Encounters With Great Recordings Of The Twentieth Century, #3: Art Bears, "Hopes and Fears;" Fred Frith, "Guitar Solos" (Release dates May 1978 and October 1974, respectively; date of acquisition, circa November 1978)

As I may have men­tioned some­where, or as you may have been able to infer some­how through my writ­ing, as a teen­ager I was a fairly reli­gious read­er of the rock and roll magazine Creem. By reli­gious I mean that I would read each issue cov­er to cov­er at least twice each month. Even the column by the British crit­ic and soci­olo­gist Simon Frith, whose work I con­sidered rel­at­ively dry—Creem was, you may recall, the magazine that pub­lished a Lester Bangs pro­file of Lou Reed titled “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves.”   That hav­ing been one of Bangs’ more restrained pieces. Anyway, there was one column Frith wrote in the wake of the rise of the Sex Pistols and The Clash, about the reac­tion to punk from more estab­lished rock music­ans of the pro­gress­ive camp, both music­ally and polit­ic­ally. Specifically, musi­cians involved in the loose-knit organ­iz­a­tion Rock In Opposition. One of whom was Simon Frith’s broth­er Fred Frith, who was at the time still a mem­ber of the group Henry Cow. Simon’s lead sen­tence in the column was, and remains, one of the best of it’s kind I ever read. It was: “The greatest gui­tar play­er in the world is my broth­er Fred.” What a bold thing to say, and what a cool thing to be able to say. I wondered if it was true, or even argu­able. But record­ings of Fred Frith’s music were thin on the ground in Lake Hopatcong, where I was liv­ing at the time. I was in my late teens, about to gradu­ate high school and enter col­lege at the time I read that art­icle. I’d heard of Henry Cow and of Frith before. I remembered sev­er­al years before read­ing an item in Melody Maker about the record­ing of the Henry Cow/Slapp Happy hybrid album In Praise Of Learning. I’d seen Frith name-checked on the back cov­er of Brian Eno’s Another Green World. But I had not heard the man play guitar.

Some months later I entered col­lege, and some months after that I read, in the Village Voice, a review of Hopes and Fears, an LP by a group called Art Bears—not “The” Art Bears, but merely, Art Bears, which will make sense later on in this piece—by Michael Bloom. Bloom was one of a hand­ful of regular/occasional con­trib­ut­ors to the Voice rock music sec­tion who cham­pioned what you’d call art rock (Jon Pareles and John Piccarella were the oth­ers) and his writ­ing on the album I recall as being highly evoc­at­ive. (The group, as it hap­pens, was born out of a con­flict with­in Henry Cow, at a point when Frith and drummer/lyricist Chris Cutler were inter­ested in explor­ing song forms with vocal­ist Dagmar Krause, and oth­er fac­tions of the group more insist­ent on longer com­pos­i­tions and such. The band split up, but not before ful­filling gig­ging oblig­a­tions and mak­ing a final instru­ment­al album; all of the mem­bers of Cow as it was con­sti­tuted at the time of the split con­trib­ute to the Art Bears’ record.)  And by November of 1978 I had moved out of my par­ents’ house and into an apart­ment in Paterson with a col­lege room­mate, had got­ten myself a kind of punk-rock girl­friend who worked in the type­set­ting depart­ment of my col­lege paper, to whom I had lost my vir­gin­ity and everything, and one night I and the punk-rock girl­friend had gone to either the Rockaway Mall or the Garden State Plaza and vis­ited the Sam Goody’s record store and I found not only the very intriguing Hopes and Fears but also a copy of the Fred Frith solo album Guitar Solos, and I bought both. 

I was quite eager to hear them right away, so my punk-rock girl­friend, who also had HER OWN CAR, drove me back to the place in Paterson, where my room­mate, a Beatles afi­cion­ado among oth­er things, had a reas­on­ably good ste­reo hooked up in the liv­ing room. I am not sure if he was in the place when we got there. Anyway, we got there, and the first record we put on was Hopes and Fears. And again, I did not hear Fred Frith play guitar. 

Rather, I heard the astrin­gent voice of Dagmar Krause, accom­pan­ied by funer­eal wood­winds, singing, in strong tones with an occa­sion­al slight fluc­tu­ation that seemed pitched some­where between delib­er­ate vibrato and near-voice-crack, the open­ing lines to a song by Hann Eisler and Bertolt Brecht: “In such a country/and at such a time”—and then the voice, seem­ingly an alto explor­ing the out­er end of her range, shif­ted to a plaint­ive falsetto—“there should be no/melancholy evenings/even high bridges/over the rivers/and the hours between the night and morning/and the long long winter time as well/all these are dan­ger­ous.” She went on: “For in view of/all the misery/people just throw/in a few seconds’ time/their unbear­able lives away.” The song is called “On Suicide.” The next tune began with some highly-fucked up key­board tones, an electirc organ with some ser­i­ous con­tact trouble maybe, and omin­ous drum­ming, a stark piano fig­ure; the chor­us, such as it is, has Dagmar, end­ing each word with a repressed sob, stat­ing, “There are no ques­tions just demands/oh give me the order and I’ll cross the border/I don’t want to be where I am.” On the next song, “Joan,” there is finally some GUITAR: a soar­ing four-note riff with a mar­tial drum fig­ure behind, and Dagmar ask­ing the ques­tion “Was I a witch?” Yes; the song is a music­al con­tem­pla­tion of the Maid of Orleans. It is only on the fifth song on side one that we approach any­thing like “rock,” and that is because the song, “In Two Minds,” the text of which applies a Marxist and pos­sibly Lacanian ana­lys­is to the top­ic of teen ali­en­a­tion and con­cur­rent men­tal ill­ness, or, more to the point, “men­tal ill­ness” (“as par­ent secretly con­spires with parent/to dis­cred­it con­science and reject all criticism/as a shame­ful sick­ness”), is in part a pas­tiche of/homage to The Who’s “Baba O’Riley.” It was a little after this point that my punk-rock girl­friend and I, who con­sidered ourselves adven­tur­ous, open-minded listeners—because a big part of being punk rock was being adven­tur­ous, and hav­ing an open mind, we reckoned—determined that as intrigued as we were, we had no idea what the hell we were listen­ing to. I think that my room­mate, who had either been there the whole time or who had turned up shortly after we put the record on, had com­pared Krause’s vocal styl­ings unfa­vor­ably to those of Yoko Ono. 

So maybe we’d bet­ter put on Guitar Solos, because on a record so titled, the artist mak­ing it is clearly out to show his stuff, and in a rel­at­ively dir­ect way. And, we recall, the gui­tar­ist’s broth­er has pro­claimed the gui­tar­ist the greatest in the world. (Doesn’t seem, on the evid­ence of Art Bears, on whose record he also played key­boards, like a very showy guy, though. In the exper­i­ence of the American rock fan, shit-hot gui­tar­ists ten­ded to dom­in­ate their com­bos with shit-hot gui­tar play­ing, c.f., Eddie Van Halen, and Frank Zappa even.) Certainly the min­im­al liner notes, which spe­cified “all music heard as played,” and, even more scin­t­il­at­ingly, “the middle part of ‘No Birds’ was played on two gui­tars sim­ul­tan­eously” prom­ised a show of some kind of virtuosity. 

And the open­ing cut, “Hello Music,” while decidedly off­beat and not all that “rock­ing,” did not/does not dis­ap­point. A two-bar two-chord vamp (later, on explor­ing a gui­tar myself, I figured out he was­n’t really play­ing chords, just bar­ring and unbar­ring a fret) fol­lowed by a four-note cas­cade at a VERY lively speed, fol­lowed by dash­ing runs with wryly dis­cord­ant inter­vals and all man­ner of har­mon­ics sneak­ing in on the side­lines. It was kind of hard to believe Frith was doing all this without overdubs—still hard—and again, I later found out that he’d mod­i­fied his gui­tar in all sorts of unusu­al ways, adding for instance a neck pickup and using a ste­reo volume con­trol. The gui­tar hence emit­ted sounds from all sorts of places at once, at dif­fer­ent speeds. Combined with an excep­tion­ally dex­trous play­ing approach—as I believe I’ve said else­where, Frith plays gui­tar with his entire body, really; more than any oth­er gui­tar­ist I’ve seen, he makes his instru­ment an exten­sion of his being—he makes the six-string sound like it’s a hundred-string. He ends this par­tic­u­lar demo with a bright and cheer­ful tra­di­tion­al major chord, a punch­line that’s sim­ul­tan­eously sar­don­ic and entirely devoid of cyn­icism. The rest of the album is some­what less imme­di­ately jaw-dropping, except when it is even more  so. But Frith is con­cerned here with impro­vising first, and blow­ing your mind with tech­nique maybe tenth. On the even­ing of the first hear­ing, it was an easi­er LP to relate to. Even the Beatlemaniac room­mate allowed that Frith knew his way around the instrument.

These two records changed my life. They changed how I hear, they changed how I pro­cess music. I went back to Hopes and Fears many, many times and still do. I went from not quite under­stand­ing it to feel­ing a deep con­cord­ance with it, and it led me to much oth­er great music. Its philo­sophy and aes­thet­ic cor­res­ponds to my own, and when it does­n’t, it chal­lenges my own, and stretches it. I think that’s what music, that’s what art, are for. Guitar Solos remains a pleas­ure and a mar­vel, on the same plane of listen­ing. I thank Fred Frith, who I con­tin­ue to think of as the greatest gui­tar­ist in the world, and Chris Cutler, and Tim Hodgkinson, and Georgie Born, and the late Lindsay Cooper, for hav­ing made this music. 

Here’s Cutler on the ori­gin of the band name “Art Bears:” “I took the name Art Bears from a sen­tence in Jane Harrison’s Art and Ritual.…..‘even today, when indi­vidu­al­ism is rampant, art bears traces of its col­lect­ive, social ori­gin,’ p 241. But not too much should be read into this.” 

I’ve men­tioned before that my late friend Lee Lipsenthal took to call­ing the Art Theater on East 8^th Street “the Art Bears Theater.”