Our kudos-garnering series Th' Kurse O' The Kaftan ("quite the best-written and most incisive rock writing on the internet" - Roberta Christgau, Dean Of Music, Lancaster Amish University. "I ain't read it but I is gonna turn it into an novel" - Stephen King) has been dormant a while, but returns in full paisley splendor with this timely and provocative piece on one of New Jersey's lesser-known bands. Mainly because they wus from San Francisco, but also because they really weren't all that great. Horn sections were a Bay Area thing, and a little goes a long way. Or stops right there, preferably. The Sons weren't Blood Sweat & Tears, whose first album is a joy forever. They weren't even Chicago. Or from Chicago.
This post made fungible thru' th' auspices of Maxie's Wax Shack "Bikini Lines While U Wait! Free For Ladies!"
Saayy, fellows! Does horn rock give you the horn? Leave us examine this conundrum an' arrive at a homogenous explication!
ReplyDeleteAKA "brass rock." I like a good Stax-Volt sound but I'm a guitar-guy, first n' foremost. I'm in the middle of digitizing a Chicago (the band) show from the Park West (in Chicago, the city) and it's a bit of a struggle.
ReplyDeleteThe Sons of Champlin were from Marin, and I put the East Bay grease sound of Tower of Power and Cold Blood up against the Sons, well, Marin comes in second. Or third. Am I counting counties, or bands?
Recently I've been expanding my horizons as a buddy of mine is a jazz trumpet player, and we've been looking into Lee Morgan and Miles Davis. It's easier for him than me, because anything longer than about 3 minutes makes me want to edit it down to a single. Yeah, I know, that's just plain wrong.
A problem with horn rock combos is the vocals - they never seem to get a subtle, laid-back singer. Always with the grunting, somebody asking us if we feel all right. He can't hear us! What we say? Do we feel all right? DO WE FEEEEL ALLLLL RIIIIIIGHT? Because, uh, let's take it down a notch here, Down to - the back beat - mmm - that's good - takin' it back, where it started, let's hear that bass a little, alllllllllll right ... I said - AAAALLLLLL RIIIIGHHHHHT! DO YA FEEL ALL RIGHT? DO YA FEEL ALL RIGHT? Feel so good ... okay ... we're gonna do a thing here ... I want all the chicks out there - I wanna hear just the chicks, okay? You feel all right? What you say? Feel all right? FEEL ALL RIGHT FEEL ALL RIGHT FEEL ALL RIGHT! Now, just the guys, okay? Just the guys ... do ya feel all right? I said, DO YA FEEL ALL RIGHT? RIGHT ON!
DeleteFeelin' a little queasy actually but thanks for asking!
DeleteI winnow out a note from Mr. Throckmorton III's Chicago comment (the city, not the band): There was a geographical component. The rough draft of Chicago (the band, not the city) was the Buckinghams, at least in their James Guercio productions. Electric Flag, Ides of March, the Flock, and Chicago (you know which one I mean) also came from the Chicago area.
DeleteGuercio also provides a link Buckinghams->BST->Chicago.
As mentioned, the Bay Area had The Loading Zone, Cold Blood, and Tower of Power over in the East Bay along with Marin's Sons of Champlin.
So that's two clusters of this style.
I'm curious about IF; they're one of those bands I've seen cited but they made little impression here in the Bay Area...I know they're British (English?), but I've never heard them.
Thanks for the geographical context, draftervoi. The Buckinghams have been antecedently FoamFeatured© here - https://falsememoryfoam.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-most-listened-to-band-in-america.html - in what was an exceptionally popular post.
DeleteIf...more jazz rock than brass rock. Two woodwind players - wood rock?
DeleteHere's their first 4 - cunningly titled "If 1", "If 2"...etc.
https://workupload.com/file/M9FGgm8Grrr
As far as prog-jazz, prog-rock, jazzrock go, I much preferred IF and The Flock who both had very tight horn charts and much better song writing. The Sons were great and fun. As far as TOP go, I met Ron on the rooftop heli-pad at San Francisco General Hospital one time to send a small package over to a supposedly clean guitarist who was doing a show at the Coliseum in 1989. Get my continental drift? Guess he was between a rock and a hard place. East bay grease is damned good stuff.
ReplyDeleteThe Flock were a very interesting band. The third album (with a different violinist) is more like a Mahavishnu album, as I remember, which is weird because that's where Jerry Goodman went.
DeleteIf it wasn't for that dreadful "Free Form Guitar" track on the first Chicago album, it'd be a perfect 10 for me. I still play it regularly. That band had it all and they were amazingly tight live. Apart from Chicago - the first two or three albums - horn rock leaves me a bit cold, although a good horn section is a thing of beauty.
ReplyDeleteDitto "Free Form Guitar". I don't mind it being aimless and self-indulgent as well as formless, but I do mind it being ugly. Rest of the album is swell. It suffered an amazingly hamfisted remix for its 50th anniversary which had the fans howling for the remixer's blood.
DeleteI like early Chicago, a bit of BS&T and If, but not a great lover of horn in rock :-)
ReplyDeleteI have a bay area friend who'd throw you off the bridge.
DeleteFavorite Pop/Rock/Soul song with a horn section: Etta James' "Tell Mama" with Gene “Bowlegs” Miller on trumpet, James Mitchell & Aaron Varnell on tenor saxophones and Floyd Newman on baritone saxophone.
ReplyDeleteAlso, pretty much any record with The Memphis Horns on it.
And then there's the J.B.'s....
Swell tunes, but are they strictly speaking Horn Rock? A sub-genre, and nothing to do with RnB, jazz-rock, or even rock with a sax part. There was a horn rock band called Heaven, and I'm sure a few others. Very much a niche market, and one that's never appealed to me.
DeleteI can't say the term "Horn Rock" has ever come up in music conversation, that I've had.
DeleteQ: "What kind of music do you like"?
A: "Horn Rock"!
It just never comes up.
Are we talking about a Rock group with a horn section? What some people might refer to as "Jazz Rock" (not Fusion)?
Genres and styles are sometimes named years after the records were issued. "Swamp pop, Swamp rock" didn't turn up until the 90, no one called The Band "Americana" until the mid-80s, both examples 15 to 20 years after the original records. Brass Rock and Horn Rock came on to my pop cultural radar in the 2010s; I've heard it occasionally but with increaseing frequency in the last five years.
DeleteThere was a K-Tel collection in 1996 (https://www.discogs.com/release/11865080-Various-Horn-Rock-Bands) with the groups Ides of March, BST, Sons of Champlin, Cold Blood, Chase, Tower of Power, and Lighthouse being obvious examples being examples of bands and songs that seem to be stylistically linked, and are also of a certain time, but it also including Edgar Winter and Elvin Bishop, who may have done songs with horns but are not to my ears "Horn Rock."
There's also "what it's not." It's not r&b music from the 60/70s, it's not funk bands like the Ohio players, it's not the Brian Setzer Orchestra (or other swing-revival 90's bands.
The other thing of note is race; the bands defined by the term are (primarily) white musicians, fronted by a white singer, and as such, they singers are often "grunty;" Chicago being one obvious exception.
Ah, rats. I cleared my browser and it had me logged in as that Anonymous guy I see all over the Intertubes.
DeletePlus, jeez, DRaftervoi....
DeleteNote to self: proof read, proof read, proof read...
I've heard this "genre" (ooh, get him!) referred to as "brass rock".
DeleteThe UK had a band called "Heaven" in the early 1970s. We had them at our college a couple of times and they were really quite impressive - a bigger horn section than the band they were obviously influenced by - Chicago.
Here's their debut album. It might have been their only album.
https://workupload.com/file/fgdtyYgT8EF
Thank you, SteveShark, I appreciate your taking the time to post that link. I'll be sharing it with my trumpet-playing pal up in Reno.
DeleteLove a good horn section as long as their off to the side adding punctuation and color but not a big fan of "horn rock." But more importantly, are you sure this post is really "fungible"?!?! I'm having trouble funging it. In the words of the Buzzcocks:
ReplyDeleteWell it seems so real I can see it
And it seems so real I can feel it
And it seems so real I can taste it
And it seems so real I can hear it
So why can't I touch it?
So why can't I touch it?
There, there, MrDave. Don't let it upset you.
ReplyDeletecouldn't stand CHICAGO, BST (dct is the worst and stupidest vocalist that ever existed) hated SONS, FLOCK and lots of the rest of the time, place and sound of horn rock. it's all bad jazz, worse rock and it stinks. most of these bands could not fathom rock and roll which is why jazz / rock and its' annoying child prog are to put it extremely mildly, not to my taste.
ReplyDeleteCome now! Surely you have some sort of opinion?
DeleteOnly in very small doses.
ReplyDeleteI think you've put your finger on the deficiency that is common to most horn rock bands, Farq: the vocalists are by and large crap. Singers like David Clayton Thomas substitute bombast for the soulfulness of say, Otis Redding fronting the Memphis Horns or Ray Charles laying it down in front of his brilliant horn sections. Those cats knew how to modulate.
ReplyDeleteRight. The votes are in and I have to say it's not looking good for horn/brass rock, but we seem to have coralled it nicely. Anybody want Fat City? I dig it. The vibes are sweet. No grunting.
ReplyDeleteNot sure if I have any idea what is meant by horn rock, does it just mean a band with a brass section, like the Stax lot? I would have loved to see the Stax tour of the UK in the sixties but it was before my time. However, I did get to see Dexy's Midnight Runners in a small marquee on Exhibition Park in Newcastle and was stood a couple of feet in front of the brass section. I can still feel the blast to this day, and the good news is that it was a recording for BBC In Concert, since released on cd. It was a bit of a transition for the band, so you get both the brass section of Young Soul Rebel days and the fiddles of Too Rye Aye.
ReplyDeleteDexy's Newcastle Exhibition Park 1982.rar
https://www.imagenetz.de/mWaBn
Read the comments, Nobby - all you need to know right here.
DeleteI tried, but am still bamboozled as I've never heard most of the bands mentioned apart from Stax, so thought I would just bring things uptodate, well 1982 anyway.
DeleteHi, Nobby! Of the bands mentioned, several were invisible on the U.S. charts. The Sons of Champlin barely scraped into a few local charts in '67 with "Sing Me A Rainbow..." but that was NOT brass-rock, it was guitar-based folk rock. Their horn section band didn't have a hit. Cold Blood charted on the West Coast (barely...) but never made it to the U.S. Top 40. Tower of Power, Blood Sweat & Tears, Chase, and Ides of March all had Top 40 U.S hits. Chicago is the most successful band of this type, but their hits after 1975 don't really fit the description, they're more pop rock. This stuff is also bound by time...it existed roughly 1966-1975.
DeleteSo, I guess with the limited time available to listen to stuffwotiveneverheardbefore, the concensus would be to give it a miss and spend my time elsewhere?
DeleteWell, it's not a style of which I'm a huge fan (or expert). Maybe we should give it the "1,000 Songs You Should Hear Before You Die" treatment, only lets limit it to "10 Horn Rock Songs Nobby Should Hear Before He Runs Out of Time." That keeps it short, I'll do three and see if anyone else will toss in the remaining seven:
Delete1) "I Can't Quit Her" by Blood, Sweat & Tears. It solves the David Clayton-Thomas problem because he's not on it
2) "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" - Buckinghams
3) "One Fine Morning" - Lighthouse (but only the single version...the LP version does go on...)
4) 25 Or 6 To 4 - Chicago
DeleteMr Dave mentions the Saints below, how about their
DeleteSwing for the Crime, would that count
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOn0_qOJ-fY
Back in 2014, I did a needle-drop digitization of Chicago's Supergroups In Concert syndicated broadcast from 1979 (which was actually recorded in 1978). It's well circulated on the Internet (I see some enterprising soul has posted it to YouTube), but if you don't have it yet (and you like Chicago), I took the afternoon off and retagged the files, and here it is: https://mega.nz/file/vUA21bZJ#yZ3VV518kqZif2MYHUnIy5ntQx80TKvmU7KLQoQWmfo
ReplyDeleteThank you - I'll give it a spin!
DeleteI went to a lot of bay area shows, and saw The Sons Of Champlin, the Loading Zone and Tower of Power many times. I thought the TOP horn section was pretty good, but not great. Bill Graham & Chet Helms brought in several GREAT bands - Maynard Ferguson & Woody Herman's big bands blew the other bands away. I saw Woody Herman's band on a bill with the Who.
ReplyDeleteOne of the best use of horns is on Boz Scaggs "Loan Me A Dime" from his first Atlantic album.
I forgot to mention that the one song I do like by the Sons Of Champlin is "Jesus Is Coming". I don't know if this ever made an album.
ReplyDeleteNot heard many bands with horns in them. I remember buying an Undertones record where they added horns & strings. I liked that album the same. Curious to hear the featured band.
ReplyDeleteI recall "It's Going To Happen" had horns. One of my favorite singles!
DeleteThe Playboy Band's Judy In Disguise has some judicious horns, Beefheart's Long Neck Bottles, Nesmith's Listen To The Band ... remembering songs with effective horn charts is harder than I'd thought it would be.
ReplyDelete
DeleteThe Buckinghams' Kind of a Drag
Electric Flag - "Killin' Floor". Nice horn chart with an obvious Stax feel.
DeleteThe Saints "Know Your Product"
DeleteWe're struggling, right? Horn sections - charts as oposed to sax solos - are relatively thin on the ground in rock, pop n' roll. Van Morrison did it superbly well ("Domino" and others).
DeleteI'm hesitant to call some "brass rock" "jazz rock". To me, jazz rock would imply some sort of even footing for all the instruments, so that you're just as likely to hear a trumpet solo as a guitar solo.
ReplyDeleteHowever, on my particular favourite - the first Chicago album - there's rarely any soloing other than on guitar. Yes, it's a bit jazzy in that the brass section is playing lines that use jazz harmonies, but it's basically vocals, guitar, bass, keys and drums backed by brass chords.
Or perhaps I'm just overthinking it.
If I may quote myself here: " ...and nothing to do with jazz-rock."
DeleteAnd you mentioned "Heaven", too...
DeleteMy problem is that I can't understand what it must be like to have something better to do than read every word on th' IoF© over and over.
DeletePerhaps you need a hobby.
DeleteHey! Maybe a blog! Photos of my pets, recipes, inspirational quotes ... maybe some "selfies" of restaurant meals! LOL!
DeleteMaybe...a podcast!
DeleteA podcast - that's like the radio, right?
DeleteYes, but for hipsters and young people.
Deletethat would be a pudcast.
DeleteAmongst other things.....
ReplyDeleteWhich is where you'll find that ballpoint pen. And 10mm socket wrench.
DeleteNot jazz or brass rock, but a great horn chart.
ReplyDeleteMariachi style!
Love - "Alone again Or".
Question: What do The Sons Of Champlin and Slayer have in common?
ReplyDelete