Primal Scream . Webadelica

Primal Scream

Backstage at MTV's midtown Manhattan Studio, Primal Scream are meeting one of their heroes. Though he remixed and preformed on three tracks off The Scream's new LP, Give out but Don't Give Up, George Clinton, The Funkmaster general himself, has never met the group and is now about to join them for a live rendition of Funky Jam on 120 minutes. Singer Bobby Gillespie and guitarist Andrew Innes and Throbert Young are telling clinton about their record, how they went down to Memphis to work with ledendary producer Tom Dowd, excitedly reeling off the list of people Dowd has produced: Otis, Aretha, Wison Pickett, John Coltrane, The Staple Singers. Clinton looks incredulously at the three gresy-mopped, leather clad scruffs. "You historical muthafuckas, he says, obviously impressed.

By Michael Krugman

"It's just the music that turns us on," Gillespie says. "It's not premeditated or anything. Music has to have soul, you know. People tend to look at music too much, and it gets stale." "It's not an intellectual kind of thing," added keyboard wizard Martin Duffy. 'It's physical, emotional...."

Gillespie, Duffy and Innes are in a Warner Bros. conference room, where they are obligated to answer a whole bunch of over-intellectualized questions about the new record. But first, a truncated history of the group.

Gillespie, the original stand-up dummer of The Jesus and Mary Chain, splits after Psychocandy to work full-time on Primal Scream with guitarist Innes and Young. Their 80 some second single "Velocity Girl" becomes the amphetamines and sunshine anthemn for the UK indie scene. Two okay LPs folowed, but The Scream didn't truly matter until 1991's Screamadelica. Combining Stonesian rhythm and blues, big staresque power pop and zoned-out experimentalism of techno-god Andrew Weatherall and The Orb, tracks like "Higher than the Sun" and "Loaded" litterally reinvented Rock 'n' Roll music for a revolutionary achievement, Screamadelica showed that in the best rock music, anything can and should go. It perfectly captured a pop momnet when all seemed impossible, winning The Mercury Prize (sort of booker prize of popular music) and making Primal Scream into the rock stars that they'd always dreamt of being.

Give Out but Don't Give Up finds the core of Primal Scream (Gillespie, Innes, Young, Duffy) and augmented by the famed Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (David Hood, Bass; Roger Hawkins, Drums) and the equally fabled Memphis Horns (Andrew Love, Sax; Wayne Jackson, Trumpet) . Produced by Dowd and remixed by folks like Clinton, George Drakoulias and Brendan Lynch, the record is a full-blown Rock 'n' Roll extravaganza in the tradition of Exile on Mainstreet or London Calling. "Jailbird" kick-starts the festivities, all chooglin' guitars, Bobby wailing "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!'s", the horns blowing serious honk-its raw, it's real and it rocks like a sumbitch. The shout-it-out-loud singalongs "Rocks" is the best song Thin Lizzy never wrote; "Cry Myself Blind" and "Sad and Blue" are reflective, heart wrentching Flying Burrito Brothers country soul; "Funky Jam" and the tirle track (featuring the wonderous vocal stylings of soul sister number one Denise Johnson) are high-energy booty shakers. Simply put, the record smokes, stomps and struts. it kicks ass and takes no prisoners. It's rif-roaring rock 'n' roll music that save your soul.

Meanwhile, back in the conference room, all the talk of cerebral activity prompts Bobby to croon an old C&W refrain, "I'm thinkin' and I'm drinkin'..."

Okay, then. As a British rock 'n' roll band of the Nineties...

Bobby: "We're not British." Erm...what do you prefer? Scots, Scottish..."

Gillespie: We're Celts."

Innes: "We're the celtic boogie boys!"

Hilarity ensues, as Bobby mock-runs out the door to see if it's too late to change the album title.

But that does raise the boogie question.

Where do you skinny white guys come off making a record that's got that Southern-fried, hipshakin', hot 'n' nasty vibe?

"Tell him about your first concert, Bobby prods Andrew.

"You know the sensational Alex Harvey Group?" asks Innes, referring to the little known (in the States, at least) seventies English boogie band. "Lynyrd Skynyrd played With them, this was before the plane crash, and they had this great fucking Confederate flag behind them. The Scottish are like rebels, as Welt, so I identified with it, you know?"

"People think the flag is a symbol for like slavery and racism," says Bobby. "But that's not what the Civil War was about. It was about like freedom, You know?"

Give Out... is emblazoned with a neon Stars & Bars, and the record is permeated with below-the-Mason-Dixon-Line Culture. Recorded mostly at Memphis' fabled Ardent Studios ("It's got great feet, great sound," Innes says) songs like "Call On Me" and "Big Jet Plane" ring clear with that classic down-home gospel.

"We were listening to a lot of Southern soul records," Bobby says. "People like Otis Redding, James Carr, Percy Stedge. When we look at what music should be, we always go back to that stuff, and to jazz: Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Charlie Parker, Sun Ra, reggae like Prince Far-I. Music that swings."

George Ctinton is holding court in the MTV Green Room. Sitting around the black leather conversation pit are the Scream and their entourage. Ctinton (who makes a point of sitting near Johnson it tooks as if he wants to make her a Bride of Funkenstein), has brought a boom box and a duffel bag full of tapes. As joint after joint of serious skunk circle the room, the Atomic Dog plays a steady stream of tunes for the awestruck assembled. A couple of raucous new funkfests called "Big Nosed Muthafuckas Gonna Get What's Coming" and "Some Next Shit," a tasty "Sixty Minute Man" from an upcoming doo-wop project, and best of alt, rare old P-Funk tapes featuring the flaming guitars of the late Eddie "Maggot Brain" Hazel. Bobby, a beatific grin beaming across his face, gets up for a drink and says, quite simply, "This is good, innit?"

"What's old-fashioned rock music?" asks Bobby. "Rock 'n' roll music never gets old. Rock music hasn't realty progressed, 'cause it's fucking music, it's dancing music, and that's what it should be.

"Modern rock music, it just doesn't rock," he continues, getting worked up. "All this 'college rock,' it don't rock and it don't roll. It's all this intellectual shit. There's no heart, no fucking boogie or soul or blues to it."

"It should be about songs," Innes tosses in. "And when you took at alt these modern rock bands, they don't have any songs. If they do, they just have one that they play over and over."

"It's like the glorification of ineptitude," says Bobby. Duffy sums it up, You can't fuck to indie rock."

The retro thang is exactly what has catapulted cack like Lenny Kravitz or the Black Crowes (or for that matter, Counting Crows) to megastardom. What do Primal Scream bring to the party that those copycats don't?

"We don't have anything in common with those people," says Bobby. "We've got more in common with the Orb."

Well, after the far-out futurismo heights of Screamadelica, the more straight-forward guitar rock of Give Out... has struck many UK dance purists as a step back, a betrayal of the techno/rock/dub fusion pioneered by the group. "For a lot of people, electronic has become their dance music, because rock 'n' roll isn't anymore," Gillespie says, "But we ve played this stuff for some of the hardcore club kids in London, and they fucking love it, 'cause it's a rock 'n' roll record they can love.

"People are like confused, saying we're like an old style rock 'n' roll band," he rails.

"That's because, if you listen to modern rock music, no one can play guitars anymore. They just strum, you know."

In other words, peter buck killed rock 'n' roll?

"That's a heavy thing to lay on Pete Buck, don't you think?" Bobby admonishes.

"What about like the Keith Richards, Joe Perry school of boogie?" Questions guitar Player andrew. "you don't hear that anymore! And i need to hear that when i hear a band."

Bobby the Yobbo gets up and hocks a Loogie out the window, 20 stories above Rockerfeller center. "I'm fuckin' Sid Vicious!" He Says.aiiid much laughter.

The tales of primal scream's incredible substance consumption are legendary, Methadrine and jack, beer and blow, ecstasy and Weed. The band's behavior recalls the stones' Notorious revels, and in comparison to today's Other noted drug takers, completely lacks the Guilty cop-out junkiedom of Kurt Cobain, etc. Upon being told of the death of River Phoenix, Innes reportedly sneered, lightweight..."' nuff Said.

This band lives the decadent lifestyle That their music demands. After all, you've got to sin to get saved. The stories are many: Throb's Weeklong lags; duffy's New York adventure, which entailed his being stabbed in the kidney And not knowing about it until the following Day. While in Memphis, innes, in rare form, puked On Graceland's front lawn.

He semi-recalls, 'we got this moonshine, the label said danger! Do not drink: WILL cause blindness, not even may cause Blindness, will!" He laughs. "but we were fine."

Duffy says, "It was like drinking petrol!"

"We get wasted, but listen to the record," says a heavy-lidded Bobby. "We're wasted, but we still make good music."

"It's meaningless," he continues. "Doesn't matter if like you drink too much, you re not gonna be able to write like Lester Bangs, or if you stick a needle in your arm, you're not gonna be Charlie Parker. It's about passion."

So here they come. Primal scream are everything a rock 'n' roll band is supposed to be. They're T-Rex, The Faces, Slade, The Heartbreakers and the sex pistols rolled into One sexy ball of fun. They rock like they're the Last gang in town. The only question remaining Is will the us kids, accustomed to fey brit new Wave acts like the cranberries, bite?

"People want to get high on rock 'n' Roll," figures gillespie. "look at Aerosmith, That's rock 'n' roll. They're a great fucking Band, they kick out the jams, you know. When you Hear Aerosmith, it just rocks like a motherfucker, the guitars and the drums, it s like, Sleazy...(rising and pumping his pelvis]"

"A lot of people in america think we're something that we're not," he goes on. Tell people to come to the show, man, if they want to get high on rock 'n' roll. If they want it, they'll get it."

Come and get it, folks. Get it anyway you want it.

Originally appeared in Ray Gun, May 1994.
Copyright © Ray Gun.

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