1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (37 page)

Sun Ra’s saxman, Farrell “Pharoah” Sanders, joined Coltrane for his next album,
Ascension.
Recorded in June with ten other musicians, it was one forty-minute piece—not something you could put on in the background like
A Love Supreme
. Its frantic, atonal
squonks
left many mystified but a devoted contingent mesmerized. In October, on his album
Om
, Coltrane chants the Hindu Bhagavad Gita and, with Pharoah, the Buddhist Tibetan Book of the Dead; there is debate in the jazz community whether Coltrane and his band were tripping when they recorded it.

Increasingly, Coltrane incorporated elements of African and Eastern music. In August he named one of his sons after sitar player Ravi Shankar, with whom he was planning to study before his untimely death two years later, at age forty, from liver cancer.

Jones/Baraka writes,

Trane carried the deepness in us thru Bird and Diz [bebop founders Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie], and them, and back to us. He reclaimed the Bop Fire, the Africa, Polyrhythmic, Improvisational, Blue, Spirituality of us. The starter of one thing yet the anchor of something before … Trane, carrying Bird-Diz bop revolution, and its opposing force to the death force of slavery and corporate co-optation, went through his various changes, in life, in music. He carried the Southern black church music, and blues and rhythm and blues, as way stations of his personal development, not just theory or abstract history. He played in all these musics, and was all these persons. His apprenticeship was extensive, and deep, the changes a revealed continuity.
17

*   *   *

The rage in Baraka’s poetry
prefigured the anger that hip-hop would give voice to two decades later in its political and gangsta phases. Meanwhile, the forerunner of the rapping technique, toasting, was in full bloom in Jamaica as part of ska culture.

Ska was created the same way American music was: through African forms mixing with European forms. It sprang from Jamaican folk music, called mento. Mento coalesced when Nigerian and Ghanaian slaves mixed the music they had brought with them with the music that Spanish and British plantation masters forced them to play.

Calypso was from a different Caribbean pair of islands, Trinidad and Tobago. It formed when music from the Nigerian and Kongolese slaves mixed with French music that stretched back to the troubadour days.

Americans were stationed in Jamaica during and after World War II, and the islanders began to mix mento and calypso with American rhythm and blues and jazz.

Mento and calypso both used the upstroke (hitting the guitar strings up toward the ceiling) instead of the more traditional downstroke. Then ska turned the R&B shuffle beat backward to highlight the offbeat. Hitting the guitar with an upstroke on the offbeat was called the skank, and the horns and other lead instruments would follow the skank.

Dancing to ska was called skanking. The style looked like running in place while you hooked your elbows while kicking out one foot and then the other.

“Sound systems” were trucks with turntables, huge speakers, and a generator. The deejay would take his truck into the Kingston ghetto and have a street party, blasting music and selling food and booze. Thousands of people would show up.

Prince Buster, one of the originators of ska, said the first ska songs were by African American sax player Willis Jackson, instrumentals such as “Later for the Gator,” “Oh Carolina,” and “Hey Hey Mr. Berry.”
18
But when American labels begun diluting R&B with white pop and country to appeal to white American kids, Jamaican sound system entrepreneurs started making their own records, mixing R&B with their own island’s genres. Nobody had any money, but everyone would work on everyone else’s sessions.

Sound system owner Clement “Coxsone” Dodd had visited the states and heard the wild American disk jockeys and encouraged his deejays to emulate them. In proto-rap style, they began chanting over instrumental tracks by bands such as the Skatalites, going “ska-ska-ska,” “ch-ch, ch-ch, ch-ch,” or grunting.
19
Historian Clinton Hutton says, “[The deejay] could cover the weaknesses in a selection with live jive, with toasting, with scatting, with bawl out.”
20
Count Machuki started beatboxing “peps” over parts of records he thought were boring.
21

The Orange Street corridor in downtown Kingston was the ska epicenter, with clubs and record stores like Coxsone’s Muzik City and Prince Buster’s Record Shack. The Motown of the scene was Beverley’s Restaurant and Ice Cream Parlour (also a record shop).
22
Four years earlier a thirteen-year-old Jimmy Cliff had convinced Beverley’s owner, Chinese Jamaican Leslie Kong, to produce his song “Hurricane Hattie.” Kong started his own label, Beverly’s, and soon Desmond Dekker joined the roster. Dekker worked at a welding plant with Bob Marley, and Cliff helped record Marley’s first singles, “Terror” and “One Cup of Coffee”/“Judge Not” for Beverly’s.

Dekker’s current singles included “Generosity,” “Get Up Edina,” “This Woman,” and “Mount Zion.” Regarding the last tune, Rastafarians believed that their leader, Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, making them all descendants of Israel. They believed Haile Selassie would lead them back to paradise in Zion.

The Maytals had sung backing vocals on one of Dekker’s singles from a year before, “King of Ska.” Their lead singer was Frederick “Toots” Hibbert, a raspy Otis Redding type who grew up singing gospel in Jamaica. In 1965 Toots and the Maytals released their debut album,
The Sensational Maytals.
The Maytals’ backing group was the Skatalites, the house band at Coxsone’s recording facility/label, Studio One.

Prince Buster had one of the top ska hits of the year with “Ten Commandments.” (The title of his hit “Madness,” from two years earlier, would be taken as the name for the English ska band that would reach the Top 10 in 1982 with “Our House.”) Alton and the Flames released one of the major anthems, “Dance Crasher,” imploring “rude boys” to be gentlemen and not break up the parties. Rude boys were ghetto delinquents who tried to look like American movie gangsters or jazz musicians by wearing sharp suits, thin ties, and pork pie or trilby hats. Sound system owners would pay rude boys to start fights at rival parties, hence their nickname “dancehall crashers.”

Ska made enough inroads into the United Kingdom that the Beatles attempted to imitate it in “I Call Your Name,” though it’s doubtful anyone would recognize the song as ska today. Mods became fans of ska tracks such as the Skatalites’ “Guns of Navarone” and Prince Buster’s “One Step Beyond.” The U.K. label Blue Beat released a lot of Jamaican singles, and gradually the term
blue beat
became generic for ska among the mods.
23
Many mods shared neighborhoods with Jamaican and West Indian immigrants and adopted the look of the rude boys. The mod movie
Quadrophenia
features them as part of the scene.

While representing Jamaica at the World’s Fair in New York City, Jimmy Cliff met Chris Blackwell, an English producer who was making a name for himself releasing Jamaican music in the United Kingdom. (Later, Blackwell’s label, Island, would be the home of Bob Marley and U2.) Blackwell had already convinced one of the stars of the late 1950s Jamaican scene, Jackie Edwards (“the Nat King Cole of Jamaica”), to move to England and write songs for him. Blackwell agreed to manage Cliff, and Cliff arrived in London in the fall, just as one of Jackie Edwards’s songs, “Keep on Running,” was recorded by a white band that Blackwell managed, the Spencer Davis Group, with Stevie Winwood.
24
Edwards’s version on his own album,
Come On Home
, is terrific, a mix of Motown with intimations of the reggae sounds of Cliff, Johnny Nash, and Bob Marley to come. Edwards wrote the Spencer Davis Group’s next two hits, too, “Somebody Help Me” and “When I Come Home.”

Cliff’s in the background of “Keep on Running,” pumping up the band in the intro with “Yeah! All right! Okay!”
25
He toured with them in autumn, and with the Who and Jimi Hendrix the following year. But his journey got rough; landlords told him to move out of their buildings because of the color of his skin. Snow was hard for a Jamaican to deal with as well.
26
His later anthems, such as “Hard Road to Travel,” “Sitting in Limbo,” and “Many Rivers to Cross” sprang from this trying period. One of the few people Cliff could relate to was Eddy Grant, a bleach-blond Guyanese. Grant formed a band in North London that year with another black guy and two white twin brothers—hence their name, the Equals.

*   *   *

Bob Marley’s father
was a plantation overseer of Welsh descent who married an eighteen-year-old Afro-Jamaican when he was sixty-one. The two separated after Bob was born in 1945. The father paid child support but didn’t see his son, and died when Marley was ten.

Marley’s mother lived with the father of Neville Livingston, who would later change his name to Bunny Wailer. Their parents had a daughter together named Pearl. Marley and Bunny were tight, and in 1957 they started listening to the American R&B coming over the airwaves from distant U.S. radio stations—doo-wop groups such as Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the Platters, and the Drifters. Lennon and McCartney were doing the same thing in Britain at the time.

When Peter Tosh (born Winston Hubert McIntosh) met Marley and Bunny, the fact that Tosh had taught himself to play guitar and keyboards inspired them to learn how to play instruments as well. Tosh popularized the “chik, chik” guitar sound of reggae. (He later had a son with Bunny’s sister.)
27

The three formed a vocal harmony trio and sang on the corners of Trench Town, in Kingston, coached by a popular singer named Joe Higgs, who gave free lessons. First they called themselves the Teenagers, but since Frankie Lymon’s band was already called that, they soon became the Wailing Rude Boys, then the Wailing Wailers—“wailing” to express the angst of living in the ghetto.
28

In 1962 they sold seventy thousand copies of the eminently danceable “Simmer Down,” a message to the rude boys to control their temper and stop turning to crime. They released seventeen singles in 1965 alone, including “Rude Boy,” where their doo-wop roots fuse with reggae skank. Their output that year included numerous Beatle covers such as “I Should Have Known Better,” “And I Love Her,” and “Ringo’s Theme,” the instrumental version of “This Boy” from the American
A Hard Day’s Night
soundtrack album.

Jamaica did not have the same copyright laws as the United States, so the group took the Impressions’ “People Get Ready” and turned it into an early version of “One Love.” When Marley redid it in 1977, he slowed it down—comparing the two versions illustrates the difference between ska and the later form, reggae—and renamed it “One Love/People Get Ready,” crediting Curtis Mayfield. The Wailers also did a version of “Like a Rolling Stone,” with very different lyrics.

By the end of the year, ska had started evolving into rock steady, the link between ska and reggae. In rock steady, the beat slowed down and the piano and bass took over for the trombone. The lyrics became more political as well. A ten-year-old boy named Clive Campbell was there at the dance halls, absorbing how the deejays did it. After his family moved to the Bronx two years later, he changed his name to DJ Kool Herc, got his own sound system with two turntables, and started toasting for free at block parties, helping to ignite the hip-hop revolution.

22

Warhol Meets the Velvet Underground and Nico

Their partnership paves the way for an assault on homophobia, repression—and sanity.

Andy Warhol and his director,
Paul Morrissey, wanted to make more movies, but they needed cash. A businessman had offered to pay Warhol for the right to use his name in association with a nightclub that was set to open soon, and Warhol and Morrissey started thinking that managing a band to play in the nightclub might be a good way to raise money.
1

They first considered approaching the Fugs, along with a folk duo who often played with the Fugs called the Holy Modal Rounders. Velvet Underground guitarist-bassist Sterling Morrison called the two groups “the only authentic Lower East Side bands.”
2
The Fugs’ Ed Sanders owned the Peace Eye Bookstore and published
Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts
. The band’s Tuli Kupferberg was a poet who had been immortalized in Ginsberg’s
Howl
for jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge (though it was actually the Manhattan Bridge, and the jump necessitated a body cast for his spinal injuries). Kupferberg had named the group the Fugs because Norman Mailer had used the term in his book about World War II soldiers,
The Naked and the Dead
, as a euphemism for “fuck.”
The Fugs First Album
was recorded in June and featured the eerily gorgeous “Carpe Diem” about the Angel of Death, “I Couldn’t Get High,” “Boobs a Lot,” “Slum Goddess,” and a cover of Romantic poet William Blake’s “Ah! Sunflower, Weary of Time.”

Both bands were filmed playing at the Factory. But Warhol and Morrissey had a sense that they would be too difficult to deal with. They kept looking for a group to manage.

*   *   *

Christa Päffgen was a German
model who renamed herself Nico and had a supporting role in Federico Fellini’s masterpiece of decadent pop society,
La Dolce Vita
. She met Dylan in Paris in the spring of 1964. He had sung the praises of
La Dolce Vita
’s Anita Ekberg in “I Shall Be Free No. 10” and was no doubt happy to meet another starlet from the film. Nico accompanied him to Germany and Athens while he wrote much of his fourth album,
Another Side of Bob Dylan.
The track “Motorpsycho Nitemare” features a woman who looks like she stepped out of
La Dolce Vita.
Nico later claimed Dylan wrote “I’ll Keep It with Mine” for her, but then again, both Joan Baez and Judy Collins claimed that, too.