruce and Baker’s rhythm section is subdued and
simple, but tight and punchy; the main attraction, however, are the
three-part harmonies between organ, sax, and
harmonica which launch the song into the air as if it were a veritable
«symphony of the birds». A simple trick, one might say, but who else did this
in 1964? Moreover, throw in some build-up, as the call-and-response coos and
quacks of the three instruments gradually expand into more complex phrasing,
until, at times, the organ and the harmonica begin sounding like they want to
peck each other’s eyes out (thus symbolically marking the normal state of
relationships inside the GBO at all times of its existence). And on top of
all that comes Bond’s vocal performance — deep, scruffy, earthy, and very reeking of significant amounts of
whiskey poured down that throat at one time or another. Long John Baldry may
have had a similar tone, but in comparison, he was... "very clean",
as Paul McCartney might have said. This ability to put a unique spin on the classics is
easily carried over and perfected on the band’s first proper LP. So it begins
with yet another recording of ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, a song with the same
status for young British rhythm’n’blues practitioners as ‘Smoke On The Water’
now carries for every beginning guitar player, but do not dare to call this a
generic ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ to my
face without a trip to the ear doctor, at least not until you listen
attentively to whatever the hell Ginger Baker is beating out on his tom-toms,
or to the glorious Bond-Bruce vocal cacophony on the chorus, or to Dick
Heckstall-Smith’s glorious sax bleating on the solo, or, heck, at least to
the way Bond hollers out "...gonna make all you chicks come... yeah, into my hand!" in
the second verse, probably putting a heavy blush on old McKinley
Morganfield’s face in the process with what might have been the first
attested specific usage of said verb in the history of pop music. (At least,
I certainly cannot remember any earlier examples). Likewise, you probably could not pass the CAKE
(Certified Alexis Korner Examination) without playing ‘Got My Mojo Working’,
but could you really resist the Bruce-Baker rhythm section cracking it up on
the song while Bond’s organ and Dick’s saxophone are making a crazyass speedy
mess in the foreground? I certainly couldn’t. However, lest you think that
the GBO only made good on Muddy Waters — whose ecstatic vocal wildness on
record was well up Bond’s own alley, with an added streak of emotional
insanity — there is also a cover of the much less known recent mini-hit
‘Neighbor Neighbor’ from Jimmy Hughes, which Bond sings with total delirious
abandon and 100% soul, even if it means having to get off key every now and
then (the "neighbor neighbor, STAY OUT OF MY LIIIIIFE!..." bit is
really hard on the ears, but it is possibly the single most insane yell put
on a British record in 1965). The overall sound — bass, drums, organ, sax —
is heavy as lead, and the combination of musical discipline and musical
insanity is really one-of-a-kind. For all of that sound, one thing Graham Bond could
never properly pull off was songwriting. He did want some credits to his
name, and five out of fourteen titles on the album formally belong to him.
But of these, ‘Oh Baby’ is really just a short tribal organ riff, while most
of the song is taken over by a wild drum solo from Ginger — as you can easily
guess, a short precursor to Cream’s classic ‘Toad’, and you can very easily recognize the style of
‘Toad’ in the young drummer’s ferocious thrashing of his kit. ‘Little Girl’
is just two-minutes of mid-tempo blues vamping; I could listen to the band
jamming it up a lot longer than that, but this is certainly not a «song» as
such. ‘I Want You’ is a great groove as well, but most of its power comes
from the twin bass-sax weave of Bruce and Heckstall-Smith and from another of
Ginger’s mammoth workouts, so they should have all received credit. Nor do I
have any idea of how Bond «wrote» ‘Spanish Blues’, which is essentially a
cool (though slightly naggy) duet between Bond and Heckstall-Smith on alto
and tenor saxes, respectively, as Bruce and Baker supply them with a lively
Latin groove (something they could never try at home, uh, I mean, in Cream, considering
Eric Clapton’s inexperience with that kind of style). To rectify the situation, witness another first: the
emergence of Jack Bruce (and his wife, Janet Godfrey) as a competent
songwriter. Two of the tracks already give a good preview of his quirky,
moody, strange-sounding songwriting style in the future. ‘Baby Make Love To
Me’ is one of the weirdest creations of 1965, formally a soul ballad but
played and sung as low as possible, so that the vocals, saxes, and bass all
seem to be delivering a funereal dirge — if anything, I’d probably subtitle
it ‘Count Dracula’s Love Song’: the tentative "d’you think that we
could, maybe... make love, make love, make love?" lines concluding each
verse smell of cemetery dust and cobwebs rather than actual sex. The (not
coincidentally?) similarly titled ‘Baby Be Good To Me’ at least gallops along
at a much quicker tempo, but still sounds creepy as heck; on both songs,
Bruce takes lead vocals, and they are already every bit as depressed,
paranoid, and frightening as they would be throughout all of his future
career. Certainly the roots of his early Cream classics such as ‘Sleepy Time
Time’ and ‘Sweet Wine’ lie here. Still, it’s nothing next to the creeping madness
that is the band’s two-minute-long reworking of the old road work song ‘Early
In The Morning’. In the GBO’s live performances, it was often used as a
launching pad for another of Ginger’s drum solos, but here, it is just two
minutes of a dark, dreary, nagging bass-’n’-sax groove, atop of which Bond,
Bruce, and maybe the other guys as well sing in such tired, pissed-off,
dejected voices as if they’d really been breaking rocks for an entire
afternoon; when Bruce comes in with his dissonant "it was a dirty
lie!" across the group harmonies of the others, it feels like the most
jarring, sharp-edged moment of the entire year. The song would eventually
take on a life of its own (Ginger in particular would revive it in a far more
psychedelic and elaborate arrangement for his Air Force five years later),
but this here is the bare minimum to remind us of how well that prison work
song stylistics actually set with a band as grim and crazy as the Graham Band
Organization. Bruce is also given credit for the band’s
rearrangement of the spiritual ‘Wade In The Water’, which Bond embellishes
with Bach-style organ; this is a good showcase for Graham’s near-virtuosity
on his instrument, as he plays a couple of solos every bit as good as Deep
Purple’s Jon Lord at his finest (actually, Lord always acknowledged Bond as a
major influence); and, finally, The
Sound Of ’65 is where you meet the original, fast and concise, version of
Jack’s ‘Traintime’, which most people probably only know in its extended
harmonica-porn version on Wheels On
Fire. Here, Jack’s harp playing is brief, sharp, precise, and perfectly
in sync with Ginger’s choo-choo train percussion — an economic two and a half
minute delight rather than the over-the-top excess of Cream’s live shows. But if there is one truly genial final touch to the
album, it is its final track. After thirteen numbers of off-the-wall blues,
jazz, and R&B craziness, probably the very last thing you would expect is
for them to close the proceedings with a sentimental, corny showtune: and, of
course, this is exactly what they do, choosing ‘Tammy’ from the 1957 movie
with Debbie Reynolds, so far largely a showcase for the likes of Bing Crosby
and Andy Williams rather than Muddy Waters. And guess what — it sounds great with the dark, deep, swampy
sound they deliver, with pianos, organs, deep bass, and faraway brass laying
the ground down for Bond’s Brother Bear vocalization. It feels not unlike
Captain Beefheart’s future experiments with corny mainstream pop, salvaged
mostly through the oddball freshness of his jungle voice — here, too, Bond
gives the song a curious and thoroughly heartfelt soul vibe, ripping it out
from its usual safe and syrupy environments by answering the question
"how would a song like ‘Tammy’ sound if it were sung by a drunk, sick,
crazy hobo with a heart of gold?" And again, things like this would be
done many times later, from Beefheart to the Pogues, but nobody other than
the utterly crazy Graham Bond Organization could dream of pulling it off in
early 1965. That a record like this did not even make a faint
dent in the charts back in 1965, being that far ahead of its time, is no big
surprise. A big thank you to Columbia, of course, who had the bravery to sign
the band, and to Robert Stigwood who managed it and (at least nominally)
produced the album — ironically, the GBO were the first more or less famous
act to be managed and produced by Stigwood, despite being a total antipode to
his most famous clients (the Bee
Gees). But for those four guys — who essentially looked like a cross between
a bunch of street thugs and existentialist philosophy students — to leave
behind the world of post-bop elitism and try to implode the pop market from
within instead was a financially suicidal move; and as happy as I am that
they did make it, it is also clear
as day that they made it at least a few years too early. Still, get this and
the following album (both of which can be neatly owned on one CD due to their
brevity) at all cost if you want to experience «the sound of ’65» in all of
its arrogantly deranged sophistication. |
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