I know, I know. A lot of these posts end up being more about my musical experiences than the nuts-and-bolts artist profile type post. A big reason for that is that when I think of music I know, it invariably takes me back to different significant moments when the music in question was either the soundtrack of, or related to, a particular event or discussion. In this case, the memory machine stopped on the day David Fwelling dropped my copy of Ginger Baker's Stratavarious in 12th grade. I was bummed, really bummed.
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Ginger Baker was the former drummer of Blind Faith and Cream, and was the Gene Krupa of that era. While Keith Moon, John Bonham and other drummers were better known, Baker was a drummer's drummer. That's why I'd loaned the album to Fwelling. He was a drummer, and Baker was one of his idols.
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As luck would have it, when Fwelling was returning the LP, in the last seconds of his possesion, the record slipped out and fell to the ground, breaking out a big hunk. Had this been just an ordinary Ginger Baker solo album, it would have been no big deal. But it wasn't. Ginger Baker recorded Stratavarious with Fela Ransome-Kuti, who was, unbeknownst to me at the time, somewhat of a deity in Nigeria, far and away the most popular afrobeat musician of his time (and an enemy of the government). At the time Stratavarious represented my only link to the exotic ethnic sounds of other lands, period.
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My brothers and I had already gone back as far as Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, Muddy Waters, and Howling Wolf in our exploration of American roots, so we were already on our way to geekdom. But Fela's music was the tip of a different iceberg, this one fucking huge. It was our first glimpse into music that wasn't directly related to rock and roll. And the album wasn't easily replaced. I'd bought it a couple years earlier and it had long since disappeared from record stores. (This was before record stores had "International Music" sections.) So I did what any budding music geek would do. I lugged my broken record back home where the three cuts still playable were preserved, sandwiched between sentries Bad Company and the Beach Boys in my third of the collective record collection. (Ten years later my brother found another copy and gave it to me as an present, unconnected to any holiday or event.)
So what about Fela? He spent some time in the US in the late 60's, where he was inspired by the Black Panthers and the Black Power movement. Soon after, he was deported and returned to Nigeria, bringing with him a new direction. He created his own compound that included a commune, a disco and a recording studio, took 27 wives and proclaimed his independence from the Nigerian state, which ultimately landed him on the government's shit list. A flagrant pothead, in 1974 Nigerian police planted a joint in his home to have an excuse to drag his ass in for a time-out. He ate the joint, thereby destroying the evidence. As if a scene from a Pink Panther movie, they brought him in anyway, to wait for the joint to pass. In the interim, he acquired a stool from another inmate, presented the joint-free duty, and was later released. Thumbing his nose at the authorities, he wrote a song about the incident, naming it, poignantly, "Expensive Shit."
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Dig it: Six cuts of
Fela at
Passion of the Weiss. Considering that his songs typically hover in the ten minute range, that's a load of excellent music. You might also want to check out the article from the NY Times (linked below) by John Barton, a former Times Lagos correspondent and friend of
Fela's. Amongst other revelations is that
Idi Amin was one of his early idols.
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