Nov 2011 / THE UGLY

UNDER-APPRECIATED ROCK BAND OF THE MONTH FOR NOVEMBER 2011:  THE UGLY

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A long time ago in a city far, far away . . . well, okay, it was Christmas 1977 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  (I always had trouble fitting that loooong city and state on various forms).  We Winfree kids often bought records for each other as presents, and I guess my tastes were already getting tough to read.  My sister Julie Winfree (now Julie W. Kovasckitz) told me that she went to the local record store and asked them what album was the most “b-e-e-a-a-r-r-r-w, w-e-e-a-a-r-r-r-r-w” in the store.  In case you can’t figure that out, that is my cruddy impression of a loud guitar all spelled out as best I can.  It was often just shortened to “bow wow” music. 

 

Well, she hit the jackpot:  The album she gave me for Christmas that year was Hurt by Chris Spedding.  Oh, did I love that record – I played that LP all the time and just about wore it out.  When I started making compilation cassette tapes for myself some years later, one of my favorite series, Wild Wild Women (nothing but woman-fronted rock bands – the Volume 2 in that series was the best one that I ever put together) was named after one of the songs on the album.  The album cover is a black and white shot of Spedding striking a guitar chord with some day-glo colors overlaying it, and with more day-glo lettering on the back cover.  Looking back on it, Chris Spedding must have released this album as his response to the punk rock movement that was just starting to take hold, since loud colors were one of the hallmarks of punk rock cover art early on. 

 

I got several more albums by Spedding over the years and was never disappointed, though none ever topped Hurt.  One in particular, his 1986 album called Enemy Within, is really quite different from Hurt but no less wonderful (it is no exaggeration to say that Chris Spedding has played just about every kind of rock music that there is); the ad that prompted me to buy it by mailorder had a short but perfect description:  “Moody, under-stated work”.  A compilation album called Ready Spedding Go that I cleaned up from the Katrina mud not long ago ends with a cut that I think is called “Guitar Jamboree”, imagining a gathering of a dozen or more of the great rock guitarists – and Spedding did a brief impression of all of their playing styles to end the song:  Quite a tour de force.  That compilation album also includes his only hit song, even in England, “Motor Bikin’” (from about the same time period as Hurt ). 

 

Chris Spedding is well known in his home country of England (at least by other musicians) but, sadly, has never really taken hold over here.  Even the so-called experts don’t seem to get him right; Allmusic’s review of Enemy Within (talk about under-appreciated – they only give the record 2½ stars out of 5; of course, Hurt only got 3 stars) shows the songwriter as being “Speeding” instead of “Spedding”, except for the opening track “Hologram”, which I believe he co-wrote with Marshall Crenshaw.  Also, I seem to recall that this album is actually a re-issue of an early self-titled solo album, but there is not a hint of that on this write-up; I could be wrong about that though. 

 

Chris Spedding is also one of the most versatile British session guitarists; like Bo Diddley before him, he played violin first before switching to the electric guitar.  Spedding has played with a lot of the English heavy hitters, including early work with a band called Pete Brown and His Battered Ornaments.  They played at a famous Hyde Park concert in July 1969 that also included the Rolling Stones, Blind Faith and, at the very beginning of their career, King Crimson.  When Pete Brown was later pushed out by basically everyone else in the band, Chris Spedding became the front man in the Battered Ornaments; and his fame began to grow. 

 

Chris Spedding went on to play with Cream bassist Jack Bruce (including his first solo album in 1969, Songs for a Tailor) and former Manfred Mann singer Mike D’Abo, plus a host of others, from Elton John to John Cale to Brian Eno to Harry Nilsson (including one of his best known albums, Nilsson Schmilsson).  In 1973, Andy Fraser, the former bass player for Free (“All Right Now”) brought Spedding in as the lead guitarist for his short-lived band Sharks. 

 

In 1978, Chris Spedding was a key musician in one of the most ambitious concept albums of all time (and the best selling British concert/cast album ever), Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds.  Actor Richard Burton handled the narration, and the musicians are a virtual Who’s Who of the British rock scene of that era:  Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues, Chris Thompson of Manfred Mann, Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy, bass guitarist Herbie Flowers (that’s him playing the prominent bass line on Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”), David Essex (“Rock On”), and actress/vocalist Julie Covington; she and Essex had been appearing together in early performances of the rock musical Evita.  The album tells the story pretty much as The War of the Worlds was written by H. G. Wells (much of Burton’s narration is word-for-word from the novel) decades before Steven Spielberg’s film basically did the same; I consider War of the Worlds to be one of Spielberg’s best movies and certainly his most disturbing. 

 

Fast-forward a couple of decades, and I am looking over some mailorder sheet or other (usually it is Bomp!, but I have ordered from plenty more over the years).  I spot a compilation album called Disorder by a first-wave Canadian punk rock band called THE UGLY that was remastered by Chris Spedding in 1995, and I had to order it just on the strength of Spedding’s having a hand in it. 

 

The first thing I noticed was how clear the sound is.  I am used to the lo-fi quality of early punk records that normally ranges from muddy to unintelligible (and the last several tracks on Disorder are like that), but there was none of that on the main tape from which this compilation was taken.  Chris Spedding did yeoman’s work to really bring out every last wrinkle of this band’s work. 

 

Punk rockers often pick out wacko names; frontman Jello Biafra of Dead Kennedys, drummer Rat Scabies of the Damned, and of course Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious of Sex Pistols are examples.  Usually it is just one or two bandmembers who do that, but all of the Ugly did:  Mike Nightmare (singer), Raymi Gutter (guitar), Sam Ugly (bass), and Tony Torcher (drums), plus soundman Johnny Garbagecan. 

 

Sam Ugly (who was only 16) and Tony Torcher had played together in a Anglophile band called the Markeys that played a lot of early Stones, Yardbirds, Animals, Kinks, and Who songs.  After they heard the first Ramones album, and after several of the early punkers came through town – Patti Smith, Talking Heads, and Iggy Pop – a new direction was clear; and the band brought in lead singer Mike Nightmare and his brother Raymi Gutter (when original Markeys guitarist Brian Vadders wouldn’t cut his hair) – good thing, too, because it is Gutter’s guitar that really stands out here.  The band started out with the name Rotten and changed it when they heard about Johnny Rotten.  The Ugly are from Toronto; nobody has said so, but I have a theory that the name comes from shortening the name of the Ugly Ducklings, one of the best Canadian rock bands of the 1960’s who are also from Toronto – else, they might have just gone with “Ugly”.  After several weeks of practicing, they had their first public performance in August 1977. 

 

As to the music, well, I can’t say it better than the liner notes:  “Rivaled only by the Viletones, the Ugly were the crassest, rawest, loudest and most obnoxious band on the Toronto scene”.  Unlike those rivals (who were led by a spoiled rich kid who went by the name of Nazi Dog, and who had the support of some members of the music establishment that were also slumming), the Ugly were truly scary people who played what they termed “hoodlum rock”.  Bassist Sam Ugly recalls:  “One of the biggest problems in the progress of the Ugly was that one of us was always in jail.  We had to cancel a lot of shows.  We’d play out-of-the-way joints so the cops had trouble finding us and [singer Mike Nightmare] would wear a disguise.” 

 

That’s Mike Nightmare on the Disorder CD cover photo with about as ugly an expression as possible, along with his equally ugly trademark yellow sunglasses.  As if that weren’t enough, the back photo shows the Ugly shirtless, with one bandmember having his pants partway off and another having his pants completely off. 

 

The Ugly compilation CD, Disorder comes mainly from a tape that was discovered in a garage; none of the Toronto punk bands ever got a major recording contract, so it is a miracle that this music exists at all.  The songs were all written by the band except for the last two cuts that come from their final performance in the winter of 1978, “Hey Little Girl” and “Lust for Life”.  “Lust for Life” is the most accessible Iggy Pop song – sometimes misidentified as a Stooges song – and was co-written by Iggy Pop and David Bowie; remarkably, the song was used for several years as the theme song for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, starting right after Peggy and I had our honeymoon aboard one of their big ships.  At the end of that performance, Raymi Gutter smashed his guitar, shook hands with the other bandmembers, and split. 

 

Highlights of Disorder by the Ugly are “Disorder”, “You Gotta Be Mean”, “No Place to Go”, “Hell Time”, “Baby You Bug Me”, and “Black Days” (that’s one of the lo-fi songs, but you don't mind when the music is this good); actually though, this is one of those records that works best as an album.  Some of the chatter between songs is included also, with F-bombs flying the whole time.  On “Hell Time”, about halfway through the singer does a mock confession to a priest – and I have never wanted to listen too closely to what he was saying. 

 

Their most infamous moment came when a punk rock concert called Outrage was being filmed in Toronto, and the Ugly were excluded from the bill.  About midway through the concert, they threw a flaming guitar at the Viletones while they were singing “Danger Boy”.  Nazi Dog put out the fire; after a while, he busted up the guitar and threw it into the crowd.  But the Ugly had the last laugh when they stormed on stage and snatched up the Viletones’ instruments for an impromptu performance of “Disorder” that lasted less than a minute.  After they pulled the plug, Mike Nightmare then fought it out with the Viletones’ Freddy Pompeii until Mike was literally thrown back into the crowd by the bikers who were on security detail.  It is all still on the film though, to this day.  (Ironically, Mike Nightmare also got beaten up pretty badly by one of the musicians who worked with Chris Spedding on War of the Worlds, Phil Lynott). 

 

So why was Chris Spedding called in anyway to clean up the music for this CD?  Well, as it turns out, Spedding was the producer on the first demos made by the Sex Pistols, back in May 1976 – the Ramones album that had also fired up the Ugly was released in the previous month. 

 

The Sex Pistols demos have recently been reissued on CD; according to Chris Spedding though:  “They are not the same mixes that I did.  Dave Goodman, the other producer besides Chris Thomas, went in and re-did them and added a lot of echo to them and added stuff to them. . . .  The mixes I did sound better.  I’m quite proud of the Sex Pistols demos, especially when compared to their other later recordings. . . .  Part of why they ([manager Malcolm] McLaren and the Pistols) didn’t like my demo was because I like R&B. . . .  The whole point of my demo – to prove they could play – that’s what I pushed. . . .  And that’s what McLaren wanted people to think:  that they couldn’t play, that was just an idea, a way of making all this anarchy stuff happen.” 

 

Actually Sid Vicious – a late addition to the Sex Pistols – was the only member who couldn’t play his instrument.  And there is also no doubt that the Ugly are accomplished musicians, nihilistic though they might be. 

 

Toward the end of the liner notes are quotes from the bandmembers in the Ugly:  from Sam Ugly and Raymi Gutter in 1996, and from Mike Nightmare and Tony Torcher from 1977.  Three of them talk about their place in the Toronto punk rock scene and such, while Torcher simply says:  “F--- the Viletones.” 

 

I can’t explain why, but the purity and no-apologies tone of that last quote has really impressed me over the years.  Many times I have thought to myself that if (God forbid) I found myself in the hands of a gang of terrorists, sharpening their knives to lop off my head, the first thing I would say when they turned the camera on me would be:  “F--- the Viletones!”  Assuming I got another shot at the camera, I would then say:  “Death to Videodrome – long live the New Flesh!”  (That’s a line near the end of one of my very favorite horror movies, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome). 

 

Do I wake up every day thinking that I just have to have my daily Ugly fix?  Not hardly.  But every now and then (like today!), the music sure does feel just right! 

 

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The Honor Roll of the Under Appreciated Rock Bands and Artists follows, in date order, including a link to the original Facebook posts and the theme of the article.

 

Dec 2009 – BEAST; Lot to Learn

Jan 2010 – WENDY WALDMAN; Los Angeles Singer-Songwriters

Feb 2010 – CYRUS ERIE; Cleveland

Mar 2010 – BANG; Record Collecting I

Apr 2010 – THE BREAKAWAYS; Power Pop

May 2010 – THE NOT QUITE; Katrina Clean-Up

Jun 2010 – WATERLILLIES; Electronica

Jul 2010 – THE EYES; Los Angeles Punk Rock

Aug 2010 – QUEEN ANNE’S LACE; Psychedelic Pop

Sep 2010 – THE STILLROVEN; Minnesota

Oct 2010 – THE PILTDOWN MEN; Record Collecting II

Nov 2010 – SLOVENLY; Slovenly Peter

Dec 2010 – THE POPPEES; New York Punk/New Wave

Jan 2011 – HACIENDA; Latinos in Rock

Feb 2011 – THE WANDERERS; Punk Rock (1970’s/1980’s)

Mar 2011 – INDEX; Psychedelic Rock (1960’s)

Apr 2011 – BOHEMIAN VENDETTA; Punk Rock (1960’s)

May 2011 – THE LONESOME DRIFTER; Rockabilly

Jun 2011 – THE UNKNOWNS; Disabled Musicians

Jul 2011 – THE RIP CHORDS; Surf Rock I

Aug 2011 – ANDY COLQUHOUN; Side Men

Sep 2011 – ULTRA; Texas

Oct 2011 – JIM SULLIVAN; Mystery

Nov 2011 – THE UGLY; Punk Rock (1970’s)

Dec 2011 – THE MAGICIANS; Garage Rock (1960’s)

Jan 2012 – RON FRANKLIN; Why Celebrate Under Appreciated?

Feb 2012 – JA JA JA; German New Wave

Mar 2012 – STRATAVARIOUS; Disco Music

Apr 2012 – LINDA PIERRE KING; Record Collecting III

May 2012 – TINA AND THE TOTAL BABES; One Hit Wonders

Jun 2012 – WILD BLUE; Band Names I

Jul 2012 – DEAD HIPPIE; Band Names II

Aug 2012 – PHIL AND THE FRANTICS; Wikipedia I

Sep 2012 – CODE BLUE; Hidden History

Oct 2012 – TRILLION; Wikipedia II

Nov 2012 – THOMAS ANDERSON; Martin Winfree’s Record Buying Guide

Dec 2012 – THE INVISIBLE EYES; Record Collecting IV

Jan 2013 – THE SKYWALKERS; Garage Rock Revival

Feb 2013 – LINK PROTRUDI AND THE JAYMEN; Link Wray

Mar 2013 – THE GILES BROTHERS; Novelty Songs

Apr 2013 – LES SINNERS; Universal Language

May 2013 – HOLLIS BROWN; Greg Shaw / Bob Dylan

Jun 2013 (I) – FUR (Part One); What Might Have Been I

Jun 2013 (II) – FUR (Part Two); What Might Have Been II

Jul 2013 – THE KLUBS; Record Collecting V

Aug 2013 – SILVERBIRD; Native Americans in Rock

Sep 2013 – BLAIR 1523; Wikipedia III

Oct 2013 – MUSIC EMPORIUM; Women in Rock I

Nov 2013 – CHIMERA; Women in Rock II

Dec 2013 – LES HELL ON HEELS; Women in Rock III

Jan 2014 – BOYSKOUT; (Lesbian) Women in Rock IV

Feb 2014 – LIQUID FAERIES; Women in Rock V

Mar 2014 (I) – THE SONS OF FRED (Part 1); Tribute to Mick Farren

Mar 2014 (II) – THE SONS OF FRED (Part 2); Tribute to Mick Farren

Apr 2014 – HOMER; Creating New Bands out of Old Ones

May 2014 – THE SOUL AGENTS; The Cream Family Tree

Jun 2014 – THE RICHMOND SLUTS and BIG MIDNIGHT; Band Names (Changes) III

Jul 2014 – MIKKI; Rock and Religion I (Early CCM Music)

Aug 2014 – THE HOLY GHOST RECEPTION COMMITTEE #9; Rock and Religion II (Bob Dylan)

Sep 2014 – NICK FREUND; Rock and Religion III (The Beatles)

Oct 2014 – MOTOCHRIST; Rock and Religion IV

Nov 2014 – WENDY BAGWELL AND THE SUNLITERS; Rock and Religion V

Dec 2014 – THE SILENCERS; Surf Rock II

Jan 2015 (I) – THE CRAWDADDYS (Part 1); Tribute to Kim Fowley

Jan 2015 (II) – THE CRAWDADDYS (Part 2); Tribute to Kim Fowley

Feb 2015 – BRIAN OLIVE; Songwriting I (Country Music)

Mar 2015 – PHIL GAMMAGE; Songwriting II (Woody Guthrie/Bob Dylan)

Apr 2015 (I) – BLACK RUSSIAN (Part 1); Songwriting III (Partnerships)

Apr 2015 (II) – BLACK RUSSIAN (Part 2); Songwriting III (Partnerships)

May 2015 – MAL RYDER and THE PRIMITIVES; Songwriting IV (Rolling Stones)

Jun 2015 – HAYMARKET SQUARE; Songwriting V (Beatles)

Jul 2015 – THE HUMAN ZOO; Songwriting VI (Psychedelic Rock)

Aug 2015 – CRYSTAL MANSION; Martin Winfree’s Record Cleaning Guide

Dec 2015 – AMANDA JONES; So Many Rock Bands

Mar 2016 – THE LOVEMASTERS; Fun Rock Music

Jun 2016 – THE GYNECOLOGISTS; Offensive Rock Music Lyrics

Sep 2016 – LIGHTNING STRIKE; Rap and Hip Hop

Dec 2016 – THE IGUANAS; Iggy and the Stooges; Proto-Punk Rock

Mar 2017 – THE LAZY COWGIRLS; Iggy and the Stooges; First Wave Punk Rock

Jun 2017 – THE LOONS; Punk Revival and Other New Bands

Sep 2017 – THE TELL-TALE HEARTS; Bootleg Albums

Dec 2017 – SS-20; The Iguana Chronicles

(Year 10 Review)