The Crickets in the Flats
The
third song on The Sound of the Sand and
as long as the first two put together (4:59 following from 1:55 and 2:13) ‘The Crickets
in the Flats’ is the only song on the David Thomas solo oeuvre that I’m aware
of that actually doesn’t include David Thomas. The Sound of the Sand album is credited to ‘David Thomas and The
Pedestrians,’ so one might grant a concession to the possibility that this is
the moment where ‘The Pedestrians’ shine. However the sleevenotes on the
original vinyl album (not the CD box set) indicate that this track (and
another, ‘Crush This Horn, Part Two’) is actually by The Golden Palominos (other tracks are
variously by The Eggs and The Trees). The Golden Palominos is the name that
Anton Fier would very soon take on for his full-time concern, a group producing
a series of collaborative albums throughout the 1980s and into the 90s, to some
acclaim and success (in 2012 The Village
Voice described the band, on their brief return, as ‘a loose collective of A-list players who combined stunning chops with
sensitive accompanist skills’ (http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-12-26/voice-choices/wild-horses/).
As far as I can tell, this is the first time he used the name (although on p. 295 of Viv Albertine's memoir Albertine claims to have seen the band in 1979). The songwriting
credit for ‘Crickets in the Flats’ is Fier’s alone – and it seems also to have
been the first time he had a solo composition released. The Golden Palominos in
this incarnation were Fier with Richard Thompson and fomer Henry Cow bassist John
Greaves. Both Thomas and Allen Ravenstine are listed as a members of this band but they ‘did not play on The Crickets in the Flats’.
The
scrambled nature of Sound of the Sand is
evident everywhere, and the two tracks prior to this one on the album are
hiding their own internal scrambledness in plain sight. ‘The Crickets in the
Flats’ doesn’t belong here because it is so un-scrambled; it’s a robust,
powerful rhythmic piece in which the drums and percussion alone account for
most of the musical content.
In one of the few interviews with Fier I’ve been
able to uncover, he says that:
before I started studying drums and percussion and rhythm, I studied
piano for about five years. I mean, I'm terrible; I quit playing as soon as I
was able because it's not what I do, and I knew that at a very early age as
well. But I did gain a knowledge of music theory because of that, which helps
me with songwriting and arranging and things of that nature. http://www.melvinmagazine.com/Issue_8/PopCulture/Features/fier_interview.html
The
cymbals and bells particularly in the latter part of the track are most
definitely ‘piano-like’, and it’s easy to see where Fier used this early
experience. Greaves and Thompson take a textural role, and it is presumably one
or both of them who contribute the animalistic noises throughout (it’s hard to
tell whether these are vocal or something else).
It
is also open to conjecture whether this track was offered to Thomas to add
vocals, or whether indeed he attempted to do so and the experiment didn’t work (this
only occurred to me this morning, having read precisely nothing about such a
thing – though I do recall members of Pere Ubu suggesting in the early 80s that
Thomas freely exercised his right not to sing on a track). It might be assumed
that, if there was at one point a suggestion that Thomas provide a vocal here,
once it was decided that the track be an instrumental then extra percussion
(and perhaps the noises, perhaps even Greaves and Thompson) were dubbed on top,
i.e. no-one, even David Thomas, could be heard in such dense cacophony as it
stands. The vocal-attempt theory is bolstered, in my mind at least, by the
similarity between this track and ‘The Rain’, on the second David Thomas and
the Pedestrians album Variations on a
Theme; which is to say that perhaps Thomas saw the value in a track like this one, but with more gaps. The fact that Lindsay Cooper plays a
similar, if more complex, melody in ‘The Rain’ to that which Fier chimes
towards the end of ‘The Cricket in the Flats’ bolsters this argument for me but
it might just be me (Fier is absent from Variations
on a Theme).
Fier
was Pere Ubu’s drummer for one album (Song
of the Bailing Man) and notoriously, and perhaps amusingly for some
outsiders, the degree to which he and Mayo Thompson rubbed each other up the
wrong way is plain. Ravenstine, in his interview with Perfect Sound Forever,
discusses the dedication to which Fier gave to practice, and his strong belief
in rehearsal; Thompson on the other hand was as resolutely uninterested in such activities. You could ask how two such strong
minded and opposed characters could co-exist in one band, until you realise
that the short-lived nature of that line up of Pere Ubu shows that, quite
simply, they couldn’t, and indeed, Pere Ubu itself broke up for five or so
years thereafter (or should I say, Thomas ceased trading under the name: could
a record such as Sound of the Sand have
been passed off as a Pere Ubu album? I actually suspect that the ins and outs
of that reality come back to the intricacies of trading name rights, and the
like. I certainly would love to know what Scott Krauss thought he was working
towards when he recorded ‘Happy to See You’ with Thomas, Ralph Carney etc.)
This,
then, is ‘The Crickets in the Flats’ (if meaningless minutiae is your game, let
me just add that the CD omits the ‘The’). The monster noises, the hinted-at
melody and the clattering syncopation presage much of the later Thomas (and
post-Fier Pere Ubu) work, as does the obtuseness.
Close
reading of the line-ups on tracks on Sound
of the Sand also suggest that this was an album of many jams and overdubs..
This was surely (I’ve convinced myself) the one that neither Thomas nor
Ravenstine saw an opportunity to add to.
*Update April 2023: I have just become aware that in a 2010 interview with Jason Gross published after Fier's death he said: 'The name came first; Arto and I were in The Lounge Lizards and before that, we wanted to call it Golden Palo but got vetoed. I used the name for the first time on a David Thomas solo album, The Sound Of The Sand [1981]. Different groupings for different songs were credited for different combinations. One song was a solo track credited to Golden Palominos.' https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/interviews/anton-fier-a-toast-to-the-restless-drummer
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