Tear up the house (Sunset Blvd)
Collected on these 2 discs are 31 previously unreleased live tracks, dated from 1978 to 2008. The names on the CD are enough to make one withdraw one's wallet.
Scandalously electric rock'n'roll was never the 'passing craze' 1950s detractors assailed it as being. Of racially and experientially blended character, the defiantly upstart style was much more powerful than the milquetoastian polite society strictures it flattened.
In its fecund youth, rock'n'roll spoke to and for entire swaths of under-celebrated America: the poor, blue collar workers, blacks, teenagers. Anyone who dwelt 'outside,' and intuited that the mannerly crooners blaring from 'Your Hit Parade' broadcasts weren't 'of' them, and didn't care to be. Those powdered songbirds would probably shrink from the egalitarian prospect.
During the 1970s, punk savages essentially devised in kind. Springing up from the urban concrete, they noisily renounced the overblown and painstakingly placid 'rock product' that relentlessly streamed from corporate radio of the day.
Throwing off status quo bondage they sifted through influences, admixing them with their own, newly coined rage. The fresh creature produced turned out to reflect the same insouciant, rudely rebellious spirit previously voiced by Elvis, Jagger, et al.
Like the sounds he so loved -- embracing, as they did, jumping rhythm and blues and swinging hillbilly country -- Robert endured through flashy, annoying trends that had nothing to do with the bop that mattered to him. His music drew heavily from predecessors' patterns but added serrated edges, interpreting them as forcibly high-spirited in contemporary context.
Possessed of a deep baritone, he commanded both audience appreciation and, doubtless, peers' envy. A technically sublime vocalist, Robert easily located notes beyond limited fellows, and sustained them with rousing potency. His powerhouse pronouncements swelled with confident authority.
The 1980s rockabilly resurgence was in considerable part jump-started by Robert. He was and remains our era's top-most rockabilly icon, of such impressive capacity as to merit mountaintop rank.
Storied English guitar phenomenon Chris Spedding laced Robert's already outstanding offering with stylistically multifarious, sensitively nuanced six-string articulation. In his hands, songs could storm, fly, or cruise with settled serenity.
Chris cannily intercut rockabilly, blues, and country enunciations with telescopically sliding jazz chording and flabbergasting treble stings. One notes the unerring heed of a genuine artist evident in every purposeful stroke.
Theirs is a remarkable, decades-long partnership that has taken them to numerous recording studios and world stages.
"We were never a 50s act," Robert once told an interviewer. "We were always a contemporary band. It was never designed to be a retro act. We just played off that rockabilly sound."
And by the doing, created something of indispensable disposition.
Parts of the above are excerpted from the author's 2017 Flesh Made Music (Retro Riff Books).
Recommended: "Beside You," "Heart Like a Rock," "I Beg of You," "Don't Leave Me Now, "Young and Beautiful," "The Wanderer," "Devil In Disguise," "Blue Moon of Kentucky," "I Just Found Out," "I Love My Baby," "I Love You So," Gunslinger," "Walk On By."
Video: "Blue Moon Of Kentucky"
"I Love You So"
"Beside You"
Robert Gordon International Fan Club
Robert Gordon Worldwide Live
Chris Spedding
Sunset Blvd. Records
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