Shadowbahn(23)

So it all fell apart ’ceptin’

these records that made their way overseas to ports most Americans never heard of—Calais & Le Havre & Dover & Liverpool—and I noted the whole phenomenon myself when the army shipped me out to Friedberg from Fort Hood and I lit out for, uh, well, maybe we shouldn’t go into that here. Anyway, playing this colored American music were these here Silver Beatles, a Brit quintet in exile that I checked out in a scuzzy German town on the Elbe where even a man as beautiful as I who’s on the run can lay his harried self low with addicts & hookers & general nefarious folk. Since the Silvers couldn’t get arrested back home in England with their ’lectrified skiffle, they’re performing in Germany, the larger point being (see, you surmise that amidst my digressions I forget the larger point but I do not, sir) the band is getting better all the time and after a while have themselves something of a following. They swap out one or two weak links (no more “Silver”) and then they’re a quartet with a couple hit records and a real local fan base—for a while you could almost call it a mania.

But you know there’s no getting around that part of being great is being lucky. After about eighteen months, luck runs out for our lovable moptops ’cause like every other limey sensation they go nowhere back in these Unanimous States, their records dying as fast as a hard-on when that beautiful Hamburg fr?ulein turns out not to be a fr?ulein at all, and that’s all I’m saying about that particular subject. Anyway there’s no call for the Silverbeebs’ tunes here where the whole rock thing might have took off if anyone had laid the groundwork for it, especially with the white girls who’re looking for some—well, I know no other way of saying it—funkified blackness, not pasty-ass hail-Britannia shit, and maybe I don’t have to tell you that when something great is at your fingertips but the grasp fails you, well, the human spirit dies a bit, yes it does. Knowing that your chance at once-in-a-lifetime greatness is gone, you get yourself gone too or you get weird, and for a while the leaders of the band, who went by the noms de guerre Doctor Winston O’Boogie & James Paul Ramone, got weird, and then Doctor O’Boogie got gone back to Germany like the band’s first bassist, who up and died from some freak headache, I’m not makin’ this up, by all accounts it were a real tragedy. So then James Paul back in England got even weirder, bein’ the avant-gardist of the crew to start with, developin’ stockhausean loops and the whole school of chamber-cathode spatialization crossed with adolescent psychodrama.





All right, motherf*ckers. Have I

played your rube long enough? Have I dropped enough g’s, inverted enough prepositions? If I lend to the hayseed performance one final fart, scratch my hillbilly balls one more itch, hiccup one last cloud of rib sauce and collard greens, can we move on? Because we’re getting to the best part of the story now, oh, the very best part, all you little darlings with your g’s on the end, and I have come to bring you the Unholy Squall, the Black Yawp. By all accounts our Jay-Paw was a cheerful sort before thwarted providence and audience indifference gave his ever-developing musical vision its bitter edge, when he changed the band’s name to its present satanic variation and returned to Germany—soon after the new album herewith under discussion was recorded—where rumor has it our hero got himself knifed by a ladyman outside the Kaiserkeller Club, his final words overheard as “there’s a shadow hanging over me” or “I’m not half the man I used to be,” depending who’s telling it. Maybe what he saw in those last seconds of mortal-uncoiling was me, the God of Music Death, which would make this album a fitting epitaph even if its hellacious black clatter did not.





Which clatter brings us to

the matter of the platter, the revolver in question, a cacophonous document from music’s Other Side, a hurled gauntlet to jazz’s intellectual oligarchy (got to be up to at least $2.08 by now), one long-player comprising two compositions accompanied by that forsaken clankety contraption called the “electric” guitar, which once had its vogue and, hard as it may be to fathom, is known to have been played louder than Wes Montgomery. Side one is the harrowing “Barcelona (Garden of Shadows),” which may have occasioned a reunion with Doctor O’Boogie and accounted for whatever happened to Sir Paul back in Grand Teutonia, thusly raising darkly implications, what with the doctor having been ousted from his own band. With its melody fading to all manner of piano pounding, random drumming, dog whistling, gin gargling, trash rustling, Indian whooping, tubercular hacking and fellatio gasping, this first side is the sound of our crazy century dying to the rustle of its own flesh falling from our times like leaves from trees. This is followed, my brethren of the maternally betrayed and befouled, by our meisterwerk’s coup de mort, much to my Memphis ’mazement, the epic that deliberates for twenty-six minutes a supposition as age-old as Eve & Adam: “Why” (little darlin’) “don’t we do it in the road?” since no one will be watching, until the seventh verse when, after singing the same line thirty times, our hero reveals the dawn of human treachery even before Cain set Abel straight for good (a fully excusable act on big brother’s part if you know the circumstances of the thing, since Cain was God’s Hit Man dispatched to kill Abel because otherwise He would have had to do it Himself), and Paulie shifts the lyric all so slightly to “someone will be watching,” and we all know who that Someone is, don’t we? the Original Voyeur. If you think He averted His eyes for a second, then you don’t know gods or men, no you don’t. God watched, yes He did, committing the Original Perversion, as the first man and woman committed the original sin, and that is the filth from which we’re spawned, not the human f*cking but the Deified Watching, and from f*ckacide, then fratricide is the only recourse . . . anyway, we’re digressing. You gotta stop getting me off track. By the ninth verse Paul is singing, “Mama will be watching,” and by the tenth it’s the money shot, “My brother will be watching,” and we’re back to Cain and Abel except this killing is a blow to the heart the way Mama’s love for little bro was a blow to Cain, so who can blame him? Hoping the Satchmo-addled amongst ye can dig it, there’s not much else to add to our evaluation of this noizelicious disc except that it puts me of a mind to relate one postscript to the whole saga, I’m sure not much more than another seven or eight thousand words [Oh my god.—The Editors] about what happened when I was stationed in Friedberg, where I wasn’t seeing the point of all the marching & training, given that Europe still was one big shitpile from those doings in the forties, a heap of nothing but rolls & rocks and bones & bodies, not to mention all the ragging I’m taking from the sergeant and all the strange looks from the other guys, given that I am the universe’s most beautiful man and I can’t help that, I didn’t ask for it.