Chartsweep 1994: Primal Scream-Rocks
By Tobe Gamut
On February 28, 1994, now-legendary indie label Creation Records released “Rocks” by Primal Scream, as the first single from the group’s upcoming album Give Out but Don’t Give Up. Two weeks later the song reached #7 on the UK Singles Chart. It was to be the highest chart position a Creation single not by a band called Oasis would ever achieve.
Much of the mythos surrounding Creation Records stems from its apparent unity, the way its artists seemed to shift and pulse as a single creature, picking up on trends at the same time as one another and generally operating more like a collective than a business partnership. Aesthetic unity goes a long way in helping younger listeners appreciate the significance of a record label to a movement or a scene; just look at 4AD or FAX, with their visually cohesive cover artworks. Over the years Creation has come to be viewed in much the same way, largely due to their monolithic dominance over that oft-defied genre known as “shoegaze”. In the heyday of the genre, Creation were releasing records by My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Ride, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Boo Radleys, Swervedriver, Adorable, The Telescopes, Medicine, and Teenage Filmstars. It’s hard to think of another indie label that at any point had such a monopoly on a particular sound.
Now, Primal Scream weren’t a shoegaze band, but they were certainly tangential to the movement. Frontman and bandleader Bobby Gillespie had once been a member of The Jesus and Mary Chain—also not really a shoegaze band proper, but by the time they paired their signature fuzzed-out guitars with Madchester-parody drum loops for 1992’s Honey’s Dead, they were essentially making an approximation of the genre. Likewise, the similarly Madchester-adjacent psychedelic dance-rock sound that Primal Scream pioneered on their smash-hit breakthrough Screamadelica had proved highly appealing to the same audience that was lapping up shoegaze. Any Anglophile indie fan overseas would certainly have placed the CD on the same exalted shelf as their copies of Loveless and Nowhere. In their sonic maximalism, their worship of 60s psychedelic rock, and their heads-down contemplative cool, Primal Scream were undeniably on the same wavelength as their Creation brethren. Even taking Screamadelica into account, the image of a unified collective is preserved.
But while the label’s towering influence over shoegaze has been repeatedly exalted and analyzed and mythologized over the years, little attention has been paid to the equally unified actions of the label’s artists after the movement waned. Seemingly in unison, the leading lights of the Creation stable all simultaneously turned their attention in 1994 toward Americana. The Jesus and Mary Chain openly snubbed their fans with the folk-tinged Stoned & Dethroned. Shortly after releasing their final album on Creation, the post-rock progenitor Pygmalion, Slowdive became the country-pastiche Mojave 3 and were quickly picked up by 4AD. For their 60s-throwback record Carnival of Light, Ride initially enlisted Black Crowes producer George Drakoulias, who soon recused himself from the sessions to remix a set of soul-influenced recordings Primal Scream had cooked up in Memphis. These mixes eventually became Give Out but Don’t Give Up—the biggest commercial success of the bunch.
Maybe it was something in the air. Maybe the shoegazers had tired of weed and picked up heroin instead, or maybe they just realized the tremolo bends weren’t all that different from the lilt of a slide steel. In any case, their collective decision to ditch Baggy and shoegaze for a more testosterone-fueled form of… well, if not outright regression, then at least revivalism… seems now a prophetic inkling of what was to come. It was something much bigger than these indie trends had ever been, something that dwarfs whatever cult eminence Creation had established through shoegaze, something that remains to this day the label’s most essential contribution to the popular culture: Britpop. Oasis was the band, of course, and their old-school rock-n-roll attitude certainly seemed in stark constrast to the androgynous siren songs of MBV or Slowdive.
Were they really all that different? I’m not so sure. The string-laden swells and head-spinning guitar overdubs of What’s the Story (Morning Glory) really don’t seem that far off from the sounds of Spiritualized or Verve, both of whom were certainly considered within the bounds of the shoegaze movement. But what mattered was that it seemed different: macho was in, swirling dreaminess was out. It’s easy to paint Britpop as the evil Goliath of patriarchal nationalism that killed off the lovely David of shoegaze, that the latter was a misunderstood gem, a potentially glowing musical future killed off by a closed-minded British public that sought refuge from the modern world in the white male wish fulfillment of Britpop. This is the story often told by indie fans, but the truth is that shoegaze never was a popular phenomenon to the same degree as Britpop, not even close. There’s a reason it was called “The Scene That Celebrates Itself”: it was, for the most part, an insular movement practiced and appreciated by a select few, usually those with the family money to afford a swath of effects pedals. And besides, one must remember that even before Oasis, its time as a critical darling in the British music press was well over: Slowdive’s Souvlaki (1993)and Lush’s Split (June 1994)were both dismissed by critics. Looking back, it seems like Ride, JAMC, and Primal Scream knew this, and their concurrent turn toward steel guitars and Southern-rock stylings seems an attempt to ease the transition.
What one can hear in “Rocks”, retrospectively, is a summation of that brief effort to bridge the gap between the psychedelic early-90s Creation sound and the 1960s hark-back atavism of Oasis. Both represented groups unashamedly paying homage to their classic-rock influences—only in the case of Primal Scream it was perhaps even more obvious.
“Rocks”, like the rest of Give Out but Don’t Give Up, has a rather complicated history. One of the original batch of tracks that were initially recorded in Ardent Studios with legendary producer Tom Dowd, the song began as a fairly soulful number. The first version, which was eventually presented on the 2018 compilation of The Original Memphis Recordings,differs significantly from that which was released in 1994. The beat is a straightforward 4/4 augmented with a cowbell, the guitar line lags slightly behind the beat, and the gospel-choir backing vocals sit prominently in the mix. But when the Scream turned their Memphis tapes over to Creation Records, label head Alan Mcgee was not satisfied. “Rocks” was one of the tunes fingered by McGee for a remix by Drakoulias, who requested a more aggressive re-recording of the guitar track and replaced the live drums with a funky stomp sampled from Sly & The Family Stone’s “Dance to the Music”. Interestingly, this is one of the few elements linking Give Out but Don’t Give Up with its predecessor: the embellishment of a rote blues-rock number with a sampled drum loop doubtless conjures memories of the hand-clap house beat underpinning the otherwise conservative blues-rock wail of “Movin’ on Up”—a song that reached number 11 on the UK charts and number 2 on the US Alternative charts, becoming the biggest hit from Screamadelica.
Were they trying to recreate the success of “Movin’ on Up”? Or maybe attempting to subtly trick fans into thinking that the upcoming Give Out but Don’t Give Up would sound more similar to Screamadelica than it really did? Whatever the motivation, these tweaks proved commercially astute, turning “Rocks” into the hard-rocking Stones pastiche that became a UK Top Ten hit. Its blues-rock stomp gradually takes on overdriven guitar, then a brass section and a gospel choir, before finally sealing the deal with a piano line. There’s no doubt that the opening lyrics—"Dealers keep dealin', thieves keep thievin', whores keep whorin', junkies keep scorin'”—pay tribute to the Mick n’ Keef lifestyle, and the eye-rollingly frank chorus imploring the listener to “get your rocks off honey” is likewise straight out of the Sticky Fingers playbook. Giving the track its title, it also serves as a double entendre: not only does it refer to the chorus of the song, but it also implies that the song itself does indeed “rock”.
Of course, this hip arrogance has always been part and parcel to Primal Scream’s image, but here the problem is that this is not true, because the song sucks. In fact, so do most of Primal Scream’s attempts at Memphis blues-rock, despite the band’s repeated stabs at getting it right. Although the abrupt pivot to macho cock-rock after the astounding success of Screamadelica certainly pissed off the Scream’s newfound fanbase, one must understand that this sort of thing is firmly rooted in the band’s DNA. Throughout their 35-year career, the band has consistently alternated between Stones-worship revivalism and electronic experimentation. Though the latter albums (Screamadelica, Vanishing Point, XTRMNTR, Evil Heat, More Light) have garnered all the critical praise, the blues records have actually proven the most popular. Prior to “Rocks”, the band’s highest-charting singles were the aforementioned track “Movin’ on Up” and “Loaded”, the latter a dance reworking of “I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have”, a track from the band’s self-titled first crack at 60s-rock swagger. In the years since the release of “Rocks”, only one Primal Scream single has ever charted higher: “Country Girl”, a Deep-South rocker from the band’s most recent Stones tribute, Riot City Blues. Such figures imply that Primal Scream has inverted the typical “one for us, one for the fans” structure. What the people really want isn’t the cool dancey stuff, it’s the hard rock.
But what’s perplexing about this is that, in their Stones mode, Primal Scream have never been more than forgettable. Bobby Gillespie simply doesn’t have the vocal chops, nor does the band have the songwriting prowess, to match up to their idols. Their Jagger/Richards rewrites, “Rocks” included, have consistently fallen flat. What Primal Scream apparently fail to realize is that their group works best as a vehicle for collaboration, rather than a kickass singer-songwriting team. But alas, such are the disappointments plaguing fans of an inconsistent band. If these mediocre records are the exorcisms necessary to allow the great electronic records, so be it. It’s just odd that so many people seem to love them. And so odd that, for a moment there in the mid-90s, they aligned so perfectly both with the Creation Records vision and with the beginnings of a new cultural zeitgeist.
Is it really that odd, though? Probably not. In all honesty there’s not much separating the sneering leather-jacket cool of “Rocks” from that of Oasis’s Definitely Maybe. Bobby Gillespie and Liam Gallagher even have the same haircut. And of course that regressionary aspect, that apparent desire to resurrect the sound of an era when rock was more ostensibly masculine and working-class, is the same. But the thing is you can’t resurrect it, and that’s where these bands differ. Oasis had aspects of nostalgia and revivalism, but there was something different in their sound, something fuller, a consciousness of both the classics they were worshipping and the shoegaze they were supplanting. “Rocks” has none of this, because it’s pure imitation. People still listen to Definitely Maybe and The Masterplan. When’s the last time you broke out your copy of Give Out but Don’t Give Up? Nowadays the Screamadelica logo on the CD seems like a cruel joke, and the hip-hop fake-out that opens the record before the overdriven guitar of “Jailbird” cuts in seems like a taunt. These guys knew what they were doing, and perhaps they knew that it would have no relevance. “Rocks” is not the sound of a band losing the plot, but the sound of a band choosing deliberately to disregard it. And I guess there’s something appealing in that.