Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard (7 page)

David Byrne:

I thought Branca’s guitar orchestra performances were amazing. Very powerful and thrilling. It wasn’t as loud as people said, it was more the immensity of the sound than the volume. At some point I tried to get elements of that kind of sound into what I was doing, though I wasn’t very successful.

Tuning individual guitars to a single note, Branca created intervals and chords by using a number of differently tuned guitars – 11 in all for
Symphony No. 1
. It’s easy to imagine the horror with which Branca, accompanied by performance artist Z’ev’s industrial percussion, was greeted in classical music circles. Branca, however, offered more than just exercises in how to clear a room. While exploring the possibilities of guitar tunings and layering at extreme volumes, Branca began to hear phantom tones within the sheets of sound. He discovered that the guitars could produce natural effects that sounded like horns or choirs.

Page Hamilton, Helmet:

Symphony Number 6
was a real sonic distorted guitar thing. Double strumming brought out different harmonics in the instruments. Live you hear all those guitars and all those harmonics popping out and it sounds sometimes like trumpet and also like voices. You definitely hear choirs. Being on stage with that is unreal.

In the early ‘80s, Branca began to investigate acoustic phenomena and focused on the harmonic series, the string of notes (the root and overtones) that make up each musical tone. He began writing microtonal music, which uses tones that fall between the notes in the traditional 12-tone system. “People talk about the music of the 21
^st
century. Well, this is it,” Branca says. “It’s going to be micro-tonal music, without a doubt.” To accentuate the acoustic traits of microtones, Branca needed to create new instruments such as a mallet-struck guitar (for better resonance) and electric harpsichord (essentially guitars made into keyboards), as well as guitars refretted to play the harmonic series.

Branca became so obsessed with the mathematics of music that he began to lose interest in composing. Nonetheless, in 1983 his explorations bore fruit with
Symphony No. 3
. Subtitled,
Music for the first 127 intervals of the harmonic series
, the piece attempted to amplify the sounds that occur naturally (though inaudibly) in nature. “At the time I saw the harmonic series as something that existed in nature, so I wanted to see, ‘How did nature write music?’” he says. “Shouldn’t it sound like chaos? And out of chaos comes order. The harmonic series is an infinite series, and it’s also an infinite mind fuck.”

After leaving influential downtown New York label 99 Records, which released his first recordings, Branca formed Neutral Records to release
Symphony No. 3
. During its brief life, Neutral released the debuts by both the
Swans
and Sonic Youth, as well as other post-no wave groups. Through these groups, younger bands were exposed to Branca’s unconventional guitar tunings and dense guitar layering.

Sean O’Hagen, High Llamas:

I’m very disinterested in guitar-based music, it constantly lets people down. Whenever music starts to get interesting and experimental there’s always a conservative rock-based movement to drag it back to year zero. But Branca held my confidence in guitars over the years. He was one of the people that redefined a tainted instrument, as far as I was concerned.

Branca continues to use electric guitars in his compositions, though by 1985 he had begun writing for orchestral instruments as well (which required him, at 37, to learn to read music). Branca has also moved away from microtones toward a tonal style more focused on structure. His
Symphony No. 8
(1992), while composed for eight guitars, is clearly more melodic and dynamic than earlier guitar symphonies, as are his operatic and choral pieces. Now past 50, and able to boast commissions from Twyla Tharp’s dance company and the 1992 World Expo in Seville, Branca is reintegrating his rock past with a more traditionally classical present. In the journey from punk clubs to symphony halls, Branca introduced rock esthetics into concert music and classical techniques into guitar noise. In doing so, he helped to further break down the artificial lines separating popular from art music.

DISCOGRAPHY

Lesson #1
(99, 1980)
; a debut EP showing Branca in transition toward composition.

The Ascension
(99, 1981)
; another transitional piece, which unlike much of his later work, comes across well on record.

Music for the Dance “Bad Smells”
(Giorno Poetry Systems, 1982)
; this Branca piece appears alongside work by John Giorno on the album Who You Staring At?

Symphony No. 1 (Tonal Plexus)
(ROIR, 1983)
; composed in 1981, Branca’s first guitar symphony explores his “emotional structure.”

Symphony No. 3 (Gloria)
(Neutral, 1983; Atavistic, 1993)
; Branca’s creative breakthrough, his first to explore microtones in the harmonic series.

Music for Peter Greenaway’s Film “The Belly of an Architect”
(Factory [UK], 1987)
; Branca’s first piece to appear on record that uses orchestral instruments.

Symphony No. 6 (Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven)
(Blast First, 1989; Atavistic, 1993)
; a piece for 10 guitarists (including Helmet’s Page Hamilton).

The World Upside Down
(Les Disques du Crepuscule [Belgium], 1992; Atavistic, 1993)
; a full symphonic work in seven movements.

Symphony No. 2 (The Peak of the Sacred)
(Atavistic, 1992)
; written a decade before its release, Branca’s second symphonic work features percussionist Z’ev as well as his guitar army.

Symphony Nos. 8 & 10 (The Mysteries)
(Atavistic, 1992)
; written in 1992 and ‘94 respectively, these guitar symphonies explore life and death.

Symphony No. 9 (L’eve future)
(Point Music, 1995)
; a work for orchestra and voices, Branca’s first release on
Philip Glass
’s label.

Songs ‘77-‘79 (The Static & Theoretical Girls)
(Atavistic, 1996)
; a collection of recordings from Branca’s early No Wave bands.

Symphony No. 5 (Describing Planes of an Expanding Hypersphere)
(Atavistic, 1996)
; a guitar symphony from 1984.

Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses
(Newtone, 1996)
; a lost recording from 1986 released for the first time.

INTERNATIONAL POP UNDERGROUND

As musical term, pop generally refers to popular music, all the stuff (rock, country, jazz, adult contemporary, etc.) that’s not considered classical. Taken more literally, pop means popular, the stuff on the radio, on MTV, in the Top 40. But pop has another connotation, one more difficult to pinpoint. This is the sense in which we’re going to use it in this chapter.

As a concept, Pop (with a capital P), can draw from many genres. Whether or not a particular piece of music is Pop doesn’t depend on how many people hear it or how many copies it sells. Rather, it depends on sounds and attitudes and production styles. In this sense, an immensely popular band like Pearl Jam is not Pop, while an obscurity such as the Vaselines most definitely is Pop. And an undeniably creative musician like Jimi Hendrix is not Pop, while the Beatles surely are.

While Pop incorporates styles from all over, it retains an essential spirit. Pop is colorful, innocent, and melodic. It’s not willfully noisy, gloomy, or rambling. Pop combines the song traditions of vaudeville, cabaret, Tin Pan Alley, English dance halls, Motown, bubblegum, and easy listening with the classic studio techniques of Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, George Martin, and Jeff Lynne. It ties Cole Porter to the Cardigans, the Monkees to Stereolab.

The two elements that each of the artists in this chapter share is that they are all:

(1) pop; and

(2) not popular in the United States.

Beyond that, they differ in styles, time period, nationality, language, and relative levels of success. Some were, in fact, immensely popular in other countries (Serge Gainsbourg, Scott Walker), but didn’t translate well to American audiences. Others, like Big Star, had just about all the elements for popularity except luck and circumstance. Still others, such as Van Dyke Parks, were just too far out to connect in the mainstream, no matter how hard their label tried. A group like the Young Marble Giants, meanwhile, didn’t stick around long enough to cross over. And some groups, like Beat Happening (who coined the term “International Pop Underground,” which I’ve appropriated for my own purposes here), were too concerned with creating their own definition of what it meant to be a pop group to care much whether the mainstream took notice.

Calvin Johnson, Beat Happening:

[The International Pop Underground] was the idea that there were people who were interested in pop music and making records all over the place, connected through the mail or through records. It was just a wide umbrella that wasn’t necessarily a genre, not any one definition. It could be anything. Maybe it’s people who are inspired by pop music, but basically it’s just about taking over the media and calling the shots: “We’re calling this pop music, and it is because we said it is.”

Whatever the reason these artists never became popular, their music lives on and thrives as part of a pop tradition that continues today, in both independent and some mainstream music. Unlike jazz or blues or even rock ‘n’ roll, this Pop is not exclusively American in origin, and it’s certainly not culturally pure. Rather, it’s an endearing musical mutt that’s claimed by the entire modern world.

VAN DYKE PARKS

Scan O’Hagen, High Llamas:

I was as influenced and as obsessed with Van Dyke Parks as I was with the Beach Boys. I loved that you could be avant-garde with traditional instruments and tunes. Some would say avant-garde is for the elite, it’s introverted, it happens in small rooms, it’s subversive, but
Cabinessense
is a very strange piece of music that’s melodically heartwarming and has a skip in its step. [Parks’ influence] was definitely there in the back of mind [on the High Llamas’ Hawaii], this bloody thing I wanted to get out of my system. It’s derivative, I guess. I thought I was putting together a record that Van Dyke would’ve done.”

Van Dyke Parks draws on the entire American musical heritage, from 19
^th
-century minstrelsy to psychedelic pop. While he has worked for decades just under the surface of our musical culture and his distinctive stamp can be heard in everything from film music to orchestral pop to experimental sounds, only a small cult of fans cherish him as a true American original. His influence can be heard both in bands like the High Llamas – who create lush, dizzyingly exaggerated pop – and more art-minded composers who work with pop idioms. Through his solo material – and through his ill-fated collaboration with Brian Wilson on the Beach Boys’ aborted
Smile
album – Parks has elevated the modern pop tune into the world of the art song.

Parks was born in 1943 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the son of a distinguished doctor who had played in John Philip Sousa’s band. Van Dyke played clarinet at age four, and sang in operas and choruses conducted by Arturo Toscanini before he’d reached his teens. He was also a child actor who appeared on Broadway and had bit parts on television and in films. After studying music composition in college, Parks played in a folk group called the Greenwood County Singers (with his brother Carson, who later wrote Frank Sinatra’s hit “Something Stupid”), and worked as a session musician at Disney.

In his early twenties, Parks shifted his focus toward pop music. He became a songwriter (penning the often-recorded
High Coin
), session pianist (on records by the Byrds and Grateful Dead), and producer (for Judy Collins, Randy Newman, Arlo Guthrie, and others). In 1966, Parks met the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, who had recently produced his most ambitious work, his band’s Pet Sounds album. Wilson hoped his follow-up,
Smile
, would be far more sophisticated even than Pet Sounds, and invited Parks to collaborate with him.

In the face of growing national turmoil, Wilson wanted to explore innocence lost in America – a prevalent theme in Parks’ own work – and create what he called “a teenage symphony to God.” As promised, the first song Parks and Wilson wrote together,
Surf’s up
(which was not a surf song at all – note the title’s double meaning), was miles beyond the band’s signature beach music. Parks’ lyrics – with surreal, deeply evocative lines like, “Columnated ruins domino / canvas the town and brush the backdrop” – were the perfect match for Wilson’s music.

Tony Goddess, Papas Fritas:

They really took a literal picture of the sound. Like the song
Vegetables
, where the downbeat would be accented by the sound of them biting through a carrot, or
Cabinessence
, where they use rustic sounds like a banjo and a harmonica. Nothing we do is as developed as those guys, but like with “Live By the Water,” I tried to make an island, calypso rhythm. I think Van Dyke Parks was directly responsible for pushing Brian Wilson toward that stuff. Some people really think he fucked up Brian Wilson, but I really like his lyrics. That’s why we named our studio Columnated Ruins, from the lyrics to
Surf’s up
.