Politely
hyperactive jazz-funk to conceal the smoothest of lounges, with the
guitarist and drummer in particular knowing what they're doing. That's
coming from one direction. Feom the other comes a bass pulse which
resembles the breathing of a miked-up salamander. Curiously rootless, it
indicates another path for dance music in which the bass acts as the
song's cynosure, rather than its foundation.
The
vocal is authoratitively breathy, resigned yet committed. If it didn't
remind you so much of Ian Anderson - who is a Scot - the way in which
the voice here wraps its flexors around the Estuary English hard "a"
leaping out of the word "masked" in the choruses, you'd think of it as
irrefutably English, eveen though its subject matter is American,
created and originally broadcast in Detroit (so it is one stop away from
being Canadian, another in laying the path for May, Atkins and
Saunderson to tread the following decade).
But
it's the hook which gets you. Whatever the hell he's chanting, like a
Kingsley Amis variant on the introduction to "Tutti Frutti," it evades
proper meaning sufficiently to echo with mindful mindlessness across
school playgrounds. You don't really listen to the words beyond the dim
awareness that this is a shaggy dog story about Tonto and kemosabe,
complete with deliberate corn ("back to front-o").
Because it's a hook you know from The Kenny Everett Video Show, which you watch every Monday early evening at 6:45 pm and which is infinitely hipper than the Opportunity Knocks which preceded it. Top Of The Pops
was a craggy pastel tent compared with Everett, and apart from the
humour (more Jack Jackson than Milligan) it quietly demonstrated an
astute pop-reading mind. Cerrone's "Supernature" was the theme tune, and
the "Lone Ranger" hook was one intermittent heck of a leitmotif.
"Ride into tomorrow today" suggested forgetting The Seventies and
hurtling ourselves away from them as fast and eagerly as possible.
I
remembered the song from being played briefly on daytime radio, and
less briefly on Luxembourg, back in 1976. Back then it sounded as
futuristic as, or more obligingly and Englishly so than, whatever
Moroder was doing. The songwriter, singer, keyboard player and producer
was Rupert Hine from Wimbledon, future producer of The Fixx.
It
wasn't on mainstream radio for long, though; most producers saw through
what Tonto's peace pipe could make people do, and there was that
derogatory slang word for gay that seemed cruel and pointless even then,
even though Hine was clearly performing the song from the perspective
of its chief narrator, who, twist in the tale approaching, realises the
Ranger is gay and...doesn't mind.
The
questions the song raises, and the fact that it was picked up and
promoted by a fairly openly gay disc jockey, suggest a more complex
beast than the one routinely excluded from today's oldies radio. I don't
think anyone at my school disco picked up its lyric at all, and these
were the same peers making messy fools of themselves attempting to
reproduce the intrinsically naff yet deceptively complex dance routines
of the band Racey. It was just a great, imaginative liminal pop dancer.
You
could never get away with a song like that in the 21st century. But
then it wasn't created in the 21st century, and I think we have to get
away with the notion of the whole of history being an imperfect path
leading us to an allegedly perfect present. Oldies shows on the radio
based around the charts - or indeed our received reaction to anything we
perceive as dwelling in and for the past - grant us only that version
of the past considered most convenient or comfortable for us. I suspect
that the reason somebody like Bowie gets such singeingly heavy ladles of
hagiography methodically thrust upon him is that he doesn't really
represent glam, but we cannot mention the central figure in UK glampop -
for reasons that are entirely the fault of said central figure - hence
burden the likes of Bowie and Roxy Music with laurels which exceed their
actual reach in the period.
We
only seem to want the kind of airbrushed history that is acceptable to
us, that nods at us, licks our faces and agrees with us. But if you
persist in doing that you end up with a sorely atrophied and smudged
photocopy of actuality. Focus your eyes on the approved jewels and try
to sweep away the dirt without really looking at it. If nothing else,
you lose a lot of fun, and are left with a solemn, stuffed New England classroom
lecture. It is as if your history, your life as you have known and lived
it, your life as your gut recognises it, is rendered into affable
nothingness.
It
also makes life as a fan of pop music so awkward and complicated that
it might drive you to exchange it for a less hassle-ridden pastime, such
as birdwatching. You can't fully understand "American Pie" if you don't
know, or aren't exposed to, "Rock And Roll (Part 2)" - as rock dies, it
is born again, and in the same year. Given the documented fact,
however, that both Messrs McLean and Gadd are convicted offenders
against women, you keep whittling the essence of what admittedly may be
an essentially rancid thing - I don't know, that argument is for another
book - eventually leaves you with nothing except the unlovably worthy.
Even then, where do you go? "Well, she was just seventeen, if you know
what I mean" go the first and second lines of the first song on the
first Beatles album; throw those fellows out as well?
What
I'm awkwardly trying to state here is that you can't live history as
though it were the cloisters of a monastery, with all the mess scrubbed
out. Yes, most pop musicians have done and said impossibly horrible
things; name me one who hasn't. So you decide to stick to jazz then
remember the stories about Miles and Mingus. Awareness of the
vaudevillian primitivism at the heart of "The Lone Ranger," including some deeply ill-advised reactions of other band members in the video, as well as David Toop's
recent caution that "[in] so much antique comedy...particularly that which depended for its amusement on making sport with those who lack power or are simply different, the laughs have evaporated into a silence of bewilderment: how was this ever [considered] funny?" doesn't
prevent me listening to and enjoying Pansy Division, or Phranc, or
Shockheaded Peters, or you can list the rest. In my spare time I like to
listen to pop records that were hits when I was still at school, to
help recall what kind of boy I was and the sort of life I led or was
compelled to lead. It isn't just pop records, either - I loved and still
love records by the Louis Moholo-Moholo Octet, Anthony Braxton, Keith
Tippett's Ark, the Art Ensemble of Chicago. They remind me of where I
came from. It was my world and I revel in it, or at least wink at it,
without an element of shame or hypocrisy. If our worlds are to contain
multitudes, we must therefore recognise that they are, by definition,
awash with ridiculous contradictions. History is not our butler.
![John Cale – Bicycle – Vinyl (12"), 2003 [r252464] | Discogs](https://i.discogs.com/cdtPnOxcIYw_oyJe-p9vXVpjk6qEaA9MNbZQwgAc_w0/rs:fit/g:sm/q:40/h:300/w:300/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTI1MjQ2/NC0xNzI5MTY4NzUz/LTI0NTEuanBlZw.jpeg)
