Doom & Gloom Dispatch #32: We Love Our Machines
Maxine Funke, John Coltrane & Eric Dolphy, Kraftwerk, Richard Hell, Sonic Youth
With her sighing voice and gentle nylon-string guitar, Maxine Funke might present as a folky singer-songwriter type. But there’s always been something else going on beneath the surface, a kind of hushed intensity, as though these quietly poetic songs need to exist. River Said, the New Zealand-based Funke’s latest LP might be my favorite thing she’s done thus far. Side A is the classic acoustic stuff, with vocals and fingerpicking front and center. But, as she’s wont to do, Funke throws us a delightful curveball on the second side, with the ambient piece “Long Beach” and the stunning Arthur Russell-inspired “Oblivion.” The latter tune stretches out to almost 10 minutes, with the singer’s voice barely a whisper over beautifully scraped strings and birdcalls. Meditative and lovely, but also as heavy as can be.
John Coltrane Quintet with Eric Dolphy - Kulttuuritalo, Helsinki, Finland, November 22, 1961
A day after this performance, DownBeat’s John Tynan wrote: “At Hollywood’s Renaissance Club recently, I listened to a horrifying demonstration of what appears to be a growing anti-jazz trend exemplified by these foremost proponents [Coltrane and Dolphy] of what is termed avant-garde music. I heard a good rhythm section… go to waste behind the nihilistic exercises of the two horns.… Coltrane and Dolphy seem intent on deliberately destroying [swing].… They seem bent on pursuing an anarchistic course in their music that can but be termed anti-jazz.”
Time has proven Tynan 100% right, of course — this stuff sucks! Just kidding … the team-up of Coltrane and Dolphy is one the high water marks of modern music as we know it. At least in my opinion. The four-disc Village Vanguard collection offers one of the most incredible listening experiences you’ll find anywhere in any genre. And amazingly, we’re going to get more Coltrane / Dolphy (and Jones and Tyner and Workman) in about a month. The previously unreleased Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy features 80 minutes of music recorded a couple months prior to the Village Vanguard stand. Unreal! You can check out a sample over on NPR now and although the recording was made with a single mic (by future Dylan engineer Richard Alderson), it sounds well-nigh miraculous.
While we wait for the rest, let’s enjoy this wondrous 40+ minutes of the Coltrane Quintet in Finland. Compared to the Village Vanguard tapes from just a few weeks before, the performance is relatively smooth — nothing too outward bound like “India” or “Chasin’ Another Trane.” Coltrane had already tested the European audience’s stamina on his final tour with Miles in 1960, so maybe he was hedging his bets slightly. But that’s not meant as a criticism. This is spectacular music from start to finish. And if this group is deliberately destroying swing on the long and luminous “My Favorite Things” here … well, then destroy away, dudes! Dolphy’s incredible flute solo here is a total showstopper.
“At home [in California] I used to play, and the birds always used to whistle with me,” Dolphy said. “I would stop what I was working on and play with the birds … Birds have notes in between our notes—you try to imitate something they do and, like, maybe it’s between F and F-sharp, and you’ll have to go up or come down on the pitch. It’s really something! And so, when you get playing, this comes. You try to do some things on it. Indian music has something of the same quality— different scales and quarter tones. I don’t know how you label it, but it’s pretty.”
Photo: Herb Snitzer/Impulse! Records
Kraftwerk - Singles (1973-2007)
Is it Tour de France time yet? I guess that’s still a couple weeks away. But you can get psyched up for it (or not) by listening to several hours’ worth of Kraftwerk singles via this decades-spanning fanmade compilation — including a whole lot of the group’s heavy breathing “Tour de France” epic. And there’s a whole lot more here: remixes, alternate versions, instrumentals, edits, etc. All good for the ‘werk obsessive.
Prairiewolf has been covering “Kometenmelodie” live lately, so I’ve had that gorgeous melody floating through my head 24/7 — I love the slo-mo version that appears near the beginning of this comp. The Feelies/Willies have brought that one back as well, to great effect. And have you checked out William Tyler’s brilliant rendition of “Radioactivity” from his recent live album yet? It’s killer. For all their revolutionary sonic/textural influence, it’s a reminder that Kraftwerk was just a great pop band, too, with hooks for days.
“We love our machines,” Florian Schneider once said. “We have an erotic relationship with them.” And with the rise of AI giving everybody the heebie-jeebies in 2023, I’m pondering that attitude. Kraftwerk are tricky — they celebrate technology in a lot of ways, though that celebration comes with a hefty dose of irony, I think. It’s definitely not all satire, however; I think that their catalog represents a kind of magical thinking about tech. Kraftwerk is perfectly aware of the very real dangers of this stuff, but they try to present a more utopian outcome, one where humanity can benefit instead of crumble. It’s a dream, sure, but you’ve gotta dream to escape the nightmare, right?
The Heartbreakers - CBGB, New York City, July 25, 1975
Naomi Fry’s New Yorker Q&A with Richard Hell this week was a great read. Hell is a thoughtful guy — some of that old ego lingers, but he’s more self-aware than most of his peers, probably. And for someone who was right there in the thick of it, he’s got plenty of fresh insight into those usually kind of un-fresh topics: New York City, the birth of punk and CBGB.
“People talk about it as if what New York has become is permanent, but the thing about New York is it’s always changing,” Hell says. “The time when I was first getting any results from myself in the early seventies, when I’d just turned twenty, was a time that now represents so much to people, a period when everything was alive, and people were doing exciting new work, and it wasn’t about money, because New York was in such bad shape that it was a Wild West frontier town, and lawless, and no one was supervising anybody, but at the same time there was an endless fund of jobs and cheap apartments, and it still had all the cultural things—great movies, bookstores, bars, music. But the ironic thing is, in a way, that situation of New York as the Wild West in the seventies and early eighties is libertarianism, where it’s every man for himself. You look at John Lydon and he’s a Trumpist, so in a way being nostalgic for that is wishing for the strong to survive.”
I’ve shared plenty of Hell rarities over the years, from his early days with Television to the Voidoids’ ruthless reign … but I’m not sure if I’ve dug too much into his brief spell with the Heartbreakers. In the summer of ‘75, Hell had just been booted from Television, but he wasted no time in getting rolling with this motley crew of NY Dolls castaways. This date at CBs would’ve been one of the Heartbreakers’ first … I think they had debuted at the Coventry in June. It’s a rough/raw audience tape, but it captures the woozy Stones-y fever dream of the band very nicely.
“[O]ur sets were driving and rocking, and at their best they combined the different things that Johnny and I brought—my intellectual ambitions and lost-boy affect with Johnny’s defiant junkie prowling,” Hell wrote in I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp. “I got to live the ideal I’d had in mind when I came to New York to be a poet—to have a well-placed platform for saying things to the world, and an audience that thrived on it and wanted to have sex with me because of it, and I ran my own life, had no boss. And there were drugs and money.”
Sonic Youth - Club Lingerie, Hollywood, California, August 22, 1985
By the mid-80s, Sonic Youth had a growing obsession with California’s underground underbelly, from Manson to SST. And around this time, the band started making regular forays out to the Golden State, beginning with the legendary Desolation Center shows in early 1985. Later that year, SY was back in the belly of the beast — right on Sunset Strip at Club Lingerie.
This show is also notable in our #SonicSummer trip since it’s the first tape we’ve listened to featuring Steve Shelley, who had been deservedly promoted from housesitter to full-time drummer. How does he sound here? Fucking amazing, of course. You get the feeling that Steve fully understood what the band was trying to do and could complement it with grace and ease — and also bring plenty of added power and technical skill to the mix, too. “He had a more fluid style to the music,” Lee Ranaldo said. “And he had a van. Case closed, basically.” After several years, Sonic Youth's classic lineup was finally firmly in place.
In addition to the fully assured Bad Moon Rising numbers played on this evening, we’re treated to a few previews of the in-progress EVOL, which wouldn’t be recorded until the spring of 1986. “Secret Girl” is a fragmentary thing, but the closing “Expressway To Yr Skull” is already a complete classic, majestic and powerful, the beautiful feedback spilling out into the hot Hollywood night for all the California girls to hear.
From The Doom & Gloom Archives
King Sunny Adé - Toad’s Place, New Haven, Connecticut, February 7, 1983
It was undoubtedly a cold February night in New Haven (is there any other kind?), but the temperature in Toad’s Place had to be hot when King Sunny Adé and his band started to cook. This was the King’s first tour of the U.S., I believe, and he and his cohorts deliver authentic juju music to the crowd for well over two hours. Probably a total breeze for Adé — his shows often went on all night. Thankfully, we can relive it via Alex Butterfield’s fantastic tape. Thank you again, Alex!
The late/great writer Greg Tate was probably in attendance for this show — he published a long piece about the tour in the Village Voice, bringing the scene to life.
“The joy in the music is evident in the band’s sincere grins; in the ringing shingaling of the four rhythm guitars; the scatting, heartpopping gallops of the talking drums; the sly, swooping iridescent glides of the steel guitar; the smooth moves and choral mantras of the band’s lead singers,” Tate wrote of a show in Washington, D.C. “But most of all, it’s right there for the world to see in the sanguine, smiling, sweet, traffic-directing face of Sunny Adé, the man they call King because he has earned the title, whom they call the Chairman because he’s got investments in some 10 businesses back home, the man whose charm, charisma, guitar and terpsichore are bringing to life D.C.’s Wax Museum. The energy and enthusiasm is so infectious and so on the One that everywhere you look people is getting happy feet, giving it up to the funk, getting down, getting off, moving, grooving, working up a sweat and being swayed, soothed and cooled in a single motion. This juju music is wicked, mon, and it’s so cool, too.”
Currently Reading: Goodby 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth by David Browne
Sweet. Thank you! This looks great. Looking forward to digging into this Kraftwerk collection!
Can I make a request... a Dirty Three concert??