BRAM TCHAIKOVSKY’S 1980 OVERTURE

BRAM TCHAIKOVSKY’S 1980 OVERTURE

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Billy Altman

When you go to a concert and both bands on the bill are as hot as is humanly possible and the most exciting thing that happens all night is a re-creation of Earth Versus the Flying Saucers staged during intermission by the audience with the aid of a bunch of frisbees, and the best feeling you get personally about the whole affair occurs when the Nassau Colisseum scoreboard flashes the news that the first game of the World Series has been rained out (dedication to one’s work often pays off in the strangest ways)...well, it’s beginning to become apparent that the days of “stadium rock” are indeed numbered, that what is keeping this form of entertainment (and I use the word loosely) still breathing is an almost nostalgic longing by the young audience that still populates these shows for the big event. I guess Kiss had the right idea awhile back when they put up all those overhead screens so you could watch the monitors and see Gino whiplashing the air with his tongue a coupla times larger than if you just looked at the stage. I mean, these three girls behind me at the show in question, which starred the Cars and Bram Tchaikovsky, spent more time yelling at each other to pass the binoculars than they did listening to the music being played, and everyone in my section (laughingly referred to as the loge—stratosphere is more like it) was much too preoccupied with attempting to get everyone in the next section down to get back into their seats so they could see something. So as far as “big” acts go, you can put me down right now in favor of videodisks, so anyone who cares to will be able to count how many times Ric OcaSek chews his gum during “Let the Good Times Roll”. (Admit it, you first-in-liners, half the fun of sitting up close, besides getting off on the three day eardrum ring, is the knowledge that most of the clowns back there paid almost as much money for their tickets as you did and they can’t see a blasted thing and you can. Admit it.)

One thing I hated about the late 60's... that musical snobbery.

So it’s not too hard to figure out why clubs have become necessary again and why most folks who have re-gained that “ants in my pants and I gotta dance” feeling that used to go part and parcel with being a card carrying rock ’n’ roller are filling up those clubs. Pay less, see more, get drunk without missing a beat, cruise, jitterbug, use a chair when and if you’re too pooped to pop. Which is pretty much the way Bram Tchaikdvsky sees live rock ’n’ roll functioning, I found out, during an interview over bacon and eggs at the counter of the Howard Johnson’s coffee shop in' midtown Manhattan (no booth for this Northern England working class bloke).

“A hall is okay if the crowd isn’t made to sit down,” says Bram. “We’ve done five gigs with the Cars so far and on three of ’em the people could stand around if they wanted to and those went really well. When they’re sat down though, it’s pretty difficult to get anything going. I tell you, if I was going to a show at a big place, I’d get rid of the chairs the minute the band came on, just start flingin’ ’em about until there was just matchwood left. Then they’d get the hint.

“The thing that’s making this tour alright is the fact that the Cars are doing five nights on and then three or four nights off, and when they’ve got nights off, we’re doing all the clubs, which helps keep it sane for us. I really don’t understand the whole mentality of these giant places over here. I asked the Cars’ tour manager why, instead of playing these 15,000 seat halls, why not do four or five nights at a 3,000 seat place. He just shrugged.”

Bram Tchaikovsky certainly knows the club scene; he’s been working in them since he was a young Mod back in the mid-60’s right through the English pub scene in the early 70’s, and he is part of that graduating class which includes the likes of Nick Lowe and Graham Parker. This class has seen it all through dim lights and bar fights, and it’s a class of veteran rockers who wouldn’t particularly feel averse to having a record they made sell pretty well, but who get that real rock ’n’ roll glow working out in front of an audience that they can see and feel. Tchaikovsky uses the word “madness” a lot when he speaks, and that word comes to represent that gut feeling that happens when things are smoking, that kind of forgetting everything about yourself sensation when you’re just letting loose through the strength of strings and good vocal harmonies. Which is what Bram Tchaikovsky’s music is all about.

We pick up the Bram Tchaikovsky story near the end of his stint in the underrated Motors. “I told the rest of the Motors that I wanted to leave while we were making the second album. We had about six months of work left and I said that I’d stay through that period but that I’d be getting a little band together while the record was being finished. I had been in a band called Heroes a few years back with Micky Broadbent and Keith Line and I went to see Mick first. Mick had always wanted to stand in the back, and I told him that I wanted to play with him TURN TO PAGE 59 again but that he’d have to do as much as me onstage if we were gonna do it. Sind, stand out front, write songs. He agreed, and when Keith couldn’t make it, we got Keith Boyce from the Heavy Metal Kids.

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“W^ did a few gigs and then, in August of ’78, I finished with the Motors. We were playing tiny clubs and Andrew Lauder from Radar records came to see us, at absolutely the worst gig we ever did. I was fucking embarrassed, I thought, ‘Well, we’ve blown this one completely.’ But Andrew came backstage and said he wanted to sign us and I thought this fucker must be mad, so he’s alright. We lined up a tour of Scandinavia and Boyce got sick, so Keith did the tour on basically one day’s notice. Then we got back and, with Boyce, we djd our album. Three weeks, not working very hard at all. After that a few things happened. 1 found Dennis,Forbes and he joined the band, and then, after another tour, it becarrie obvious to us that Boyce wasn’t headed in the same direction as the rest of us, so he left and Keith re-joined. That’s about it for the history of the band, except that Garv [fellow Motor-man Nick Garvey] played some rhythm guitar on the album and playjed some gigs with us. Until Virgin found out, that is.”

I told Bram that I had heard he Was deeply affected by the Who film, Quadrophenia. “Yeah,’’ he said, shaking his head, “we all went to see it and it upset all of us, ’cause we were all Mods. It was Strange to watch it, ’cause that’s exactly what it was like. The film was frighteningly accurate. We never went to Brighton, we were from the North of England, Which is even more working class than the South, and the violence around where we were was !worse once it got startedWe used to get a lot of stabbings, fingers chopped off; tf you went to a fight, you went with motorcycle chains,, axes and hammers. It was like West Side Story, real gang warfare. I played in a Mod band when I was sixteen and I got to see the whole thing. I’ve seen 400 people just go mad and smash a place to pieces. All you could do was pick up what of your equipment you could carry and run as fast as you could.

“Mablethorpe, where I’m from, is a real out of the way place and we had a truce with our local greasers. Like, you’d go to the discotheque and one side of the room was theirs and you did not go into it and one side was ours and they didn’t cross into it. Occasionally we’d get together and, if we were looking, we’d get the people from other cities and we’d pile on and beat all the greasers up and you knew that a few weeks later all the Nottingham Hell’s Angels were gonna show up and beat all of us up. Everybody learned to run extremely fast in those days.

“I definitely congratulate the Who on that movie. Those parties...Everybody goin’ to someone’s house and wrecking the place. That scene when they were all in that room and everybody was dancing and takin’ pills with the lights out and they were playing ‘My Generation’ and they get to the line, ^Why don’t you all f. .f. .FUCK OFF!’ That’s exactly how it was. Good pure madness. One night we were completely out of it on pills and beer and we had nine people on one motor scooter, just to see if it could be done.”

That night, Bram Tchaikovsky and his band played a very late, one-set show at Hurrah on the upper West Side, and it was like night and day compared to the previous evening in the cavernous Nassau Colisseum. Things were good and loose and the band was clearly getting off on the, energy being generated by the crowd and the band working up a sweat together. The rough edges of the band’s music cut nicely against Tchaikovsky and Broadbent’s Everly Brothers-styled harmonies and, if you’re familiar at all with their one album so far,, Strange Man, Changed Man, you know that what sets this group apart from most other British bands who keep crawling out 'of the woodwork these days is that the focus is on melodic, beautifully structured songs, performed adeptly and toughly. “Girl of My Dreams,” “Sara Smiles/’ “Nobody Knows,” just about every song they play bristles with a Churning Undercurrent centered around the band’s use of low vocal harmonies, something you don’t hear much of now unless you’re still reaching into the stacks for your Byrds, Searchers and Beau Brummels records. Evert the re-working of the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer,” which kind of sounds out of place on the album, works live, a bit of bar set fun, to be goofed around to and not scrutinized and cubby-holed.

“People ask me why we do that song,” Bram said earlier. “I think it’s a great song. You know, one thing I hated about the lafe 60’s and early 70’s was that musical snobbery—that some bands were hip and others just had no chance no matter what kind of songs they did . Like in England, the Foundations^, or Amen Corner; they did great stuff but no one ever wanted to admit it. I’m glad that people like me, who were really disillusioned for awhile, people like Joe Jackson and Graham Parker and Nick Lowe, are out and about again and being heard. We’re all coming from the same place.” ®