Robert Gordon and Chris Spedding: Pair nonpareil
Scandalously electric Rock'n'Roll was not the passing craze 1950s detractors hoped it would be. Of racially and experientially blended character, the defiantly upstart style was much more powerful than the milquetoastian societal 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. 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 and admixed 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 Robert so loved -- embracing, as they did, jumping Rhythm and Blues and swinging Hillbilly Country -- he 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 and interpreted 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, sustaining 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 a top-most genre 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 digs the instincts of a genuine artist, evident in every stroke.
Theirs was a remarkable, decades-long partnership that would take them to numerous recording studios and world stages. Legendary is their fuel-injected reinventing of roots-music treasures like "Red Hot," "The Way I Walk," "Rock Billy Boogie," and "Driving Wheel." They also granted new, bold being to "Hello Walls," "It's Now Or Never," "Stuck On You," "Look Who's Blue," and "Sweet Love On My Mind."
2022's Hellafied proved to be the duo's final studio collaboration. Cleopatra marketed it as both CD and blue/purple vinyl.
This was my contemporary assessment:
These tracks were put to tape in 1998 for a never-released album. Several songs did appear on Bear Family's The Lost Album Plus, issued that year.
Robert and Chris were decades beyond the need to prove themselves; the sound here is of men with much yet to offer. Material reveals a pair eager to trek beyond the confines of orthodox Rockabilly. That genre's swagger was retained, along with twangy flourishes, but set in a contemporary context.
Willingness to slip out of aesthetic constraint makes this release rewarding. As they are beyond probative burden, they are free to reap benefits from spirited arrangements.
Whether the steadily chugging "Have I the Right," the Country reclination in "Please Don't," stroller "I'll Make It Right," or the Bo Diddley-beat of "Don't Let Go," you're in the hands of masters.
Over in the hot rod column, "Please Don't Touch," "Tell him No," and "Believe What You Say" barrel down roads like gassers. No cherry-topped cruiser has a prayer.
The energy level is so high as to seize listeners in paroxyms of happy fracture. The songcraft is solid, the execution masterful. One again marvels at the perfect pairing of Voice and Guitar.
Robert's immense tone is richer and more sinewy than when he emerged. His presence is tremendous. And Chris flabbergasts, as always, with incomparable fretboard wizardry; he effortlessly blends airs and changes from the popular musics songbook.
Together, the two were nonpareil.
"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.
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