Songs In Heat

Dan Ireton, aka Dredd Foole, July 2023. Portrait by Naomi Yang

At home, I put on the recent archival release by Dredd Foole & The Din, Songs in Heat (1982), and Naomi said: It’s the primordial soup.

I didn’t have to ask what she meant. This is where our music started. And not just ours – the whole scene we came up in. It’s like that part of The Last Waltz where Levon Helm describes the mix of sounds he grew up with along the Mississippi near Memphis: “Bluegrass, or country music, you know if it comes down to that area and if it mixes there with rhythm and if it dances, then you’ve got a combination there of all those different kinds of music - country, bluegrass, blues music…”

“What’s it called then?” asks Martin Scorsese.

“Rock and roll,” says Levon.

Dan Ireton’s early work has been called “free rock,” and his later, more unplugged music has been called “free folk.” But “free” doesn’t come out of nowhere - on the contrary, like all improvisation it requires preparation. You have to stew in the soup.

We first met Dan when he was working at the best used record store in Boston of the 80s, In Your Ear, and he’s always been deeply involved with canon – shaping it, refining it, drawing from it. We were newly hatched musicians trying to crawl out of the muck when he (and Byron Coley, working at the same store – what a pair of professors we had!) would subtly push us toward something more interesting than what we already thought was cool. They didn’t scold, or condescend. They just went about their business at the counter, making each other laugh with references we didn’t yet get. They used words we didn’t even know (Byron was probably making most of these up). And they employed the Socratic method, asking us questions in response to our selections. Like: Uh huh. Have you heard The 13^th Floor Elevators?

The liner notes explain that Dan’s first recordings as Dredd Foole, documented on this new CD from Corbett vs Dempsey, were also all first takes – the band (Mission of Burma, but with instruments swapped or otherwise defamiliarized) were given a brief set of instructions, and tape rolled. What came out is primordial, as Naomi said. And yes it’s free in the sense of unrestrained. But check the tracklist: there are four original Dredd Foole compositions, and an equal number of covers. This is canon formation as much as free invention.

Those four covers come from the volatile mix of influences our generation along the Charles was putting together: VU, the Animals, Pere Ubu, and (in a secret bonus track on the CD, you’ll have to get the physical media for this one) the Stooges. Not just any tracks by these bands, mind you. They are the soupiest: Sister Ray, When I Was Young, Final Solution, We Will Fall. All are drone/raga heavy, even for these exceptionally heavy bands. They’re each the type of song you’d close a set with. Yet they’re all in one set.

The same is true of the originals in this collection. Each gets it all, from Dan and from all his musicians. This must be the kind of electrical spark that turns muck into DNA – an energy, urgency, immediacy that makes the hair on your neck stand up. That, according to lore, tore the headphones off the band in the studio. That propelled Clint Conley’s guitar across the room. That kept the original Burma playing live as the Din a year longer than they were willing to play as Burma.

Who could blame them? It sounds incredibly fun to be in this band. In fact, these recordings make it sound like fun to be in any band. Let’s start one.

Listening to: Picture of Bunny Rabbit, by Arthur Russell

Cooking: Everything in the freezer (our fridge is failing)