In the introduction to Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, Simon Reynolds writes that, during the post-punk era with which his book is concerned, he never bought older records. Reynolds posits two reasons for this phenomenon: to begin with, today’s pervasive reissue culture did not yet exist but, more importantly, the overwhelming fertility of the then contemporary musical climate left no time to turn toward a nostalgic past anyway.
Liberated from the commodified leisure culture of the 70s mainstream rock spectacle, post-punk musicians sculpted their own vernacular, free from punk’s rockist foundation, upon the scorched earth landscape with which they had been left. They applied punk’s transgressive ideals to itself, synthesizing its minimal, neanderthal approach with supposed antagonists disco, prog, and electronic music to effect both a formal and aesthetic break from punk’s already cloistered structural misanthropy — and it is this further break from tradition, coupled with post-punk’s proletarian accessibility that lent itself to such a rich proliferation of recorded material from the period.
Ant Trip Ceremony hardly draw from the same ideological well, but perhaps share deeper impulsive groundwater. Recorded on a low budget in early 1968 by students in Oberlin, Ohio and originally released in a run of only 300 copies, the band’s only album 24 Hours remains very of its time, typifying the zeitgeist of a late 1960s America abundant with the music of an inspired generation. The presence of a “Hey Joe” cover and the album’s current status as a reissue beg for it to be interpreted through the lens of Lenny Kaye’s influential 1972 compilation of proto-punk, Nuggets, and 24 Hours fits predictably into that mold. The band’s version of the standard lies somewhere between The Leaves’ frenetic original and Jimi Hendrix’s laid-back, downtempo interpretation with the album’s 11 other tracks accordingly straddling the line between raucous garage rock and gauzy psychedelia.
Yet unlike typical 60s tracklistings, where a hit single becomes the title of a band’s record and its first track, 24 Hours remarkably resists front-loading to the point that I almost wanted to abandon ship on first listen. Though Ant Trip Ceremony are also clearly at fault, it is these introductory tracks that suffer from the album’s rough production. Opening crooner “Locomotive Lamp,” which in another world might burst out of floodgates with the bombastic pomp of Scott Walker, here limps from the silent void, weary with dispassion. Along with its three successors, the song is barely saved by mildly interesting, spindly guitar work, and half-hearted lyrical banalities like “eternally free to love” and “bridges in my mind” do little to prevent me from being reminded of Spinal Tap’s satirical hippie pastiche “Listen to the Flower People.”
Fortunately, “Hey Joe” is a breath of fresh air that manages, through its sonic oscillations, to express both the blind passion of a man who shoots his lover after being cuckolded and the melancholic aimlessness of consequent self-exile where most versions settle for just one. And the remainder of the album builds off of its energy. “Outskirts,” with its tastefully applied vocal tremolo, could be the story of Joe’s southbound journey: “Going down the river/ Going down the track/ Don’t know where I’m going but I know I’m going back.” Side two mostly atones for the shortcomings of its obverse, utilizing the no-frills production to its proper advantage on tracks like pithy rocker “Get Out Of My Life.” The specter of “Hey Joe” continues to exert its vibrant influence via the successful appropriation and slackening of its chord progression on “Four In The Morning;” and the band is at their most compelling on such instances where they let things stretch out and take on a life of their own, exemplified by “Pale Shades of Gray” and the instrumental flute-adorned pseudo-raga “Elaborations.”
While 24 Hours fits in with the better Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, it also doesn’t particularly stand out. So why reissue the album? There already exists a 1995 repress, and this new edition surely can’t have been motivated by a demand for a 180 gram issue of such an obscurity. I originally intended to use this review to present the 2010 Vinyl Lovers version of 24 Hours as a separate entity from its 1968 predecessor: a Borgesian re-contextualization forward in time that would illuminate the deficiencies of garage rock’s current crop of lazy anachronistic imitators, decrying the shoddiness of their misplaced troglodyte nostalgia, etc., etc. But such a rash generalization would be both defeatist and a hasty simplification of reality. The truth is that I continue to discover older music I love, whether it be from 1968, 1981, or 2010.
Contemporary labels like Spectrum Spools rescue albums from both historical obscurity and the ephemerality of recent limited cassette pressings. So, if Simon Reynolds’ statement regarding the post-punk era is to be applied to today’s glut of reissues, maybe its emphasis should be placed on the erstwhile absence of such a reissue culture rather than on a cultural inadequacy inherent in our current digital age. Today’s music curators are faced with access to a near-totality of recorded material, both past and present, and the act of presenting a recording or collection of recordings as a relevant, coherent album is a way of making sense of it all, of separating the wheat from the chaff. Reissues have brought about a folding of music history in on itself, a canon in flux, and an archaeological intertextuality facilitated by the information age. Formerly lost in the ether of 60s garage rock, it is because of this recent reissue that the existence of Ant Trip Ceremony came to my attention. 24 Hours might not be the best example of its type, but I’m glad to have heard it.
