Black Cab - AltamontDiary

Wed 7th Jul, 2004 in Music Reviews

There are reasons to be apprehensive about Black Cab’s Altamont Diary. Firstly, it’s a concept album. Bar notable exceptions like Dark Side Of The Moon, the concept album is rightly maligned for its oft-myopic scope. Secondly, Black Cab are a Melbourne duo writing songs about the terrible events of Altamont, California in 1969. You’d be within your rights to ask straight out whether Australia’s cultural cringe had scored another victim – talented musicians again ignoring Australia’s rich history to focus on America’s. Finally, the Summer Of Love has been covered in so much depth that it seems folly to try to bring anything new to the ideological table.

And yet, any apprehension fades away quickly as the old-school keyboards of opener Summer Of Love flow from the speakers. Birds chirp in the background as a slow, steady drumbeat and a sensual bassline snakes its way around Andrew Coates’ refrain of ‘It’s alright, it’s alright.’ The optimism of the track is palpable, but a subtle darkness lies in the sporadic bursts of dirty synth; a darkness that hints at the knowledge that maybe we will never be truly free; that we will never truly know our fellow man.

The album continues in this fashion with Its Ok, a syncopated homage to ambivalence; ‘It’s ok / Things are not ok.’ Coates and his compadre James Lee revel in repetition, lulling and ebbing and flowing. The harsh, distorted guitar of Angels Arrive signals the beginning of the end for the Summer Of Love.

The Altamont Disaster is often seen as the point when the naivety the hippies was exposed. A free concert spear-headed by the Rolling Stones, the gig saw a black man beaten to death by the Hell’s Angels, who were hired as security on the day. Music, so integral to the movement for peace in times of extreme violence and turmoil (the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement), became the soundtrack to the death of a man, as well as the dreams of a future free of tyranny or oppression.

Coates and Lee have captured this violence/freedom dichotomy in extraordinary fashion. Their music flits from chilled-out, relaxed, psychedelia to stabs of guitar and harsh, cold beats. The album becomes cinematic as recordings of people speaking at Altamont are used to effectively contextualise the tunes. Sonny Barger, leader of the Hell’s Angels at the time, talks in the background as Coates and Lee hold back their musical glory.

The thematic high-point  – Good Drugs - comes at the mid-point of the album. The tension in the track is unbelievable, as a melodic sitar struggles against the raw, synthesised bass. The lack of vocals allows the listener to be placed smack bang in the middle of the tension, and the effect is quite extraordinary. The crowds of Altamont cheering wildly at the end of the track envelope you, as you become an unwilling participant in an event you know will end tragically.

This is majestic, nigh-operatic music; both restrained and free; strong and weak; hopeful and dejected. It is ambition manifest. Its expression of ambivalence and uncertainty is most explicit in the lyrics to the Grateful Dead’s New Speedway Boogie, which is gorgeously covered:

Now I don’t know but I been told
in the heat of the sun a man died of cold
Do we keep on coming or stand and wait
with the sun so dark and the hour so late?

It is a ludicrously impressive achievement for a band – especially an Australian one, so removed by time and geography from the Summer of Love – could create such an eerie soundtrack to such an explosive time. Now, in 2004, we have an album to listen to as we read Hunter S. Thompson’s soliloquy on the Summer Of Love in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, written in the early 70s:

‘So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.’

 The ebbs and flows of Altamont Diary perfectly express Thompson’s take on the tide of love, freedom, beauty and ultimately, naivety.