MEET YOUR GHOST
Music brainiac Brian Turner reveals a rare and fantastic record from his secret stash— hey, quit drooling on the magazine!
Jimi Hendrix was a ham? Well, okay, there’s an opener for my first piece here.
When CREEM excavated me to come up with something for this first issue, all I could really think of was the concept of iconic figures who inhabited the world of rock journals past; what’s been said, what’s been oversaid (even here), what’s mutated out of the cesspool of a genre that still enables Clapton to slither the earth. Truth is, a lot, actually. Whether “guitar rock” means anything to you or you prefer to put on VR goggles and experience a pink immersion in the sights and sounds of some formless deconstructed electronic ooze, the fact remains that the old blues-based 4/4 has been nursed into many innovative forms, in particular with a dose of the old lysergic. Tony McPhee, Wayne Rogers, Helios Creed—all clobber me still every time I play ’em, and if anyone deserves a museum for guitar lifespan extension it’s Bill Orcutt. I do like Hendrix, in his raw state most: Woodstock’s searing a.m. cosmos rattle, well-documented on YouTube; the destroying “Machine Gun” from 1970’s Isle of Wight Festival. But the studio shaping on record never did much for me, nor did his reclaiming Dylan, Beatles, “God Save the Queen,” or “The Star-Spangled Banner” flashed up live. I get it, but I’m more drawn to the free-form freak-outs and wanna hear the real whacked shit and recording-level mismanagement minus jewelry rattle and the overtly commercial deification that followed me in giant murals every time I walked up the Haight in my year living in S.F. I know, I know, separate the music from the myth...but I like a good myth, too.
