I listened a couple of times this morning to Rock Bottom, a solo album by Robert Wyatt. I spent years in my teens muddling around with the art rock musicians who had been active 10 years before, including the stellar line-up on the Wyatt record. I had a copy of the New Rock Record, essentially a print-out of a vast database of session musician and headliner work that allowed you to look up any musician and see all the records they had appeared on, and I went through it virtuoso by virtuoso. I particularly liked Steve Hunter, a guitarist whom I thought lost even to Google, but in fact who has a new record out!
All of that aside. What I'm trying to say (and doing rather more circuitously, even, than usual) is that there is a whole world of music in the small art-rock genre down there in the hole with this Wyatt record. I could listen to the genre frequently enough so that some of the playing in the tracks actually made me laugh, as I could perceive the wit in the playing (not in the lyrics, which I found generally to be heavy and unremarkable -- I referred to the spoken word segments as "a-------e sequences" -- but then, as I say, I was younger). That was heady stuff, but lonely in some ways, for a 17-year-old. It was a great way to spend the money I made at Hardee's, and selling ice cream.
(photo via Cromacom on flickr)
Listening to Rock Bottom took me back with much more age and intelligence than I had the first time, and so I didn't tap my foot impatiently, hoping for a hook. Instead, I tended this time to just sit and listen. I had to acknowledge that I don't have the patience for this work, any more, if I ever did. Or, at least, I don't think I do -- but on the other hand, I still love things like the Mars Volta and Emerson Lake and Palmer.
What I realize is that there was a time when rock and roll had an artistic side it now lacks, when it was possible just to be an artist and make artful, artistic rock. Not just Art Rock, mind you, but rock for the sake of its existence as a work of art. Did it sell? Well, Wyatt's record did, 1000 recordings says, and I don't doubt it. But this was 1974, and certainly it doesn't compare in memory to other work we heard from that year -- oh, say, Rock and Roll Animal, the Lou Reed live record on which Hunter worked. Such art music had to be recorded, of course, and the record companies weren't what you'd think of as non-profits, but they could sink a lot of art work in an ocean of profit and diligent A&R work and speculation. And you never knew when you'd find a knew Pink Floyd, even if -- and about this they could be patient, back then -- it took five or six records to have a major hit.
Now, Rock Bottom sounds lush and truly experimental, instead of just irritating, which is how I felt about Soft Machine stuff when I was so much younger. But I don't know: I guess I'm a pop music guy. As I said earlier, sometimes I Want Candy. (Maybe more often than I want to admit.)