|
(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Summary.
David Peel (born David Rosario) was one of the most militant
and underground folk-singers in the age of the student riots.
He was a modern minstrel of the white lumperproletariat, who terrorized
the Lower East Side with live performances at street corners, accompanied
by random street musicians. This political bum was obviously mimicking
street preachers, except that his religion was the marijuana, his Bible
was rock'n'roll, and his mission was to expose the hipochrisy of
the bourgeoise. His semi-improvised albums (or, better, public
"happenings") followed in the footsteps of the
Fugs' grotesque agit-prop cabaret and of Frank Zappa's satirical operettas.
Peel's hysterical, sarcastic and insolent tone,
and his spartan/spastic combo of guitar, harmonica and tambourine (which mainly
contributed rhythm),
and the naive enthusiasm of everybody involved (responsible for some of the
most hair-rising backing vocals in the history of music),
created a new kind of folk music.
His masterpiece, Have A Marijuana (1968),
a demented sabotage of
protest songs, hillbilly, blues and square dances,
was an epic insult to common-sense.
He played folk music with the emphasis of punk-rock and the
arrangements of "lo-fi" pop.
And he played it with divine recklessness.
As of 2008 (before i published my "History of Rock and Dance Music"),
no major encyclopedia or history of rock music mentioned him.
Full bio
(Translated from my original Italian text by Troy Sherman)
David Peel was one of the most intransigent members of the
funny, militant underground of the 60s and 70s. He was at the core a New York
Folk singer, but it remains difficult to find any similarities between him and
any of the others (especially
Bob Dylan).
Peel was a sort of modern white minstrel of the slums, terrorizing the Lower
East Side with street corner performances, ever-accompanied by a small group of
homeless musicians like him.
He was basically one of those crazy preachers who stand in
crowds and shouts at people, but his religion was drugs and his Bible was rock
and roll. He had no qualms about exposing the hypocrisy of a society that
persecuted and massacred pacifist Vietnamese citizens, but then was shocked at
the idea of marijuana at home.
His records, generally improvised in one way or another,
continued the agit-prop saga initiated by the Fugs and the social satire launched by Frank Zappa.
Peel can be immediately recognized by his psychotic tone and
Spartan accompaniment (guitar, harmonica, bells). His style was inspired by
Appalachian Folk and African music; he was a bluesy and British story-teller,
but it was his distinctive personality as an artist that transcended any
classification.
His lyrics were completely topical and specific, and in no
way universal. But, the tone of Peels innocent and enthusiastic screams had
universal value. The worth was not in the writing itself, but in the spirit of
its ideology (the bizarre faith in drugs, specifically marijuana, as a remedy
for all of the worlds ills).
His extravagant musical creations were fun, and his discs
prove that music for him was not a vocation, but rather a coincidental conglomeration
of public happenings. Those discs are notebooks, with notes thrown down in
bulk, without even the slightest claim of an attempt at making revolutionary
sound from a musical standpoint. Politically speaking, Peels operation was
perhaps less effective of an attack on culture than that of the Fugs, but
purely by chance it was equally, if not more, brilliant.
Have A Marijuana
Danny Fields of Elektra discovered him in march 1968 and producer Peter Siegel recorded him in june and july (according to his recollections).
(Elektra, 1968), an album recorded live with random street musicians of the
Lower East Side
(actually cut over a period of four summer weeks, supervised by veteran producer Peter Siegel) and released in october 1968 (not december as many sources claim),
is a masterpiece in its own way.
The genuine hysteria portrayed by the singer and the grotesque incompetence of
his accompaniment (who can only produce tribal rhythm and sloppy vocal
accompaniment, using their hands, tambourines, guitars, and drums) contribute
to the chiseled atmosphere of absurdity, which seems only to exist to
systematically contradict all of the clichés of the music industry. Peel stages
a relentless musical for stragglers that winds along psychopathic choruses,
drawn from a precedent set by British and South American folk music and sung
hectically and mitered. The gems of this spastic, vaudevillian asylum epic are Mother Where is My Father?, Happy Mothers Day, and I Do My Bawling in the Bathroom. His
protest speeches are farcical comedy sketches like I Like Marijuana, sarcastic blues like Here Comes a Cop, or tongue twisters set to the beat of a polka, like The Alphabet Song. There are apologies for crime, degraded political slogans (the cha-cha of Up Against the Wall), and miniature dramas with a coarse laugh that exist to exorcise the desperate and angry cry of revolt in hope of Dadaist freedom (the genial crooning of Show Me the Way to Get Stoned).Every
song is seasoned with a dementedly acute and unleashed rhythm. The atrocious
skit culminates with the great choral finale of We Love You. At the time, Peel did not know it, but with the release of Have a Marijuana he had invented punk-rock: just speed up and amplify the songs and you have the choral chants
of 1977.
Peter Siegel recording Peel's band in the streets of New York (clearly not in december, unlike what many sources claim, as you can see from their clothes)
The second album, American
Revolution (1970), was recorded
between political events (Peel founded the Rock Liberation Front and
publically accused Dylan of having betrayed the cause). He takes up the usual
company of amateurs that was found in the first release and repeats his debuts
formula.
His third record, Pope
Smokes Dope (1972), is the most daring in terms of lyrics and the most
musical of his entire canon. The imbecilic popular song strays as usual, and is
arranged with a set of rich rhythmic equipment. This record more than the
others was created for satire, which goes beyond defamation and contempt and
even contains a hint of coquetry in the accompanying instrumentals. The self
portrait of I Am a Runaway, the
homage to John Lennon of The Ballad of
New York City, the metropolitan Indian war dance of Chicago Conspiracies, and the choral gags of Everybodys Smoking Marijuana and The Hippie from New York City are all half way between the music of a village festival, childrens ring-around-the-Rosie, an operetta, and the spiritual hallucinogenic porn of a blasphemer. With boundless melodic imagination and two centuries of American civilization and music behind him, from television commercials to country and westerns, from musicals to doo-wop, rising again to the moving blues violin and operatic chorus of the profane Birth Control Blues, and culminating the
exuberant collection in a final joke, Peel simply reveals the fact of the
century: The Pope Smokes Dope!
David Peel
continued recording records through the 1970s, documenting alternative evenings
of the heroic years. He has never, of course, enjoyed the favor of the record
companies or been mentioned in any prominent histories of rock.
Peel died in march 2017 of a heart attack at the age of 73.
|
