DAVE EDMUNDS & ROCKPILE: TROUBLE BOYS DESTROY U.S.

DAVE EDMUNDS & ROCKPILE: TROUBLE BOYS DESTROY U.S.

A Grateful World Rejoices

by

Rob Patterson

In the beginning, there was guitar, bass, and drums. The Lord plugged them in and behold! . . . The heavens were filled with the thunder of percussion and the howling snap of strings. It was a joyful noise that shook the world by its heels. The Lord heard the noise, and He knew it was good. He called it rock.

1975: the 25th year of the age of rock, and by any standards a musically turbulent and confusing year, one that reeks of future significance. And in that year, amidst punk, pop, disco, funk, fusion, fossilized country-rock, heavy metal still screeching and kicking its way to the grave; Devo, revo and whatever else cropped up on stage or vinyl clutching a guitar, Dave Edmunds was a modest man whose simple accomplishment might once again shake, rattle and roll the world. Dave Edmunds and Rockpile played rock 'n' roll.

Rockpile. Never has a band sported a rpore fitting name. With iust four pieces (Edmunds on guitar, Billy Bremner on second guitar, Terry Williams playing crisp, deadly economical drums and Nick Lowe on booming bass that gives enough in energy and joy to overcome his abandonment of precision), Rockpile furiously pump out sets which float along on magnificently crunching chords and magically fired lead lines. True believers say there is no better rock 'n' roll band playing today. If Nick Lowe is the Jesus of Cool, Dave Edmunds is the Messiah of Rock 'n' Roll.

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"Amazing, isn't it? Three guitars and drums . . ."

Dave Edmunds spoke the words softly while sitting in his New York hotel room, a suite poised between downtrodden and uptown; a stop on the way to the top or a respite on the slide to obscurity. His tone belied a wonderment at his own achievement—so little but so much.

"The Shadows ... the Beatles ... all the biggies ... three guitars and drums." He almost whispered the words with reverence. "Where's it going to end? How far can you take it?

"It's all I've got—rock 'n' roll music. I don't want to go back to being a car mechanic. It's no philosophy, it's just all we can do. Terry plays drums—that's all he can do.

"I know what Nick's talking about when he says he wants to take the money and run if we hit big . . . but I know if that happened he'd have to carry on, because there's nothing else to do. He can't even repair cars . . ."

It sounded so simple when Edmunds described why he plays rock 'n' roll, hardly like a passion or crusade, but more like an accident of fate, a flaw in the human condition he must accept. An attitude not at all indicative of the miracles he performs.

Tracks On Wax 4 is filled with miracles and is the first true Rockpile album. Recorded by the band in a mere two weeks, it is the vinyl fruition of the Lowe/Edmunds pact to rock 1 together. Within the tiny grooves of the

record, Edmunds has compressed the last 25 years of rock into a single, totally un-self-conscious statement. Verve, passion, dynamic and truly talented playing power material as straight ahead as a stock Corvette . . . material that so successfully welds 1953 and 1978 together that I would defy any first time listener to pick the oldies

from the recently written goldies. And if Rockpile is a big nostalgia trip, at least it's an original approach.

"I don't want to become a Robert Gordon, you know . . . doing all oldies and covers," said Edmunds. "Which is not to knock Robert Gordon, because I saw him the other night and he was fantastic. I don't want to be that... so it's nice that there's new songs."

"We can't add another instrument... I play too loud so there's Just no room."

But still with a link to the past.

"Sure," he said. " Trouble Boys'— Eddie Cochran. 'Deborah'—Buddy Holly . . . But they're still new songs! They won't knock it anymore . . . not that I used to get knocked before."

In fact, few took the time to knock Edmunds's obsession with basic rock 'n' roll, and even fewer took the time to understand it.

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It seems strange that a 35-year-old Welsh guitarist with such talent should only now be rising from obscurity to cult hero status in the U.S.A., especially one who lives and breathes the essence of American rock 'n' roll.

Today, a listen to his late 60's work with Love Sculpture sounds refreshingly on par with the heroes who emerged while Edmunds submerged, probably due to his proclivity even then for

fucking with the past and the future simultaneously. His searing version of "Sabre Dance" is a masterpiece of psychedelic classicism—firmly contemporary and rooted in the past; alas, radically ahead of its time.

After the demise of Love Sculpture, Edmunds became the hermit of Rockfield Studios, taking literally years to demystify the secrets of the rock V roll ancients, trying like the devil to remake the magical sounds that brought life to rock 'n' roll.

Subtle As A Flying Mallet remains the prime example of Edmunds the student, cramming his final exam in rock 'n' roll with every brick he could recreate in the famous Phil Spector wall of sound. But, it was actually on Rockpile where Edmunds began to pull the past into the future, and the three keynote songs of that LP—"Down, Down, Down," "I Hear You Knockin' " and Chuck Berry's "The Promised Land"—are still part of every Rockpile set.

"The Promised Land" was probably his catharsis. On that cut, he achieved the same cruddy, raw sound as the original with equal black-ass funky energy—so close to Berry's version you could barely tell the difference. Stringy guitar, minimal traps, thumping string bass and a miles away sound—all the elements were there.

Production work for Foghat, Brinsley Schwartz and Ducks Deluxe brought Edmunds back into the stream of musical life, and the effects of exBrinsleyite Nick Lowe are immediately .evident on Get It, an album with a curiously reverent mix of Elvis, Hank Williams, and even Rodgers and Hart covers, wide-screen Spector production, and an emerging new breed of rock 'n' roll song—composed separately and together by Edmunds and Lowe. It was old, it was new, and they called it rock.

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Though Edmunds may deny the sheer power of his vision, those who come in contact with Rockpile can't help but be touched in some way. On their first American tour a few years back opening for Bad Company and promoting Get It, they were dropped before the tour was completed.

Edmunds prefers not to comment on that whole scene, but Nick Lowe explained what was behind the "popular rumor" that Rockpile blew Bad Co. offstage on their own tour.

"There are three reasons why we got slung off the tour," said Nick. "The one that they gave us was that they weren't selling out. They were doing 15,000 and 20,000 seat halls, and out of 20,000 they might get 18,000, whereas the last tour they were turning them away at the doors.

"So there were 2000 spare seats you couldn't even notice in places that big, and they wanted someone who could put some bums in some seats of their own. We certainly weren't capable of that since their audience is essentially 14-year-old girls who weren't around when Dave had 'I Hear You Knockin' ' in the charts.

"Secondly, we were having a lot more fun onstage than they were. I wouldn't dream of saying that we were blowing them off, but we went down real well every night. But they're one of the five biggest groups in the world," to which Nick quickly added, "if you like that sort of thing.

"And thirdly, the punk thing was really big in England at the time and because I had something to do with the Damned, they thought that I was the ringleader of some sort of conspiracy to overthrow them. So I thought, ''Well, this is like a rhino crushing a grape . . .'

"If they're scared of me with all their huge organization, I thought fantastic! Paranoia runs deep if the big boys are shitting bricks.

"They're terrified of anything that's written about them in the papers. And they were getting a slagging in the papers, who were either ignoring Rockpile or saying that we were better than them.

"We were having a great time, so it was time for us to go!"

Rockpile's next assault on the States came on what Edmunds called "the perfect bill" opening for Elvis Costello, this time under the banner of Nick Lowe and Rockpile. But curiously enough, the set was filled with material from Edmunds' albums—"JuJu Man," "Down, Down, Down," "I Hear You Knockin'," "I Knew The Bride," "Here Comes The Weekend," "ThePromised Land," and at headlining club dates, Billy Bremner singing "Trouble Boys".

The shock of hearing the band was immediate. Any precious or cute edges Lowe had on album were bashed out into tough rock 'n' roll with Edmunds, Bremner and Williams behind him— not just a wall of sound, but a virtual mountain avalanche, rolling mightily and thunderously into the hall. Chords a mile wide and lead breaks that glistened with inspiration. The experience of age coupled with the abandon of youth; 25 years of rock 'n' roll packed into one hell of a band. Rockpile were received like heroes.

But on their most recent tour—fronting for Van Morrison—they found themselves facing audiences truly oblivious to their magic.

"I can't understand it . . ." mused Edmunds. "It's like every audience is sitting on their hands. We can't gqt but a peep out of them."

But, fired by two furious nights at New York's Bottom Line, the band again hit New York a few days later for the acid test at the Palladium.

Opening the late show, Rockpile pulled the faithful out of their seats, feverishly stoking their fans with pure rock W roll. It was the sixth set I'd seen in less than a year, the third set in but a week, and still each moment was stuffed with surprise and excitement.

The band played a stupendous set, even by the rigorous standards they set for themselves. Even when Billy Bremner fluffed a lead and went on for a number of bars in a dreadfully wrong key, the band took the goof in stride and laughed it off without a dent in their energy. Nick was grooving about stage heavily, winding up the audience with flips of his wrist and jutting out a hearty "thumbs-up" to the fans with a grin. The band left the stage to a genuine clamor for an encore, one of the very few that they would ever get on this tour. The lights immediately came up and cheated the still shouting fans and Rockpile out of their deserved encore.

Later that night, halfway through his set, Van Morrison dropped his microphone after a number of erratic gestures. With a glazed, almost scared look in his eye, he looked at the audience. Weaving like a breeze was jostling his balance, he stalked offstage and the concert was ended early. Said cause: a breakdown. Or perhaps another case of Rockpile paranoia.

Rock 'n' roll is one of our truly great American inventions, but it seems that it takes the English to keep reminding us 6f that fact. In the early 60's, rock 'n' roll was in danger of suffocating under a giant marshmallow of refined, bleached, sugary pop. Elvis had been calmed by the Army, Chuck Berry was sliding onto the long road down and Buddy Holly was dead. The American Pie was a pile of whipped cream, with stars like Bobby Vinton, Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. They didn't call it rock.

But suddenly a new sound broke open from England. Raw, gritty, basic rock 'n' roll bands who believed that more than two guitars was overkill and strings were something you put on your guitar, not on your record. Bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Kinks . . . rock 'n' roll bands.

Bands with two or three guitars and drums. No more. But enough music to move a whole generation or two. Rock 'n' roll music, pure and simple.

Dave Edmunds is old enough to be a contemporary of the stars that carved out the music of the 60's, and might well be the last wave of that particular British movement which took rock 'n' roll and gave it a spiritual rebirth.

"You know," admitted Edmunds, "I can't really say why I like rock 'n' roll so much . . . why all that stuff that came from America was so important.

"Everyone in my age group became fascinated with the stuff back in the 50's. I was only 13 when it all started, you know, the early American rock scene. But it gripped me, got ahold of me, and I've been fascinated with it ever since.

"Good thing too . . " he reflected. "It's the whole roots of pop music."

Roots music for rock people? The last of the British Invasion? A scheme whereby two solo artists save money on a band by sharing it? Rockpile are not easy to define, and Edmunds isn't about to analyze it himself .'

But whatever Rockpile may be— super nostalgia trip, a rock consciousness raising squad, or the old farts' answer to the Sex Pistols—the hope of their continuation as a unit is one of the great promises of 1978. For, whichever way the musical trends blow, we'll always have one place to turn for the real thing—straight-ahead, flat-out rock 'n' roll, free of frills and fired with energy.

"Face it," said Edmunds, "we really couldn't do anything different. . . We can't add another instrument," he said, cracking a smile, " ... I play too loud so there's just no room."