Like many other clueless air-guitar rebels, I sang in a band during the Seventies—a strange assortment of druggies, layabouts, alkies, and genius geeks who all loved hard rock. I was the singer, and the songs I sang ranged from Trower to Led Zeppelin to Deep Purple to Mountain. I had a miserable voice, but I was the one who could get a raspy tone and volume, so sing I did. No one seemed to mind, most likely because they were usually as drunk as I was. In any case, Dewar and Trower were the perfect combination of singer and guitarist—there likely hasn’t been a collaboration this good since Rod Stewart and Jeff Beck or Paul Rodgers and Paul Kossoff (in the late, great band Free). Trower, additionally, is about my favorite British blues guitarist—he broke the Clapton mold that his peers got snared by and developed his own sound; I think he’s pretty distinct from Hendrix, even with the similarities. I’ve seen him pass through town in the last few years, and the man plays better than he ever has. Yeah. Great stuff. The saddest day of my life, though, was when someone who’d recorded one of my band’s kegger gigs played the tape—we sounded awful. Even the time-honored rock and roll aesthetic, which favors attitude over expertise, couldn’t save us; we sucked, in turn, long, deep, and hard.
A bag full of agitated electric razors would have sounded better than the clamor we were producing: out of tune, atonal, thumping, with a guitarist who was fried on cocaine and rum, who managed to make his guitar sound worse than car alarms screaming in a West Virginia mall. I, in turn, had a timbre that sounded, to be kind to myself, like someone clearing his throat over the loudest microphone on the stage. A crazed dog would have told me to shut the hell up. I didn’t stay quiet, though. At best, the rhythm section—a bass player and drummer who wouldn’t be out of place in a police lineup in Hooterville—sounded like two winos having a knife fight behind an abandoned coin laundry. We knew we were terrible.
That night we had a gig, and what I did was drink more and scream harder. My voice was gone the following morning, and I couldn’t talk or eat shellfish for a month. But I pressed on; I continued, a true believer in my own capacity as a post-blues revenge howler who could tear a hole in the ozone with one ball-squeezing shriek. I was in a band in the Seventies that played hard rock, “butt rock” so-called, and I was the singer—not that I could sing, but it’s not as if any of us could really play, either, save for a guitarist who had chops, no ambition, and a taste for coke. Everyone in the band is missing in action, including me, but the fact that my phone doesn’t ring with queries from these guys hasn’t diminished my lifestyle. Between groping other guys’ girlfriends, stealing drugs and records, and not paying back any of the borrowed money I promised to repay in just a couple of days, it’s just as well that bad news that’s over thirty years old remains the tragic history it has so far remained. Our song list:
Hot Blooded; Mississippi Queen; Bad Motor Scooter; Tush; Waiting for the Bus; Jesus Left Chicago; Heartbreaker; Rock and Roll; Good Times Bad Times; All Right Now; Wishing Well; Superstition; I Just Wanna Make Love to You (Foghat version); Jeanie Jeanie (remember Automatic Man?); Dancing Madly Backwards (remember Captain Beyond?); Too Rolling Stoned; The Fool and Me; Day of the Eagle; Man of the World; Hellcat (Scorpions); Dirty Love (Zappa); Thumbsucker (Mountain); Highway Star; Space Truckin’; Black Night (Deep Purple); Supernaut (Sabbath); Bang a Gong; Rebel Rebel.
There were hundreds of hours of rehearsal in a floating crap game of a scene, going from one band member’s parents’ house to another for what were really drinking parties. Things usually got destroyed, and sometimes we made it all the way through a song. We even played a few dozen times. I was drunk most of the time so that I could scream the few words I actually knew to each song, somehow, truly thinking that I sounded just like Robert Plant or Paul Rodgers or Rod Stewart or any of my swaggering, macho strut heroes—only slightly aware that all the half-skips and sashaying I took for masculine intimations of heterosexual power were, in fact, very much a swanning display of featherless fan dancing. To the end of my time in front of the microphone, twisting my vocal cords into knots of scraping rasps and glottal whispers, I was convinced my style was akin to the greatest belters blues and soul music gave to the white world for worship: Ray Charles, yes; Otis Redding, oh yes; Little Richard, absolutely! It was a small beer that I never knew what I sounded like—the grunts and groin-splitting yelps buried under layers of untuned amplified guitar, farting bass lines, and the endless thrash of a speed-freak drummer. Someone once recorded one of our gigs on a reel-to-reel at a San Diego State frat party, and it was a gross, hell-bent, auto-accident cacophony, fuzzy and sputtering with feedback, wrong notes, crowd noise, and breaking glass: the noise hurt the inner ear—the MC5 without conviction. I was singing, all right, but I sounded like I had two wool socks crammed in my mouth, screaming in muffled horror while a serial killer approached me with a blade. It was a state of excited slovenliness that made you flex your muscles, arch your back as if you were about to get to the bottom of whatever problematic quandary was confronting you and your friends, only to stumble, trip, and reenact the history of pratfalls as you collapsed under the shifting weight of your liquid arrogance and managed only to destroy something in the house you were visiting. I sounded drunk. The band sounded drunk. The decade was drunk.
Ted Burke