Off-Board Excelsior: The thread where you excerpt interesting things you've read about music

Lester Bangs on Sham 69: "They didn't suss that English football chants wouldn't level American concert halls! This band is that stupid!"

And F Kogan, in his "Disco Tex" essay, going from mambo to the Velvets in five easy steps:

"A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall" and "The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll" are Bob Dylan’s original attempts to resemble the mambo. In Cuba in the ’30s, when everyone was adding horn parts, Arsenio Rodriguez (I’m told) took the call-and-response section at the end of the son and scored the horns in the rhythms of Yuka drum parts, increased the polyrhythms. (Yuka is a Bantu musical form that survived in Cuba, I think. I don’t know what I’m talking about; I took a course once.) Arcano and Cachao did something similarly polyrhythmic to the call-and-response section at the end of the danzon. The call-and-response section tended to grow and grow at the expense of the other sections. James Brown did something similar in the early ’60s, took a song ("I Lost Someone," "Prisoner Of Love") and threw a church-derived call-and-response vamp into it; the call and response grew and grew on his records and dominated his live show; finally (on some stuff) he abandoned the "song" form altogether and just did the vamp, and put in new polyrhythms (derived from Caribbean rhythms but jammed tight between the measure bars) to form his characteristically tense North American funk. And Dylan did something analogous (though without the focus on polyrhythm, so it really doesn’t have much to do with mambo or funk, does it?): he had all these words he wanted to put in, so to get them in he’d take a sung line and just vamp on it, adding line upon line of words, rather than getting on with the song. (And it gets real tense, you’re ready to scream while you’re waiting for the tune to resolve.) He’d also use vocal as drone, rhyme as drone, word-repetition as drone, so you had a blues drone stuck in the middle of a folk song...

Finally he sold out and went electric and on "Subterranean Homesick Blues" he got rid of song altogether and just did the vamp (and the drone and the repetition).

Yardbirds did sort of the same thing at the same time with those rave-up drones (beat-your-head-into-the-wall things) that tended to take over their songs – then some garagers took the rave-up drone and added the Dylan vocal drone, and you get the Velvets.