Rockhunter, Issue 15, October 2004
Rock ‘n’ Roll Weather. Part I: The Function of Rain and Related Effects: Mickey Newbury, The Kinks and Armageddon
This is nothing more than a very brief conspectus. There’s sound effects up the wazoo and all over the place in rock and pop music. It would be tediousness itself, without peer and sans compare, to thumb through every record with a weather effect on it.
And although I’m touching on ambient sound, this is nothing to do with the ambient music genre, best ruined by the KLF on their Chill Out LP (1990).
Obviously, in all recorded rock ‘n’ roll history, BBC Sound Effects Library 21, Weather, including storms, heavy rain, hail, thunder and lightning strikes, is the best album if it’s weather effects you’re after. But let’s not forget context, on which the drama of weather depends. If it’s somewhere in the region of pay-day, you’ve a full belly and you’ve recently had a blow-job, it’s safe to say that rain in your landscape will not affect you in the same way as in times when none of the above apply.
But what I’m getting at in this piece is to see if sound effects can be anything other than intrusive and what their function is if they are to be regarded as integral narrative elements.
In the most literal examples of sound placement, it’s almost as is the people splicing in sound effects haven’t got the skill or imagination to evoke the effect they want in the arrangement of the song being recorded. Relying on song supplements, whether in cover art, tour names, videos, or sound effects, reveals the paucity of the tune/words. Ooh, what a stormy relationship, these supplements say. My, so sad! Christ, how awful! Can a sound effect do anything other than confirm what the narrative says already?
This is not so peripheral as you might think. If I come up with a negative reflex, where does this leave writing about music? Words for and against sounds — how ridiculous! Words supplementing and continuing others less effective, how medieval!
Rain and related effects such as thunder in rock ‘n’ roll songs can provide simple narrative framing devices. But they’re not always used literally to define misery, loss or upset.
Rainy Day Ray
Let’s start with “Rainy Day In June” by The Kinks, off of Face to Face (1966), which kicks off with a clap or peal of thunder that’s reprised in the middle. This was one of Ray Davies’s post-breakdown songs. Amidst the gloaming, the dark afternoon of reason, cannily similar to that espied by Shelley in “The Revolt of Islam” (1818), “There was no hope, no reasoning”.
However, although Davies’s subject position is clearly one of abjection — “The cherished things are perishing [it’s continuing to happen even now]/And buried in their tomb [a predestined post-mortem location if ever there were one]” — this is not just a miserable-man-in-café number. Davies is a key witness to the truth of the weather, whether he’s sad or not. And the truth on the day he’s witnessing is that {THUNDER} “everybody felt the rain.”
There is no repeat of the thunder effect after its appearance on the cusp of the first chorus, although there are a couple more opportunities for it to be spliced in. Twice is enough for Davies — the one at the beginning foreshadowing its echo later. The first speaks quietly of darkness in the psychedelic p.m. and the second announces its fleeting presence before the immanent rain. If you ever wondered whether something could prefigure immanence, look no further.
Wet Beatles
Whereas The Beatles sing about how much they don’t mind the rain, in “Rain” (1966), unlike the squares they’re narrating who dodge indoors at the first sign, Davies understands that one’s feeling about the weather are obtuse immaterialities. Stating your love of something everyone else hates does not, as The Beatles mistakenly supposed, make you a free spirit. Everybody feels the rain, whether they choose to stand out in it or, having felt it, run indoors and watch it fall.
Newbury Fruits
The rain effect of tape hiss was emphasised with rain sounds by Mickey Newbury on two tracks, “The Future’s Not What It Used To Be” and “Mobile Blue”, on Frisco Mabel Joy (Elektra, 1971), the first country concept album, as it goes. If you doubt it was a gen-u-wine concept, check out the first track, “An American Trilogy”, which mixes and splices three songs from the American Civil War imaginary — one from the south, one from the north and one slave spiritual/lullaby — and creates from them one new song which is wider and stranger than its individual sections. Newbury knew what to do. Presley’s people snapped up Newbury’s arrangment of Trad. Arr. and had their boy release “An American Trilogy” as a single in 1972 and incorporate it into his live act.
During lengthy recording sessions done in between working for other people, Newbury had saturated the tape so much with instrumental overdubs that the intros of both tunes on the recording master tape were ghostly with pre-noise. The solution? Since it suggested the sound of rain on a tin roof — and since there may as well have had a tin roof on Wayne Moss’s converted garage studio he recorded the album in, for romanticism’s sake — he went the whole way and added bona fide rainwater sound effects to detract from the ambient hiss.
“Sonderangebot”, on Neu!’s Neu! (1972) uses a similar effect for a different reason, which I think it speaks for itself.
Newbury’s songs need no effects to emphasise or accentuate their emotive content/affect. If he wants you to feel sadness, that’s the way it’ll get you. But, like the two instrumental interludes on Frisco Mabel Joy — which incidentally call to mind the Hollywood ‘filmic interlude’-style of Alexander Scriabin — the rain effect adds yet another spatial aspect to the album. Not many people can make space from sound.
The hiss-to-rain conversion was quick thinking, whether or not he really needed to shield the limits of his recording technology from the view of the public. In retrospect, I shouldn’t mind a bit of pre-tune hiss, but maybe the Hi-Fi audiences of then and now would have blanched at an old timey gesture of modernity too far from the Newbs.
Laying Waste To The Nukeular and Biblical Imaginary
“Armageddon” (1969) by The Cape Kennedy Construction Company is alarmingly sparse in its instrumentation, with — in order of appearance — electric organ (heavily echoed as in church, of course), vocal, acoustic guitar, drums (echoed up), bass and electric guitar. But the sweep and depth of its twin appeals to abjection and humanism is alarming.
This song starts with a quote from Revelations (What else? — Divinity Ed.). It uses the Biblical end of history as the narrative basis for a contribution to the nukeular armageddon and Cold War imaginaries, which we cherish now as the peaceful past of proxy conflict as we once clung to the peaceful future of dystopian technologies.
Of course, this is not an ode to the battle between YHVH and Shai’tan, rendered in the Greek as αρμαγεδδων, as translated from the Hebrew, הר מגידו, which names the “Hill of Megiddo”, a famous reusable battleground in olden times. That subject would be a waste of a song.
The vision of Armageddon is retold by an individual speaking from experience — “I said listen. / To what I say. / About my life […] I’ve seen love. / But I’ve seen death.” The singing voice urges us to heed his reading of the politics of fear: “They blow us up. / They put us down. / They’ve made it tough. / They’ve made it rough.” So above the experiential knowns of love and death, awaits the unknown Armageddon of humankind which is a autonomous power beyond because it can engender fear of fear, which is a worse kind of suffering than either love or death.
“But where’s the rain-related effect, and what is its function?!”, I think I hear you sob impatiently, as always. It blasts in just after the tremolo’d voice wobbilily pronounces, “And he gathered them into a place called Armageddon. And the seventh angel of the Lord poured forth its vial upon the earth; and the voice from heaven, from the throne, said, It is done.” A combination of needle being hastily scraped over tracks and thunderclap roaring introduces a simple acoustic guitar figure. This effect is used again later.
The combined sound of deafening thunder and a record being ruined live is the best way to call up an image of apocalypse. Whether it’s begun by a bomb or meteor or a rushing of solar winds, the end will surely come in one last great storm. End weather. Devil thunder, rain of ire, burning snow and ice and wind shards. If there is a better way of sounding the apocaplyse, let me know because I’d love to sit here playing it over and over again and again.
This is a fabulous example of how to use an effect properly. These fellows either made it themselves or doctored an existing one with compression and that, forming a sound you never heard before to musically enhance the thing in hand and make the radio, the room the record’s playing in, and the world, a more interesting series of interlinking spaces. Textbook, really.
If you want to hear “Armageddon”, the CKCC’s best tune, it’s was most recently made available on a compilation CD called Sometimes I Wonder: The Psychedelic Pop Sound of President (2004).
Sudden Lack of Rain-Related Material
The beginning of The Warlocks’ 1965 recording of Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain” sounds like rain, but it’s just tape or acetate hiss accentuated by a trebly fingered bass figure, like water dripping from guttering. This rather windy beginning was just a hint of what they were mighty windily to achieve as The Grateful Dead.
Speaking of wind, I only wish I could mention Hawkwind’s “Silver Machine” (1972). With it’s electronic metal weather and time machine spatiality, I’d could do a lot with it. But this brief essay is about rain, so it’s with passing sadness, not to mention wind, that we bid farewell to Calvert, Brock, Turner, Kilminster, Davies, Dettmar and King, solicitors of drugs and commissioners of oaths.
Exploding Clouds and Dialect Versioning
The Troggs’ version of “I can only give you everything”, which opens Trogglodynamite (1967) starts with a noise that could be an explosion or thunder (which is a kind of cloud explosion). Ambiguity is not a trait usually associated with The Troggs, but given their occasional harsh tenderness on numbers like “Our Love Will Still Be There” off From Nowhere (1966) and “Last Summer”, later on Trogglodynamite, and elsewhere, who’s to say. Mind you, they also kept in one of the band saying, “Hev Yew Gotta Loight, Boi”, briefly simultaneously versioning the Singing Postman and doing an impression of Allan Smethurst, famous at the time for his Norfolk dialect songs recorded under the stage name of the Singing Postman.
Space From Sound! No More Effects Needed With Proper Arrangements!
In a display of musical prowess and arrangementship, The Rokes, on “When The Wind Arises” (RCA, USA, 1968) — comp’d on, among others, Incredible Sound Show Stories, Vol. 3 (1996) and We can fly, Vol. 4 (2003) — produce a great clashing dynamic soundscape. They narrate the movement from the “first dark hours of morning” to the time when the wind arises: “how it paralyzes!” It’s a weird fugue. And not a gram in sight, except up their hooters, probably, where a gram should be.
As it was with Newbury, so it is with The Rokes: creating space — mind space, social space, what’s the difference really? — with sound.
Now find some of your own. Let me know your favourite weather effects in rock and pop music.
Some luv
Ed.
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