{"id":2057,"date":"2015-06-05T19:17:43","date_gmt":"2015-06-05T18:17:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eyeplug.net\/magazine\/?p=2057"},"modified":"2011-05-25T18:57:24","modified_gmt":"2011-05-25T18:57:24","slug":"kris-needs-presents-dirty-water-2-%e2%80%93-more-birth-of-punk-attitude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/kris-needs-presents-dirty-water-2-%e2%80%93-more-birth-of-punk-attitude\/","title":{"rendered":"Kris Needs Presents… Dirty Water 2 \u2013 More Birth of Punk Attitude"},"content":{"rendered":"

(2CD set, Year Zero)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Happily, the overwhelmingly positive response to Dirty Water \u2013 The Birth of Punk Attitude <\/em>has enabled journalist, DJ, broadcaster, and all around living leg end Kris Needs to again take us by the hand and lead us through many of the dimly lit tributaries that ultimately combined to lend their fetid waters to the great punk torrent.<\/p>\n

In my review of the initial 2CD set, I made the connection between Kris\u2019s inclusive approach to defining punk attitude and James Burke\u2019s interconnective approach to explaining sequences of historically significant events. If anything, this comparison is even more apt the second time around \u2013 to understand why this<\/em> happened in 1976, you have to go back to here<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In some cases, the lineage to\u00a0punk rock\u00a0is self evident \u2013 the likes of Death, the Velvet Underground, Suicide, Patti Smith, Jayne County, David Bowie, Mott The Hoople, Kilburn & The High Roads, the Hammersmith Gorillas, the Doctors of Madness, the MC5 and Blondie all have acres of printed paper establishing their varying roles in shaping the scenes that would burst out of tiny pockets of defiance in New York and London. However, many of these artists are represented by seldom heard cuts such as the Motor City maniacs\u2019 epic set closer \u2018Black To Comm\u2019 and Vega\/Rev\u2019s startling \u2018Creature Feature\u2019. Similarly, the historical connection between primal rock\u2019n\u2019roll and punk is also a matter of historical record, and trailblazing greats such as Bo Diddley and Eddie Cochran are duly represented here.<\/p>\n

These, however, are the basics \u2013 dig around the period when the likes of Diddley. Cochran, Gene Vincent and Link Wray were laying down the fundamentals for generations to come, and you\u2019ll find all manner of other stuff going down. Through drawing lyrical inspiration from the lives of the disenfranchised, and subsequently influencing Joe Strummer (a.k.a. Woody Mellor), Woody Guthrie\u2019s rough hewn folk can be readily identified as one of the germinal building blocks of what would later be identified as a key aspect of the punk mindset. One only needs one listen to Guthrie\u2019s \u2018Goin\u2019 Down The Road Feelin\u2019 Bad\u2019 and Patti Smith\u2019s \u2018Piss Factory\u2019 to realise that they are coming from the same benighted place. \u2018Strip away and Woody was a punk in the old-fashioned way,\u2019 explains Kris, \u2018a short, scruffy, road-wise, quick tempered, skirt-chasing, chauvinist boozer, who couldn\u2019t be controlled by any political party, but campaigned in a much broader sense against homelessness, poverty, racism and inequality.\u2019 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Moreover, by following the folk path along a m\u00f6bius strip of drug-fuelled weirdness and inspiration, Needsy also establishes the contribution of freaks such as the Godz and the Holy Modal Rounders in developing a conviction that each generation of young people should start at Year Zero, disregarding the ideas of their elders as moribund and irrelevant. Specifically, the sense of wild abandon embraced by both these bands provided a gateway to the kind of free-thinking non-conformity that found its apogee in the late, great Don van Vliet\u2019s Captain Beefheart. Indeed, not only did the Captain and his Magic Band\u2019s wilful disregard for the established parameters of rock\u2019n\u2019roll provide a mutable template for punk rock, it also pointed the way forward into post-punk and all subsequent experimental and courageous readings of the form. Fittingly, given our host\u2019s epoch-making tenure as editor of the much-missed Zigzag<\/em> magazine, Beefheart\u2019s \u2018Zigzag Wanderer\u2019 has been selected to open the two-disc set.<\/p>\n

Of course, rock\u2019n\u2019roll was hardly the only ingredient bubbling in van Vliet\u2019s voodoo stewpot \u2013 jazz, bebop and doo-wop all broiled among the gumbo. Perhaps the true genius of Dirty Water 2<\/em> is the way in which Kris Needs has taken artists such as Dizzy Gillespie, Albert Ayler, the Silhouettes, and George Clinton\u2019s mighty Parliament collective and clearly demonstrated how they too fit into the mad parade. This is achieved on a number of levels \u2013 not least by identifying the way in which bebop and free jazz marginalised audiences in exactly<\/em> the same way that punk would do decades later, as well as establishing the direct influence of doo-wop on groups such as Suicide.<\/p>\n

Like its predecessor, Dirty Water 2 <\/em>stands as a monument to defiance, transgression and self-determination, 150 minutes of exceptional music are matched by a robust booklet in which Kris recounts a history that through his own personal experiences and lunatic adventures intertwines with his selections to provide an enjoyable, inclusive experience. From the artists mentioned above to several nicely soiled nuggets of garage frustration, via the titanic storms of sedition whipped up by Blue Cheer or the Edgar Broughton Band, Needsy\u2019s selections provide an object lesson in the advantage of keeping mind and ears open. And surely, if nothing else, that is the idea that underpins the punk attitude.<\/p>\n

Order Dirty Water 2 <\/em>direct: www.futurenoisemusic.com\/product.aspx?id=718<\/a><\/p>\n

Catch Needsy on fnoob radio, every Wednesday from 7pm: http:\/\/fnoob.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(2CD set, Year Zero) Happily, the overwhelmingly positive response to Dirty Water \u2013 The Birth of Punk Attitude has enabled journalist, DJ, broadcaster, and all around living leg end Kris Needs to again take us by the hand and lead us through many of the dimly lit tributaries that ultimately combined to lend their fetid …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2058,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,82,78,93,77,79,128,71,92,80,89,86,81],"tags":[279,121,256,280],"series":[],"class_list":["post-2057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exotica","category-folk","category-funk","category-garage","category-genres","category-glam","category-hot-plugs","category-music","category-post-punk","category-punk","category-reggae","category-rock","category-rockabilly","tag-dirty-water","tag-eyeplug","tag-kris-needs","tag-punk-attitude"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2057"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=2057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}