But Malcolm McLaren, who also knew his way around the Rock cartography, would contrive Sid Vicious into the June 1979 Top Ten with “C’Mon Everybody” from that same Eddie Cochran-Jerry Capehart writing team. The Who were also doing a bombastic “Summertime Blues”, for their ‘Live At Leeds’ double-album (recorded 14 February 1970). And the side-two opener of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues”, which – according to Farren, was the first political song in the canon due to its line about ‘I called my Congressman, but he said Whoa, I’d like to help you son, but you’re too young to vote.’ These twin barricades shocked full of heavy myth and legend, surround the two ‘suites’ of found-fragments, spoken-word snapshots, docu-veritè sequences and choppy riffs. Hence the opening (a Fragment) and closing (The Whole Trip) book-ends of Bo Diddley’s “Mona”. And Mick’s savvy enough to realise that an album lacking any pretention to strong melodic song-content needs the framing ramparts of a reliable fallback structure. Most of the greatest recordings of the Rock era were made by technically-imperfect artists. ![]() He knows the structure and vernacular, the dialectics and the format. He knows the punctuation and the manifesto. Mick Farren knows the grammar and vocabulary of Rock.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |