6.3 Pop Heresiarchs: Johnny Aggro’s Brian Jones Shango Baptist Routine: part 3 of 3
Walter Benjamin and 1988
Johnny Aggro’s Brian Jones Shango Baptist Routine: part 3 of 3
That night, Johnny and his pal figured out the theory behind Rock My Religion II. Watson said that Walter Benjamin was a collector of visual impressions. He had strolled through the old Paris arcades and assembled in his mind a diorama of revolutionary images. This was well known. It would take Johnny Aggro, said Watson, pointing at his friend, to wander the folkways of the North Atlantic and compile an anthology of revolutionary sounds. Johnny accepted the compliment. The two men nonetheless figured that this presented a certain difficulty. The audio archive didn’t go as far back in history as the visual archive. We have pictures of how the Iroquois people looked in the seventeenth century, said Watson. And that gives us a visual context for Marx’s praise of the Indians as models of primitive communism. But the Smithsonian didn’t record their medicine songs until the 1930s. Same with the blues, said Johnny. In fact, the very earliest blues recordings have all been lost.
There’s a lag, said Watson. Perhaps even a void. One which I intend to fill, said Johnny, triumphantly. He searched his pockets and showed Watson some of his latest index-cards. They featured ideas not for songs, but for the raw sonics of revolutionary history. Sounds which should have been recorded but which weren’t. Sounds which could never have ever been recorded except by a time-traveler with a tape-deck. Sounds of the old weird Atlantic. ‘War cries of the Chowan River’, ‘Slave dancing his chains on deck to a sea shanty’, ‘General Lambert’s call to arms at Daventry.’ Watson gave a long low whistle. He said he could only imagine what a Conny Plank or a Holger Czukay, one of his beloved tape-edit composers, might have done with access to such sounds. He shook his head. Did Johnny know what he was doing? In entering upon this new field of study, a purely hypothetical field of study, he was setting himself up for an intellectual career which would exceed any one man’s lifetime. Was he willing to risk it? Especially when the only reward was the dubious distinction of being called a prophet.
So began a long period of indigence for Johnny. He survived by doing odd bits of clerical work – proof-reading for the South London Press, temping at the GPO in St Martin’s Le Grand – while grimly hanging on to the Peabody chambers after Watson had departed. During his spare hours, Johnny wrote out ideas at a furious pace. These were mainly ideas for time-traveller field-recordings: ‘The scratching of Colonel Okey’s quill on the king’s death-warrant in 1649’, ‘The splash of the water over the head of Muddy Waters when he was baptised in Deer Creek’, ‘An escaped slave whistling on the Underground Railroad’. But there were also ideas for completely imaginary sounds: ‘Mob singing “woo-woo” at the burning of Parliament in 1968’, ‘Brian Jones elegy on mandolin for the hanging of Colonel Axtell at Tyburn.’ And there were even ideas for impossible, joke sounds: ‘Hinges creaking on Davy Jones’ Locker.’
By the late 1980s, Johnny had over 10,000 index-cards. They filled scores of shoe-boxes which were piled up in the nooks and crannies of his flat. One day, Watson paid him a surprise visit. Accompanying him was Minerva, a medical student. He suggested Johnny needed a filing system, some way of organising his material. Otherwise, he was at risk of simply compiling a shopping list of magic moments from Marxist historiography. Watson said it was something Adorno had warned Benjamin about, the danger of being spellbound by mere facts at the crossroads of history. Johnny frowned. He was aware that Watson was now working in advertising. He told his friend he didn’t get it. His collection was nowhere near complete. He had to keep going. Watson tried again. He asked what Johnny was expecting. Some kind of miracle? Johnny nodded. He felt like he was on the verge of a breakthrough. Watson gave it one last try. He said that Johnny’s father would never return to him through the dusty magic of his shoe-boxes. It was a cheap shot. But it worked.
Johnny paused his collecting, he re-surfaced from the detritus of his shoe-boxes. He surveyed the world around him, like a man disturbed from an opium dream. Let’s get to work, he said. Watson nodded. He dropped the needle on the twelve-inch of Model 500’s ‘Interference’, hoping the rush of Kraftwerk-style synth riffs and squelchy bass lines would get them both into the right kind of mood. Johnny immediately began plucking a series of index cards from his archive. As he handed them to his friend, Watson stuck them to the wall with adhesive, trying to get them to line up, to form some approximate dialectical progression.
Gradually, the outline of a narrative emerged. It was the first incarnation of Stone Dead, a surrealist treatment of Brian Jones as an idea. Johnny’s starting point was to take seriously Jones’s alter ego Elmore Lewis, casting him as a historically novel cultural figure, the Anglo-African bluesman, whose lineage could be traced back far beyond the Baptist ministers of the Afro-Christian church to the riverine shamans of the Yoruba people. In this conception, Jones was shaping up to be a kind of Ubu Roi figure, complete with cruel temperament, insatiable appetite for drugs and women, and fascination with ritual violence. Watson became obsessed with Jones’s visit to North Africa in August 1968 to record the Master Musicians of Joujouka. They were playing at the sacrificial feast of the G’nou tribe. Johnny saw the whole ceremony as an occult reckoning. The black men wanted to dress their honoured guest in the skin of a slaughtered goat, but Jones backed off from the initiation. Less than a year later, he was dead. Johnny shook his head. In the end, he spiked this treatment, worried that it was a form of racist mystification. Watson wasn’t sure if he agreed. Nevertheless, he suggested that Johnny might do better to focus his Rolling Stones research on Jagger rather than Jones. Jagger, he said, was a more legibly dialectical figure.
A few weeks later, Johnny got his slot at the Tunnel Club. The fact that he bombed with the audience obviously depressed him. By the end of the evening, I had joined Watson and Minerva in their efforts to console him. Minerva punched his Puritan hat back into shape. Watson slapped him on the back and said he was ahead of his time. I bought him a cigar and said I’d be glad to interview him about his work. He perked up a bit.
Outside, it was cold and damp. The tall iron frame of the gasometer presided over our good-byes. Johnny said he would send me a tape. I walked home in silence.
After that night, Johnny and I met up a few times. That was when we went out on our epic pub crawls of south-east London. Johnny was trying to make a go of his life at this point. He thought he could be a rock critic for the music press and submitted a review of a Throwing Muses gig to the NME. But they said it was ‘too academic’ for them. He had a brief fling with Minerva. But she soon left him, complaining of his ‘dark moods’. He drifted back into his Brian Jones obsession, talking of the call-and-response horn patterns of the Master Musicians of Joujouka. I could see he was sinking into depression. Abruptly, he stopped returning my calls.
The only reliable news I had of Johnny after that came from Watson. I bumped into him quite unexpectedly at the Clock House in East Dulwich one night. He said that Johnny’s stand-up career, such as it was, had stalled after he had discharged a firearm at the bar of the Royal College of Art. I expressed my shock and disbelief. Watson said that he was there. He had witnessed it. Johnny was doing a version of Stone Dead, a new version, a version of alternative history, in fact, which saw Brian Jones reimagined as a Shango Baptist. It was good! said Watson. Very good. But, of course, Johnny being Johnny, he had to go and sabotage any possibility of success. Watson and I drank in silence for a time. The small pub had a convivial atmosphere.
How the fuck does Brian Jones, in anyone’s wildest dream, get to become a Shango Baptist? I said at last. Watson smiled. He was kitted out in a large check suit. Johnny took liberties with Brian Jones’s life story, he said. Johnny figured that Jones should have gone to the Caribbean rather than Africa in 1968, that he should have recorded the hymn-singing and bell-ringing of the Shouter churches in Trinidad rather than the pipe-playing of the Master Musicians of Joujouka, that he should have allowed himself to be baptised into their faith. This would have saved him, Johnny was convinced, from drowning in the pool at his country house in East Sussex. How? I asked. Watson said that for Jones to have been ceremonially immersed in running fresh water rather than stagnant chlorinated water, to have cleansed himself of his resentments and rages, to have tamed his orisha and taken a holy sign from the Psalms, as the Shango Baptists did… all this, according to Johnny, would have enabled him to succeed where Jagger had failed in leading the revolutionary mob of London in 1968. Really? I said. Watson nodded. That was the moment in his performance, he said, when Johnny had removed his Colt from his jacket and fired a round into the ceiling.
Crikey! I said. Indeed, said Watson. He sipped his vodka and tonic. Desperate, really, he said. Maybe Johnny is an embittered revolutionary who has ended up fabricating history in order to maintain his illusions. That’s a bit harsh, I said. Watson shrugged. Okay then, maybe Johnny is just mad! It was clear Watson was suffering, in his own way. Maybe, I said, Johnny imagines himself a second Adam renaming a world redeemed by Karl Marx the Messiah. Jones’s miserable drowning, in his eschatology, is transformed into a righteous baptism. I laughed, despite myself. And all the sinners saints, said Watson, quoting the Jagger lyric from ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’
We decide to get drunk together. Johnny Fucking Aggro, Watson said, after a long interval. Maybe Johnny was on to something. The English bluesman as Shango Baptist does rather make sense of the oddities of Jones’s early life. I raised an eyebrow. Oh, said Watson, the fact that he was always attracted to bodies of moving water. The mineral springs of his home town of Cheltenham. The flow of the Thames at Eel Pie Island and, then, at Barnes, where the Olympic Studios were based. The fact that Jones was a good little church-goer in his youth – a member of the choir, in fact – and knew all the old hymns by heart. The fact that he could go into a trance-state as easily as succumbing to one of his asthma attacks. Watson leaned in confidentially. He used to say that he could hear the dead talking to him from the water-pipes of his Courtfield Road flat in South Ken. Imagine!
That was the last item of reliable news I had about Johnny. Minerva, when she drifted more into my orbit, with her scented skin and silky underarm hair, said that he had moved out of his Peabody flat. She thought he’d put his collection of ‘bits and bobs’, as she called his musical treasures, in a self-storage unit in Vauxhall. This must have been in the early 1990s. I wondered if Johnny had effectively made himself homeless, preferring as he might to have his sealed boxes of tapes and jottings rather than his own shivering limbs protected from the elements. It was a haunting thought.
I tried to track down Watson, but he too had disappeared, as if his fate were tied in some mysterious way to Johnny’s own. Minerva flashed her eyes at me and said I should watch out. I might be next.
At odd moments, especially after Minerva left me, I had fantasies about waiting under the arches at Vauxhall for Johnny to turn up. I was sure he must be secretly adding to his collection, one way or another. By this time, Mrs Thatcher’s ‘B Team’, as she called them, were in power. They were no friends to the dispossessed. They criminalised unlicensed rock festivals. They even forced the closure of gypsy camp sites. It became very hard after this to imagine Jagger, or any figure from the entertainment business – including those alternative comedians who had joined the rock stars of old in performing at huge arenas in London – leading an angry mob down Whitehall. In the 1990s the prospect of any kind of revolution on the 1968 model seemed, well, laughable.
It didn’t escape my attention that Johnny’s method of stand-up commentary, with its juggling of memories from the archive of popular culture, went on to have some minor success with the more intellectually-inclined British comedians of the early noughties. Dave Gorman stood on stage with his PowerPoint slides projected behind him and riffed in stream-of-consciousness fashion on the connection between, say, Twelfth Night and powdered chicken beak. Stewart Lee, similarly, was able to prowl the stage with a mike and squeeze sparks from the collision of sundry items – an Edward Lear nonsense poem and a broken toilet, a reality TV show and a Martin Luther King sermon. Even Russell Brand got in on the act for a bit.
Johnny, like Watson always said, was ahead of his time. What made him inimitable, though, was that he was piling up cultural fragments in the hope they would be transvalued by collective political action. He was indeed a prophet. Figures like Gorman and Lee, by contrast, were baroque artists whose virtuoso compilations could only be redeemed as tributes to their own solitary genius.
Did Johnny ever return to his silo of scribbled notes, index cards and reels of audiotape? Or do they moulder even now in a damp nook of the Thames Embankment on a steadily expiring lease? It’s a mystery.
One thing I do know is that the ancient pre-Socratic philosophers believed that all things decay and return to the watery abyss from which they emerged. And certainly when Brian Jones drowned under the spot-lights at his swimming pool, his precious collection of treasures at Cotchford Farm was looted immediately, some say by the very guests attending the party he had hosted that night. The cavernous bedrooms and apartments and waiting rooms of the rotting pile were emptied out. Everything disappeared – the woven rugs and brocade cushions bought from Christopher Gibbs’s Chelsea antique shop, the kaftans and Berber jewellery found in Morocco, the rare vinyl cuts by Snooks Eaglin, Champion Jack Dupree and Lightning Hopkins, the stacks of Gibsons and Firebirds, the sitars, dulcimers, harpsichords, marimbas, tambouras and mellotrons picked up over a career of effortless musicianship, the flutes, trombones and saxophones, the pan pipes of the Joujouka, the plated bottles of brandy and fine wine, the wardrobe of velvet jackets, striped trousers, cravats, silk ties, high-collar shirts and white shoes gleaned from Carnaby Street, the Ascot hats, fur capes and scarves plucked from women’s department stores – all the accoutrements of a gilded youth. Gone!
And that is how I think of Johnny Aggro and his fabulous collection of revolutionary sounds. Gone, all gone.
Next
Johnny Aggro’s Brian Jones Shango Baptist Routine: Background