Bonniwell's Musical Mess

I got this album the other day for my birthday and gave it my first listen last night. Its a collection of the Bonniwell Music Machine's songs that have fallen far from anyone's attention. And for quite obvious reasons. The music is a fucken mess. Its garage rock from the late 60's, all those sounds are in there - fuzz guitar, farfisa organs, thudding drums - the ideas are in there, the voice is there but not a single one of these elements seem to fit together in any way, shape or form.

The Music Machine had a hit in September 1966 with the song "Talk Talk", breaking into the top twenty and making a television appearance that showed them wearing - according to Sean Bonniwell, the band's lead singer/songwriter, to avoid all gimmicks and to embrace their originality - matching black suits, mop-tops and, to really stand out, a single black glove on either their right or left hand. Fucken wild, hey. Their next single flopped, Bonniwell blaming industry clashes and the band put themselves through years of hard touring, presumably on the back of the one song. They refused to play covers or, apparently even listen to any form of advice. The band would play hour-long sets without breaks, rather than stop to have requests shouted at them which smacks of some weird and confused egomania rather than some highly original or progressive musical tract.

After a while, the original Music Machine parted and Bonniwell put together The Bonniwell Music Machine, recorded some songs for Warner Bros that probably didn't see the light of day until this CD release.

The disc is basically the musical equivalent of one guy's strange, deluded insistence that he force his overwhelming originality onto an audience that existence nowhere but in his mind. An odd, maniacal journey into a pop-garage sound with not a single clue about hooks, harmonies or cohesive musical arrangement. Its astounding that this man was even allowed near a recording studio. No one could have been that hard up for bands in the late 60's that they needed to spend time on this confused mess of ideas. From the liner notes (credited to Bonniwell and written in the third person) to the untracable sounds that pop up clueless and erratic this music isn't, as is claimed, a forerunner to punk or progressive rock, its some insane, gloriously confused mess of mashed ideas made inside the supposed shape of 1960's garage rock.

And its not Beefheart messy either. Beefheart at least had something you could tap into, had enough of a flow and awareness of its own insanity that it was something you could tap into. But this . . . this is simply . . . impenetrable.

To quote Bonniwell in his description of the song "Absolutely Positively", which is about: 'Demanding that you get what you don't have without knowing what you want, is the same as wanting what you haven't got - then not wanting it after you get it." Right . . .

Now, I've met people like this - I know that they're real and that they're out there. People that are so enthusiastic and so brimming with ideas; people that are so convinced of their own originality that they loudly proclaim it attempt to draw others into audience. Unfortunately, though, these are ideas are often so confused, so lost, so misdirected that they are lost on anyone who happens to come into contact with them.

Which is why Bonniwell's music is so fascinatingly, fantastically broken and messed up. In a way, he does fit in with the idea of punk and, indeed, with anybody's ideas about freedom of thought and expression; the idea of creating your own world, of making evrything around you your own and yours to own. Its just that its such a terrifically garbled and inarticulate mess that no one can get properly inside of it to take away something for themselves. As Bonniwell sings in the opening line to "Talk Talk": "I got a complication/And its an only child." Thanks Sean, couldn't have put it better myself.

Pat, You Are A Pillar!

"A lot of women singers today seem to be saying, ‘If you love me and then hurt me, I’ll die.’ I say, ‘If you love me then hurt me, I’ll kick your ass.’"
-Pat Benatar (June 1979)

This is a little of the fallout from a mild brain lapse that occured last year. I got this job where myself and my fellow employees would come to blows over what radio station should be playing. One guy refused to listen to my choice of "yoof" music and I threatened to blow up when a song was played for THE TWENTIETH FUCKING TIME THAT DAY on his commercial puke-choice. So, for the sake of everyone's sanity we made a comprimise.

We eventually settled on an oldies station playing mostly rockin' tracks that re-packaged nostalgia and dreams of past youth specifically for the daily grind. But the station had a love for music which is uncommon for most Australian commercial arse-waves and was pretty endearing.

Oh, and the songs!

I would come home after a large day of nothing and fill my housemate's computer with the massively fake, over-emotive 80's tracks, get drunk and wail along with Flock of Seagulls, Foreigner and - most emotive of all - Pat Benatar.

Pat was born Patricia Mae Andrzejewski in Janurary 1953 to a Polish family in Brooklyn, NY. She was discovered at an open mic nightin the late seventies, playing run-of-the-mill songs dressed in Catwoman costume, showered with praise, shown a record deal, won best female vocal grammys for twenty consecutive years in the early eighties and was generally loved by everyone.

Her obvious massive songs aren't the ones that get me, though. Yeah, "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" is fun and brash and does deal with the main idea that runs through pretty much all of Benatar's songs: that of, "Try it on if you want guy, but I've been through enough shit to know what you're about, if you fuck with me I'll find something else like you never happened," etc.

The songs that get me are the ones with ridiculously over the top chorus, huge arena rock guitars and straining layered harmonies. "Shadows Of The Night", "We Belong", "Heartbreaker".
All of them paint Pat as this immovable pillar, this tough and world-weary chick that has been fucked over, shat on, spat up but doesn't want anything similar to happen to any dude she meets. She warns us about it but is never out for scalps. She still seeks and strives for love regardless of previous histories.

It seemed a common theme for popular women singers in the 80's. Women no longer striving for liberation; women realising they've found it, have been living that way for years and reveling in it, falling in love with it.

"Love Is A Battlefield" was the soundtrack to last year - the song that best describes all the idiocy of bringing previous history and ill communication into relationships, which of course is impossible not to do but fucks things up nevertheless. Its one of Pat's more relaxed and restrained songs but could be - maybe because its what I want to believe and take from the plasticity of the eighties - her most sincere and heartfelt that I've come across.

I think Pat's doing a bit of TV work these days. "I Was A Celebrity, Now Pieces Of Me Are Being Fed To The Wolves" reality-type swill and selling songs for toothpaste and travelcase commercials. Nevermind. For a good chunk of last year she was a rock when I was a flabby piece of fetid fat being drunkenly blown around. Pat, you are a pillar!

Ineptitude Abounds

The other day I came across two articles both giving a brief rundown of the history of Beat Happening. One was a wonderful, and at the same time critical, analysis of the band, its songs, albums, influence and infamy, the other was an odd and rather deluded rundown of the band's recorded output. One was published in a webzine focussing, generally, on the wierder sides of musics out there, the other was in the corner of the back pages of Sydney's main club and DJ streetpress. The link to the Perfect Sound Forever article is here:http://www.furious.com/Perfect/beathappening.html. Unfortunately I don't have a copy of the latter article. A damn shame considering how strange its appearnce in such a publication is and was.

You can read the wonderful history of the gloriously inept and underconfident band wherever and however you wish but I don't think you'd ever be able to say that they were talented musicians or fine singers. They did craft wonderfully basic, naive pop songs holding true to themes of teenage love and all things romantic and bookish. But you'd never be able to accuse them spending too much practising together or (gasp!) learning their instruments.

Which is what the writer in 3d World was attempting to convey: that Beat Happening were a band of incredibly talented individuals who played and sang with wonderful voices and an inbuilt sense of musicianship. The best thing about the article was that I think the dude had actually listened to the albums he was describing. And yet he went on to describe what he had heard as collection of finely wrought and deftly performed indie tunes that everyone needs to seek and fall in love with.

Now, don't let me disuade you. I fucken love Beat Happening. Memories of lying in bed wailing out of tune with Calvin with my girlfriend of the time, dancing and singing around her bedroom during a Melbourne summer was wonderful. My favourite songs of theirs will always remind me of that. The band and their music should be sought and savoured but to deny them their wonderful and insatiable INABILITY would be to miss most of what their doing.

The PSF article says most of what needs to be said about the challenging nature of such a band but I thought it so strange to - in the same day - stumble across two mostly opposing articles. Apparently the article in 3d World was an attempt by someone in the magazine to sell something that the readers might not seek out intially - a grouping of underground guitar bands that the kids are getting into but have missed the dance world slightly. I'm gonna make sure I keep up with his articles and whinge about them to you here later.

Rainy Day Mix-Tapin'

Its been raining pretty hugely the last couple of weeks in Sydney so I thought it only right that a similarly wet and soppy cassette be made to accompany it. Plenty of Scottish, English and New Zealand pop tunes on there which makes sense since everyone living in those lands pretty much invented rain. Its also quite possibly the whitest tape anyone has ever made.

Side 1:

The Jesus & Mary Chain - Nine Million Rainy Days
The Go-Betweens - Right Here
Look Blue Go Purple - Winged Rumour
Teenage Fanclub - Everything Flows
The Kinks - Victoria
The Puddle - A440
Suicide - Cheree
The Smiths - William, It Was Really Nothing
The Pastels - Surprise Me
Beat Happening - Foggy Eyes
Nico - Elegy To Lenny Bruce
The Magnetic Fields - I Don't Believe In The Sun

Side 2:

The Carpenters - Rainy Days & Mondays
The Concretes - Say Something New
Cat Power - Satisfaction
Bat For Lashes - Trophy
Codiene - Pickup Song
Slowdive - Catch The Breeze
Boo Radleys - How I Feel
Belle & Sebastian - If She Wants Me
Vaselines - The Day I Was A Horse
Faust - Its A Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl
Public Image Ltd. - Careering
The Bats - Other Side Of You


Heaps of the songs (Go-Betweens and JAMC in particular) remind me of the time in a previous house when it rained and rained and rained all night and the drain in our concrete backyard got clogged so that the whole thing got flooded. There was nearly a foot of water in some spots and it kept raining and raining and raining. This was the day the house had decided to have a picnic in some park or wherever. But obviously we couldn't go anywhere outside so we stayed in and drank gin and ate tasty food on the floor of our living room.

Songs of the Mo'

five songs getting my goat of late. that's right i'm changing the phrase, i'm spinnin' it flip-mode on ya. from here on the term "getting your goat" will refer to shit that knocks you sideways, as opposed something that pisses you off.


New Order - Elegia

Dark dawning of the second side of the Low-life album. Synths rising over massive drums, making heavy and more real the seriousness of Joy Division, making their story with a scary, quietly violent instrumental.


Pat Benatar - We Belong

Found the 7" single the other week for $1 and nearly died. Played the song non-stop for a couple of days, singing along with Pat's pain. The slow and completely over-the-fucking-top chorus carried me away away away. Will always be remembered for the time me and friend copied the lyrics from this song onto a drawing of a lady blowing a chimp. 'Many times I tried to tell you/many times I cried alone . . .'
Hang out for a full critical analysis of Pat Benatar songs in a future post. Yes, I'm serious.


The Eastern Dark - Julie Is A Junkie

Glorious Australian pop shouter, its a wicked Ramones rip-off about confusion and love for a girl who's only gonna break you in two. Choruses that kick off with a keening minor-chord wail get me every time.


Ween - Baby Bitch

Half-serious song from notorious genre-plasting idiots. The story goes like this: dude is hanging at a party with his chick, sees an ex who's surprised that he would be with anyone. He tells her in the chorus, eschewing all politeness: "Baby, baby, baby bitch/I'm better now please fuck off." Sounds wonderfully barbed when sung. We soon learn that the narrator was at one time fat and ugly but has been a whole fuck-load better since he stopped seeing this chick. Pretty freaking bitter, but the dude is moving on. Not unlike a situation that I found myself in not that long ago. I'm not as bitter as the Ween boys maybe, but next time I see that bitch and her boyfriend I will most likely stab them both.


The Magnetic Fields - Epitaph For My Heart

Re-found the 'Feilds recently and took myself back to a time of rainy day bus-rides to and from the town my girlfriend of the time was living. From the beginning, the harmonised reading of an electrical device's warning tag to the image of hurling the love's ashes off the Brill Building on a perfect evocation of the pain of love that is necesarry for pop.


I'm not posting any mp3's for these songs because I don't know how. And even if I did I probably wouldn't anyway. Find 'em for yourself and see what else you stumble across.

The Battle Forever!

Was deeply affected by this video when I first saw it a couple of months ago and only realised what it meant this morning . . .

http://youtube.com/watch?v=sqHz7cUw4Ls

Glenn Branca, the supreme guitar abstractor, shifting abstract destruction and letting the machine by which he is so consumed personally overtake him.

Every idea about the amplified guitar and its part in the subversion of culture--rock'n'roll guitar to sixties guitar to punk guitar--is given over in this brief performance as the machine itself doubles back and attacks a single human being. This is Branca's own personal battle, he wants to search the machine, to see who comes out on top after hand-to-hand combat. A single soul performing in a New York loft or the physical embodiment of the history of the best and most impassioned music since World War II. Branca was up for the fight: had given himself up to years deep education for years before facing his foe.

But he never stood a chance.

The weight of the six-string phallus eventually overcomes his taunts and attacks by snarling back at him, ripping and tearing at the hands and fingers he uses as (his only) weapons and eventually throwing him off-stage in a tired, worn heap.

The ferocity of the battle does not leave Branca scarred enough to give up, however. In the years that pass he will pit himself against more and more of these chiming, ringing, droning, coarse and heavy machines. And for the rest of us, we must resign ourselves to the fact that the amplified guitar is as wild and unpredictable as always and is still--after all this time--yet to unleash its fullest and most absolute fury.