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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 38, Number 11. May 29, 1975

Records

Records

Rock'n' On — Elvis Presley (RCA Victor)

"24 All-Time Rock 'n' Roll Hits" is what it says on the cover of this fine double album, and that, cats 'n' kittens, is just what you get. Regardless of what he's into now, there is no denying that Elvis made a vital contribition to rock during the 1950's and he should never be forgotten for this.

This album is quite something: for a mere $5.50, you get a double album containung all but a h andful of Elvis's finest achievements. This has to be the best value for money of any record currently available in NZ. You name it, and it is probably here:

"Hound Dog", "All Shook Up", "Heartbreak Hold", "Blue Suede Shoes", "Jailhouse Rock", and ballads like "It's Now or Never", and "Can't Help Falling in Love." Great stuff, one and all. These tracks are timeless, as fresh and vigorous now as in the '50's.

The album has a good sleeve notes, giving recording dates etc. — I wish more oldies compilations would do this! My only criticism, and a major one at that, is that many of the tracks are in very crude, 1950's stereo rechannelling, and it sounds bloody awful. The best thing on these tracks is to shift the balance over to the left channel, thereby cutting out the echo in the other channel. Still, at $5.50, no-one could say they're hard done by.

Some classic slabs of rock'n roll history, then, and at a very reasonable price. No rock music collection is complete without some Elvis, and thus album is just right for starters. It'll sell a bomb, make no mistake!

For Earth Below: Robin Trower Chrysalis L 35421

Third lime around, Robin Trower continues flashing out his persona as Dr Hendrix, the Seventies disciple of — perhaps the master virtuoso of — the electric guitar, who trims his improvisation and polishes his delivery to get the message through to the rockers. Trower's seduction is direct and uncompromising in its love for past styles, and he lets us know where he stands from the start.

Trower brings to this album the enthusiasm of earlier efforts while backing away from their cluttered production modes. This should not, however, be construed as meaning his music is simple; quite the reverse, in, fact, and at times suprisingly so. Robin Trower, the entity, includes as a singer a veteran from the now defunct Stone the Crows, James Dewar. His vocals are mixed up, thereby eliminating the major problem that plagued earlier recording, while Trower's guitar work focuses more on originality (within, of course, the already-defined limitation) and less on re-hashed variants of the electric guitar man's licks. His love of pure rocking and taste for the vertiginou feel Hendrix sometimes evoked — as opposed to merely ripping off his ideas — are more completely realised, resulting in a thoroughly unified album that enables Trower to transcend the imitative category.

The group's nucleus includes Trower on guitar. Bill Lordan on drums and Dewar on bass and vocals. Fellow refugee from Procul Harum's elephantine excesses, Mathew Fisher, produced; and Trower himself draws widely from the sonic spectrum built up during his tenure with that group. He turns in a searing wah-wah solo on "Fine Day", the album's only neo-rock-&-roll-blues fusion attempt. Like the other players, Trower acquits himself exceptionally well, tempering his playing to let Dewar's vocals remain in the foreground.

Dewar remains prime mover, his eclecticism in bass styles against his low-keyed, almost conversational singing style. His singing is as changed as any other element and works towards a half-singing, half-rapping tone that is particularly effective on his side of life, mand-in-the-street (shades of Gimme Shelter rather than Space Waltz) exercises like "Althea", "Confessin' Midnight" and "For Earth Below", a classic tale of a "fine, fine friend of mine" done in by his penchant for pretty women.

The project hangs together with the unforced lyricism and humour than buoyed the best moments of his earlier woork — a Salty Dog's 'The Devil Come From Kansas" and Broken Barricades "Song for a Dreamer". I do have minor reservations concerning the lyrics, some of which seem to me in need of polishing. Overall, I find the album remarkably consistent. The hard, crisp tone of the playing is reinforced by the clarity of the producotion, handled by Fisher and engineer/collaborator at the Los Angeles Record Plant, Gary Ladinsky.

page 17

Robert Franken — Notes on Some Recent Work.

"If you take a cell from the gut of a toad and transplant in into the toad's head, the gut cell has encoded in it all the information it needs to be a head cell."

I

The work of Robert Franken it familiar enough, at least in Wellington. It is easily recognisable and immediately impressive, became of the fine, detailed, accurate drawing and because of the strangeness of the subjects. The pity of it is that the response may well end there. Having had our visual thrill & acknowledged its sourse, we pass on. Part of the difficulty is in the tradition which Franken's work belongs or seems to belong to. Surrealism, a movement whose intention was, first off, the expression of the 'true functioning of thought... in the absence of all control exerted by reason & outside all moral & aesthetic preoccupation' (1) is today, in the popular mind at least, little more than a collection of tricks & visual gimmicks. The crucial distinction, if we are still to find any worth in the tradition, is that elaborated by Ted Highes (2) between the surrealism which is a surrender to the arbitrariness of the dream-flow & the "surrealism of folklore", where problems in the ordinary world exert such pressure that solutions must be sought below or beyond the conscious mind. I would suggest that Franken's work, at its best, relates to this second formulation; and that because of a tendency to consign all 'surrealists' to the same tatty & tawdry bag, it has never received the attention it deserves.

Detail from a study "something primieval".

Detail from a study "something primieval".

Detail from a drawing "Comtemplating a metaphor".

Detail from a drawing "Comtemplating a metaphor".

Detail from a drawing "an inner wish".

Detail from a drawing "an inner wish".

II

The question is, how necessary & how precise is the vision Does it demonstrate a particular concern or a kind of generalised vagueness? Is it exclusive or inclusive? The grotesque character will be agreed upon, initially. However, accurate as this is as a first descriptive terra it requires a good deal of qualification. The works are so cool, so impassive, so utterly convinced as to their own veracity, almost dead-pan. They are not morbid because they have arrived complete and without any need to strain after effect. They are not obsessive because of their ability to throw off any private emotional load, to come clean. Looking at them, it is as if the eyes themselves are exhausted by long staring; their attention wavers & into the gaps rise the metamorphising shapes of men & beasts.

Part of this effect derives from the technical felicity Franken possesses. The preposterous nature of the vision is accented by the entire apparatus of techniques proper to the most meticulous life drawing — clear and precise and anatomically correct as drawings in a biology manual. Everything it laid there, unobtrusively, to convince; the proposition only is untenable. Of course, it is a familiar method; yet the focus is very different from that of a Magritte or a Dali. The concentration is not towards the inclusions of bits & pieces picked up all over the place; rather it is upon a narrow range of the biological creation — insects, birds, reptiles, animals, men. It is possible to be even more specific: Franken's concern is the invention & description of new creatures from the large & little bits & pieces of other creatures and the elaboration of the dramatic and humorous possibilities in the process. Take for example the drawing 'Contemplating a Metaphor'. It is as if the entire projected biological ancestry of man explodes into the consciousness of one individual at once. Like God falling into him. The eyes are comically bewildered, helplessly, mutely pleading, exahausted, while the face is disintegrating & becoming masklike. We can appreciate the sinister side to this; indeed, we seem to be specially attuned to it. What deserves as much attention is the sly humour of the drawing — of the kind that hugs itself in silent laughter as you stumble about wearing your distorting lens, attaching new and crazy meanings to familiar things. The implication in the title is that contemplation itself may bear strange fruit, and the consequent uncertainty as to the precise location of the metaphor — in there or out there — adds a further range of subtleties to the work.

III

"What makes monsters is the irreconcilability of the forces which produce them & this this ordains that every monster should also be a cripple." Harold Rosenberg.

Seen in three dimensions, that is, as slides, the drawings are startling. The illusion of depth gives them extra conviction, as If they are indeed shorts from a movie. The film could only be the endless metamorphoses of men & beasts, a recurring dream of possibilities, a series of life-dramas played out to the the rules of a naughty god, always ready to risk his hand in the hope of one more new combination. It is hardly fantastic, it is perhaps even a little trite, to suggest that Franken's intention in delivering these shots is to make us look again, to persuade us to encorporate or allow for the distortions in out ordinary vision..

IV

"Any kind of violence — any form of vehement activity — involves that bigger energy the elemental power circuit of the Universe." Ted Hughes.

It is obvious enough that Franken's work is remote both from our ordinary reality & from the formal concerns of most contemporary art. I have tried to indicate above some tentative directions where connections between the world of drawings and this one might be made. As to the second point, it is enough to say, if these directions can be followed productively, the isolation from contenporary fashion is irrelevant. If it is true today that without the proper pedigree in art-historical terms, a work is not a work of art, we will have to do without works of art. It would seem that Franken's formal concerns do not extend much beyond the development of his drawing technique so that it remains adequate to the demands of his vision. Which is, finally, religious, in that it concentrates on the revelation of what he calls the 'Ultra Force'. What value is given this final formulation of hit demonic creative power depends on individual viewers viewers.

V

"The great gods are blind or pretend to be Finding I am among men I open my eyes and they shake. " W.S.Merwin.

The drawings are riddles to which we are at liberty to propose answers. With no design or decorative function, without any concern for beauty, they consist of images isolated in pure white fields of paper. They seem to have arrived out of the back of empty space, complete, provocative and mysterious. As riddles they tease and stretch the mind, and as true riddles should, they elude the constrictions our answers would put upon them. They stand as rare acknowledgements of larger powers, too often ignored.

(1)Nadeau: History of Surrealism.
(2)Introduction to the Penguin Modern European Poets: Vasco Popa.