Cheap at Half the Price
“Pop music is a music, if nothing else, of standardization, where the instruments and the records are mass-produced,” says Frith. “I thought it might be interesting to approach it from the opposite standpoint and try to make a completely standardized music with completely non-standard means […] a low-tech record using homemade instruments.” He kept that this idea for over a year, yet it refused to gel. “I made a lot of prototype instruments which ended up being used more for improvising than anything else. I wanted to use them in this different way, but somehow everything kept getting put off. I never quite got to grips with it. Maybe because it wasn’t substantial enough of a project – just an idea. But I would still like at some point to further explore making pop music out of non-standardized instruments.”
What Frith finally came up with for Cheap at Half the Price (1983), his third Ralph album, were pop songs; pretty much straight-ahead pop songs, in fact. But they’re straight-ahead Frith pop songs, and that kind of contradiction in terms is precisely what the genre needs to bring it back to something approximating life. (He goes through seven numbers and never once utters the word love, so he must be doing something right!) “I’ve often wanted to do absolute pop songs, pure and simple, to see whether it would be possible to use a very pop musical format and give it some edge. So I guess it just came out that way.”
It sure did. But it didn’t come easy. “After a one-and-a-half-year period of fooling around, I had three tracks and nothing else. (They were all fairly experimental, and they’re all on the second side.) The only other resources that I had, apart from instruments, were a bunch of tapes of drumming. Three of these bits of drumming were in fact lifted from tracks that I had previously done: Fred Maher on one track left over from Speechless, and Paul Sears on another left over from Gravity. The third piece had actually already been on two albums: the Aqsak Maboul record and Gravity [Frank Wuyts’ track on “Come Across” …] In addition, I had a tape that the drummer on Gravity, Hasse, had made at my request. As I was leaving, after we’d recorded all the stuff, I asked him to very quickly record a bunch of generic drum examples of dance music. I wanted him to play ten seconds of this and ten seconds of that, on the off chance that I might use it for something. And I didn’t use it for anything – I maybe used one of them. But the others were just sitting there, and I rediscovered this reel that has about 15 different kinds of drumming, each of which lasts about 15 seconds. And I found that, with a certain amount of judicious editing or looping, I could make these into drum tracks. So I guess five of the drum tracks – if we include the first track of Side Two – are based on these 15-second bursts of drumming.”
The fact that Frith is playing practically everything on the album except for the drums is the kind of virtuosity you’d come to expect from him. But having put in some hard time with Skeleton Crew, he was ready to really stretch himself as a singer, and the real glory of Cheap – even more than his editing skill in producing coherent drum tracks from snippets of playing, or the new vigor he brings to a pop format – is how overwhelmingly, imaginatively vocal this record is. His singing in the pop songs certainly has a much livelier range than anything he’d done before, and always to the strengthening of their meaning. And the really impressive chops are on Side Two, the ‘instrumental’ half, of Cheap.
Frith may not have tackled Cheap’s pop songs within the home-made idiom he initially had in mind, but you still couldn’t mistake them for anybody else – even though the first cut, “Some Clouds Don’t,” is a deliberately simple genre piece, with its simplicity underlined by squeezebox-&-calliope keyboards and somewhat impersonal, double-tracked vocals. The guitar licks are restrained but perfectly respectable; the bass playing, as is often the case with Frith, is a lot better than that.[1] But he isn’t out to wow anyone yet, just to tweak whatever dread of pop there may be in whoever’s listening – including himself. There’s also a second dread on his mind in this bouncy yet cautionary opener: “Beware of the wise – lies, lies, lies. They have shoes that will fit any size – why, why, why? […] Some clouds don’t have a silver lining.”
“Cap the Knife” is a wilder cut, its hectic music punctuated by clips of marching soldiers, gunfire, and, most unpleasantly of all, some bromides that pass for ideas in a Reagan speech. The first gem, “the vast resources,” is followed by such old standards as “neighbors,” “partnership,” “peaceful progress,” etc., until the Prez gets to the point: “our own vital interests.” But “Cap the Knife” doesn’t try to paint Reagan as an idiot. Rather than gild a lily, Frith wants us to read between the lines of Reagan’s noises – just as his improvisations try to discover the true character, the neglected beauty of quotidian sounds. When Frith speaks for himself in “Cap,” it’s more to warn than to lecture: “One loving lick from a little pet dog could kill.”
Another cautionary ditty. Fear informs almost all the songs on Cheap – a more specific political fear than the hydra-headed angst of Speechless, and one perhaps more objectively justifiable too, because some devils can’t be supped with no matter how long your spoon is. But Frith’s real concern is with the roots of evil, not its flowers. He sings about the people who are most familiar to his listeners: the ones who become the thugs’ silent accomplices out of despair, inertia, and ignorance. For Frith, the yuppie generation is no different from any other. People still believe that you get only one lunge at the trough, so you better make a real pig of yourself. But there’s no guarantee that dehumanization stops with pighood (pigdom? piggery?). “Evolution,” perhaps the best song on Cheap, is a creepy portrait of what’s left when everyone capitulates. “Welcome to the insects” is the refrain, with uncomfortably entomoid vocals and accompaniment. Other lyrics are cliché phrases for Frith’s obsessive themes of apathy, evasion, and fear: “just another reject,” “let’s change the subject,” “where are the suspects?”
The number-one suspect is that disappointed, self-absorbed face in the mirror, and its classic mugshot is in Cheap’s brilliant “Same Old Me,” where Frith’s enthusiasm for character acting leads him to do a real Lon Chaney. “Same old hat, same old coat, same old shoes, same old smile, same old books, same old opinions, same old lies, same old shit,” he croaks, and a voice treated with a low register and mild distortion. It perfectly evokes the character’s bloated, paralyzed failure, singing slightly out of sync with the propulsive accompaniment, in which Frith movingly sketches in his own fear and disgust. There’s even pathos, as the catalogue of revulsion concludes with the hard facts: “Same old news, same old tragedies, same old sleep, same old sleep, same old stupid habits, same old fucking problems, same old ME.”
But the Cheap songs never slide into bitterness. Solidarity is the heart of Frith’s music; liberation through understanding and action is the goal. He simply doesn’t believe that our lives are tiresome reruns of greed and brutishness – although I’m sure he could cite plenty of evidence for that argument. Some of his finest music touches on a transcendental serenity, but he hasn’t yet made a song which evokes that vision. Sublimity is still something beyond words, and in his songs, the best he can offer is a simple, cheery hopefulness. The delightful “Some Clouds Do,” the last of Cheap’s cycle of Side One songs, has two brief vocal sections where he sings, “Some clouds do, some clouds don’t,” over and over again. Frith uses a haze of random sounding home-made playing, impersonal vocals, a simple melody, repetition all elements which, in certain instrumental works have expressed his most powerful feelings. Here, in keeping with the song’s pop genre, they describe a guarded optimism that counterbalances the warning of Cheap’s opener. His parting promise of silver is the most charming cut on the album, but this isn’t the music where he mines the gold. Tapping that mother lode requires risk, experimentation, and discovery.
Side Two has some of his best pick-and-shovel work, starting with “Instant Party” and “Walking Song”: lively upbeat pieces that seem completely unrelated to the fears of Side One. If you’re looking for problems, the worst you could say is that Frith’s party is sometimes more boisterous than lively – especially that outburst of loud, bleary revelers spirited into the first part of the song, a tape of someone’s actual party. The glistening nocturnal “Walking Song,” with its Middle Eastern lilt, is more unambiguously attractive. More personalized too, thanks to Frith’s wordless singing. The song suggests a snapshot of his itinerant life, taken at one of those moments when it feels like the best way to live. But for all his vocalizing on cheap, Frith hasn’t buried Speechless’ anxieties over the strangling of communication. They’re collapsed into one searing cut, “Flying in the Face of Facts.” Ironically, it’s the most purely vocal work on the album: Its only instrumental lines are quiet Casio chords that create an almost-subliminal harmonic uneasiness, and a Jews-harp-like twang that measures out the pulse in water-torture droplets.
Frith places three extraordinary vocal lines against this backdrop. The only track plainly recognizable as his singing is played backwards, creating a grotesque impression of someone vainly struggling to make himself understood. It’s one of the most powerful things I’ve heard him do on record, because these lead vocals don’t sound like just a backwards tape. He obscures the effect in the mix (and with some processing of the track itself?), making it come across as though he were actually singing those choked, imploding words. A second vocal character distantly shadows this voice with animal-like yelps and howls and bleats. Frith mercifully perforates both lines with silences, but the third, a bristling skein of rhythmic, percussive static, runs through the entire cut. And if you don’t believe me when I say it’s Frith with a mic to his lips, blasting out air and rapping his tongue against his clenched teeth, then listen to it again and notice the occasional breaths he takes, which create little commas in his nonstop aria. Any one of these lines is strong enough to carry a cut of its own; “Flying in the Face of Facts” can barely contain the intensity of all three, and at certain moments the music wrenches into an emotional nakedness that’s pretty damned scary.
Frith says that, “at a certain point, when I was going through a lot of bad times domestically, a whole lot of songs emerged.” It’s easy to see “Flying in the Face of Facts” as a nightmare of trying to express yourself with your defenses down. But the song also suggests Frith’s frustration with people’s indifference to what their governments are doing, an idea all over Side One. One of the facts he’s been flying in the face of is that most people who live in the West don’t give a shit about what’s going on around them, much less about Karl Marx. You’re out there trying to make ideas clear, and you’re getting the Dog Routine from everybody, their blank-eyed heads abruptly listing 45 degrees – you might as well be speaking ecclesiastical Latin. And of course, there’s the hideous possibility that, intellectually or spiritually, you have ivory-towered your expression of this idea. The fact is, no one’s realizing any idea to its fullest. If you want to stop undercutting yourself, you have to chase down your negativities, confront them, and free yourself of them. And doing that can sometimes hurt.
To knit everything back together after “Flying in the Face of Facts,” Frith offers up three different, very special pieces. The first, “Heart Bares,” surprisingly alludes to the music of Reich and Glass, most obviously in its steady eighth-note pulse. From Reich (especially Music for 18 Musicians or Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ), Frith adapts the layering of changing lines and the ko-ko-ko vocals that swell and fade; from Glass, the sensation of forward motion, the constant sound of electric keyboards, and the visceral effect of simply cutting from one harmonic area to another as the music streams on endlessly (one of the beauties of Music in 12 Parts and Music with Changing Parts). But with its detached, contemplative atmosphere, “Heart Bares” is pure Frith. You aren’t confronting Reich’s troop of musicians or Glass’ cranked-up ensemble. There’s only the quiet, lovely tracks of Frith playing and singing, impersonal and intimate at the same time. That quality, so typical of Frith, is here created – how else? – vocally: He cools down the intimacy and personality of his hushed singing by overdubbing several tracks of his voice and varying their volume and timbre.
The second gem, “Absent Friends,” is Frith’s reinvention of a traditional Swedish tune. Not insignificantly, it’s also the first of Cheap’s two non-vocal cuts. One of the best ways to repair your melon is to shut up, step outside yourself, and embrace the vitality of the Folk. And judging from the golden strength and openness of Frith’s music, it hugs him right back. “Absent Friends” is another solo venture – almost. He’s still carrying most of the weight himself (here on Casio, guitar, home-mades, and violin), but he’s also included other musicians in the form of the rhythmic clapping of Aqsak Maboul. I’m sure they’re simply a leftover track from an old session; more creative editing, just like the drum tracks he stitched together for Side One’s songs. But working with friends, even when they are absent, is what it’s all about.
Or is it? The final cut on Cheap is a brief glimpse of a beautiful, quasi-electronic sound – or rather, three individual sounds that move together in a rocking or beating pulse, subtly going in and out of sync with each other. The most prominent of the trio is a repeated cycle of high-pitched tones, rhythmically suggestive of a broken wind-up toy stuck in the groove of one fragmentary movement. (Reinforcing this quality is a slurring of pitch heard toward the end of the cut.) But that image isn’t enough, because it doesn’t touch the, well, the purity of this bell-like, crystalline music. There is no feeling that anyone’s playing this stuff. It could easily pass for an insistent, unidentified radio signal – a message from space, perhaps. That non-human quality, that sense of something independent of people, something permanent and incorruptible, links this exquisite work with Frith’s blissful Nature pieces, and I think we should take him at his word when he calls this cut “The Great Healer.”
In all three of his albums for Ralph Records, Frith gets around to celebrating the selfless freedom and serenity of Walden Pond. The sound and movement and color of life, undiminished by anyone’s ego, is the world’s best music. This understanding is the unspoken heart of Gravity. In Speechless, Frith up and speaks it, even though it’s a round-peg revelation he’s offering our square-hole world. But for the sake of his and our sanity, Frith still keeps the faith in Cheap at Half the Price. The only change is the heightened eloquence and virtuosity of its expression.
FOOTNOTES
1. One of these days, he’s going to pursue this instrument with the diligence and love he’s brought to singing, and the results are going to knock everyone on their ass.
2. Frith’s music has repeatedly combined his love of the sounds of everyday life with his fascination with the banality of evil: Bits of commercials, news broadcasts, and TV shows are all over Skeleton Crew’s Learn to Talk (a quick three cheers for the hilarious yea-saying yokel sprinkled into “It’s Fine”!), as well as the appropriately titled Voice of America (1982), an album of concert improvisations by Frith, Bob Ostertag, and Phil Minton.
3. I’ve listened to this track forwards but can make out practically none of the lyrics. All I can catch is the word that’s most frequently repeated, “hummingbird” – a fowl that’s theoretically incapable of flying, which suggests a more hopeful idea hidden in the song: Beware of the wise and their facts, and believe the truth that’s hovering in your face.
Links to:
SONIC TRANSPORTS: Fred Frith Contents
SONIC TRANSPORTS: Contents
For more on Fred Frith, see:
Music Book: Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music, Second Edition
Music: KALW Radio Show #1, A Few of My Favorite Things…
Music: SFCR Radio Show #6, Postmodernism, part 3: Three Contemporary Masters
NICOLE V. GAGNÉ 