My first encounter with 'Nut Rocker' came via the final track encore on Emerson, Lake and Palmer's 1971 'Pictures At An Exhibition' album. As a pretentious teen I was always keen to put distance between myself and my Duran Duran loving peers and so listening to classical music as played by prog rockers seemed to fit the bill nicely and put me on a higher plain of awareness than the common herd. In my own mind anyway. But for all that I was always wary of 'Nut Rocker'; the fact that the credit read 'Fowley' and not 'Mussorgsky' was a black mark at the outset, but the headshot was a tune too lively and - 'gasp' - danceable for me to stroke the chin on my po-face to.The joke was on me though, and in more ways than one; 'Nut Rocker' is based on Tchaikovsky's "March of the Wooden Soldiers" from 'The Nutcracker', albeit in a rocking arrangement by Kim Fowley that rolled over old Pyotr courtesy of B Bumble and the band, the collective name of a gang of session musicians with agenda of recording pieces of classical music in a rock and roll style. And rock and roll it does - Al Hazan gets all Jerry Lee Lewis on the piano intro, pounding the keys as if his fingers were mallets over a piston straight drum rhythm.
It's fast and it's furious but in truth it's nothing Winifred Atwell couldn't have barrelhoused out ten years previous - it takes the late diversion of a guitar solo and some decidedly unclassical boogie woogie to fill out the sound and raise it higher than the novelty spectacle of rockers tinkering with the classics. Which isn't to say that it's not a novelty single, because it is. Very much so. But its rolling jollity and vivacious relentlessness marks it out as one of the better ones.
No comments:
Post a Comment