America is the birthplace—the one true
home— of rock and roll and this will remain true, no matter how it is rendered
or forged, rushed or slogged, fusioned or funked. When the first 45rpm singles
of blues and ‘rock’ were shipped overseas in the 1950s, the world was exposed
irreparably and irrevocably to some madness, mayhem derived from heartbeats of
many ethnicities, traditions, and practices.
In 1974, perhaps to wash clean his soul
following his stint of activism and bed-ins, John Lennon assembled his own
nostalgia outfit, seeking to rekindle his earliest rock and roll passions. With
sessions taking place in Hollywood and New York under the direction of Phil
Spector, Lennon’s penultimate album—the 1975 release Rock and Roll-- astounded critics, as it contained no original
material, but rather a collection of reworked antique pop, from Fats Domino to
Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me.” Growing up on the imported recordings of
American popular music in the 1950s, Lennon (and a band that included Leon
Russell, Steve Cropper, and Klaus Voorman) may have been seeking to challenge
and succeed in conquering his earliest musical memories, what he knew of
backbeat-driven pop long before any of Sir Paul’s carefully melodic bass lines
reinvented the pop song form (it’s worth noting McCartney released his own
moldy-oldie tribute record, Run Devil Run,
in 2004).
Lennon’s Rock and Roll album has been called a critical failure; to many, it
was a step in reverse, as the former Beatle drifted from the simplistic
punctuality of rallying cries like “Instant Karma” and “Power to the People,” and
into the banality of tired 1-4-5 chord structures. Despite the flawed recording
sessions and legal entanglements that plagued the album’s creation, Lennon’s
mid-1970s effort is important—perhaps critical—in understanding the relationship
between the soul of American pop and the unique pop instilled in British soul.
While Lennon orchestrated complex studio efforts on both coasts in America, Van
Morrison’s live album It’s Too Late to
Stop Now was released, and served then as it does today, as a touchstone of
power-pop, the sound of someone who was born on the other side of The Pond from
Chuck Berry, yet could sing the blues as if having had the opportunity to know
far more than any one Brown-Eyed Girl. While Morrison would mature through his
successful career into a renowned pop-rock-folk guru, Lennon retreated after
the release of Rock and Roll, to
relative seclusion: he reunited with Yoko and raised his son, while the films Grease and American Graffiti repopulated mainstream culture with well-worn and
cherished melodies. The fascination and idolization of that era of American
music has yet to end, despite our countless endeavors into new forms of
electronic music, rock’s fusion with jazz, and much else. Everything old is new
again; in the United States, everything old seems to at least bear repeating,
in new iterations across generations.
In the mid-1990s, Van Morrison
discovered James Hunter: the guitarist and singer was performing in a club, and
Morrison befriended him. Hunter ended up as part of Morrison’s band (including
on the live release A Night in San
Francisco), and as his opening act as well. While Hunter’s solo releases in
2006 and 2008 garnered the typical attention and faint praise of late-night
television, Rolling Stone, USA Today, and rhythm and blues
communities on both sides of the pond, this endeavor—a six-piece power outfit—seems
to be not only a good fit for the not-humble now-fifty front man, but totally
ripe for the day and age into which the group enters: our brave and repetitious
world of 21st century American culture. The James Hunter Six is the
band Lennon sought to assemble, to perform Rock
and Roll; it is a patriotic, percussive sound, pulled together by someone
on the outside looking in, from across The Pond.
And so on a sultry Friday night in
July--four days before the US release of their back-to-retro album-- the James
Hunter Six [JHS] swaggered and sweated through an hour-and-twenty minute set at
the Tupelo Music Hall in White River Junction (7/5/13). Like Elvis, his short black hair
reminded me of Tony Curtis; like Elvis, Hunter needed a sweat towel after the
completion of the first song. Unlike Elvis, James Hunter sought unsuccessfully
to establish a relationship with the aging, balding baby-boomer audience;
unlike Elvis, Hunter needed to dry off the fret board of his Stratocaster
between songs, as he moved around the same five-or-so bar chords rapidly, in
almost every tune. Balding heads simply bobbed and toes tapped until they wore
themselves out; one guy, who looked like Bob Weir, kept time with both feet,
gently clapping along in sixteenth note patterns when he was really enjoying
himself. Moments of true musicianship and musicality were highlighted, as they
often forced a Canadian woman to stop talking, mid-sentence at times, to her partner,
a bald man in a white dress shirt. Unlike Elvis, Bob Weir, or Tony Curtis,
James Hunter had and took the opportunity to be fifty years old and to work as
hard for an audience of less than one-hundred as he would have treated a crowd of thousands.
The band consisted of a tenor sax,
baritone sax, drum kit, stand-up bass (played through an amplifier), and a
keyboardist. The only instrument that kept the show in this century, and from
being totally analog, was the Hammond XK-3, a digital-oscillator-based replica
of a single manual B-3. Though played extraordinarily well by fill-in
keyboardist Dave Slocum, the board’s stoic and digital drones sliced through
the tight grooves like an electric knife through butter: unnecessarily powerful
and lacking the mechanical nuance of a true tonewheel instrument. Its simulated
drawbars (and lack of Leslie) seemed to keep its player mostly bored, save for his
handful of ornate solos. The sax players stood on the opposite side of the
stage, ever aware of and ready for their next cues, whether they were
introducing a smattering of percussive accents, dotted rhythms, or punctuated,
sustained tones. At their best, the sax players took lavish and jazzy solos
that rivaled any licks being played this summer on Phish tour (a three-night
run at SPAC was initializing during the JHS show, less than one hundred miles
west of the Tupelo); at his best, Hunter duplicated his own guitar riffs with his
voice, a difficult technique. Hunter himself was not in fine voice; many of his
songs, constructed around falsetto vocal moments, seemed to present a
not-insurmountable challenge. His style of strumming was more akin to the Rastafarian
shuffling of Bradley Nowell, and contained far less trickery than one might
have anticipated (“Hail Hail Rock and Roll” may be Hunter’s Chuck Berry
track-of-choice). His guitar solos did not involve effects or pedal boards, and
the one Townsend-like arm-windmill move he did looked out of place and strange;
he did comedically use the microphone stand as a slide at times, and thrashed
oh-so-briefly, as to always leave the crowd wanting more. Perhaps the true rock
star, however, was the JHS drummer Jonathan Lee: from beneath his fedora, and
his consistently calm—almost vacant—facial expression, Lee propelled the group
ahead in every song (his only fault may have come in speeding up a couple of
already-too-fast rockabilly-inflected numbers). With the double-bass player by
his side, Lee covered the gamut of rock beats, circa 1955-1965, always looking
as cool as late October, on a Friday night in July. While some of Hunter’s
original material may cross from emulation and tribute and into replication and
forgery, Lee was a joy to watch: it was from the drum beat, and not the hints
of the unmistakable instrumental riff, that I recognized the original source of
Hunter’s song “The Gypsy” (The Champs’ 1958 hit “Tequila”). When teamed with
double bass player Jason Wilson, whose tone may have been some of the finest
amplified stand-up bass I’ve heard, the rhythm section of JHS allowed all
others to rest easily on the backbeat, and to show no concern for their timing
within the congruent and angular structure of the sound.
There’s a reason why the JHS sound in
concert like a Sam and Dave cover band, and at times resonated with the crowd
like a Blues Brothers routine tapped of humor and mystique: under the direction
of producer Gabriel Roth (who won a Grammy for his work on Amy Winehouse’s
first album), the JHS completed a remarkable—and mono—recording at Daptone
Studios in Brooklyn, thus entering themselves in the high-stakes race to claim
the future of reproducible pop music. Prior to her diagnosis of cancer, Sharon Jones
and the Dap Kings had planned to have JHS serve as their opening act, on a
coast-to-coast American summer tour. So, one may wonder how the JHS album would
sound different, if it had been produced by Jack White, at Third Man Studios,
another retro-analog facility that seeks to question and redefine the production
of recorded music? What would Rick Rubin do, with a British blues-rocker
seeking to cover nothing, but to record “new” material that sounds like The
Five Royals, the Cadillacs, the Duprees, and the Imperials, to such an extent
as to be interchangeable? What we buy to spin on our record players at home
offers these valid challenges, in musicology and production; in live performance,
the James Hunter Six helps define American pop music, its constant revolution
and resurrection of recurring forms.
