Blurt is no squirt
By Richard Meltzer ( The Village Voice )
I was watching John Waters's Mondo Trasho the other day when it hit me for the first time in years how great the Del Vikings' "Come Go with Me" really really is.
Various fragments got played & replayed but mostly that tumultuous sax break which every time I heard it fucking transfixed
me with the CONCRETE MYSTERY of all sorts of intangibles that're still every bit as intangible as they were in the spring of '57. Heck, it's gotta be the greatest sax tune-from at least a dozen different angles- in the history of rock-roll music.
SECOND GREATEST-from a good 3/4 as many - is the original import version of "My Mother Was a Friend of an Enemy of the People." by Blurt, on the Test Pressings label, spring of 1980. Shit, "Mother" is a goddam catalogue of TOPICAL AWESOME SUBSTANCE. The scattergun whiteboy dementia of Gary
U.S. Bonds 61 speeded up to REAL TIME and spit thru a reed laced with cyanide.
Modern noise meets "Congo Blues" in a bowling alley. Albert Ayler sings with spirits brain-damaged on sterno with eternity yet ahead. Capt. Beefheart without the requisite cartoon belly-laugh to assure everybody that certain forbidden neuroses aren't so grave or terminal as all that. A “sonic accident" of sufficient scale to make “Land of 1000 Dances" seem like the Boston Pops go digital ... etc.
Cutesy-pie references aside. what you've got here is a trio of Great Whites swimming & gurgling in MYSTERY SO DEEP there ain't no bottom-lotta strange things down there and it'd be a lost cause tryin' to calculate what it ultimately (or even approximately) reduces to in terms of I dunno what. Geez, if I could talk about stuff like that without hokey metaphors to glitz up the landscape I'd be laughing at clouds or writing meaningful sitcoms that shake the planet ...
in the meantime forced articulation is nowhere (and when was the last time you heard a jaded mr. articulate like me wax on that kinda level?). I'd hafta guess Blurt will probably never again pull off anything as TOTALLY THERE they've as the cut in question. Still, gotta be the "most important" post-punk combo (worldwide) still playing anything even resembling R&R.
They've got a decent new single ("The Fish Needs a Bike," on Armageddon), a not-Half-bad live LP (Blurt in Berlin, ditto) and a 12-inch side on a two-disc sampler ( A Factory Quartet, on Factory) which does more than any previous vinyl offering to strip bare the embarrassing sham of, ugh, Fusion Music, delivering a Jazz-Rock so slitheringly powerful-and yet so unreliant on even convention one of Fusion--that you gotta wonder why (outside of people obviously not knowing what to DO ANYMORE) the decision to clumsily, stickily fuse ever had any currency at all.
On “Puppeteer" for instance, sax-boy/vocalist/lyricist Ted Milton starts out like a coy Jackie McLean on some old Mingus LP and suddenly explodes into uncharted rock-roll ??? like there's nowhere else to go. On "Dyslexia" you got a rock rhythm section generating tension/release at least the equal of the guys on Julius Hemphill's "Dogon A.D."and then Ted gets ferocious and DOES THE SWIM (crossing the English Channel while Jules is still treading H20).
The points) being: 1. Fusion's biggest flub was making it a question of form rather than parallel (structural & emotional) proclivity. Run things parallel where they run that way and just fucking blow.