George Brigman – Jungle Rot
Finally! For a dude who’s writing a psych blog, I haven’t really, you know, written a whole lot about, well, psych. No more! Time for some out-and-out jams, you know, stuff with debauched electric sex all up in it. Here’s Jungle Rot, a 1975 album by Baltimore shreducator George Brigman. (Like that? Shreducator? I just made that shit up.)
Brigman’s an outsider, and he compares favorably to other lonesome wanderers of first-wave psychedelia like Skip Spence. Unlike Spence (or Syd Barrett, to whom Spence is most often compared), however, Brigman never had a previously successful outing as a recording artist. (Also unlike those two, there is no documented history of mental illness or debilitating drug abuse, just the creation of music out-of-sync with its milieu.) There was no Moby Grape or Pink Floyd for Brigman before Jungle Rot. This was his debut, and it’s savage, debauched, and remarkably assured.
Briefly: the reason this album is considered a sort of lost artifact is twofold. First, Brigman recorded it and then more or less quit recording for decades after the untimely death of his bassist. Jungle Rot was released and then vanished. Second, the music on here really is pretty unique, especially in 1975. It takes proto-punk’s muscular snarl and applies that aesthetic to psych-blues.
The title track, which opens the album, absolutely kills, with Brigman throwing down some panning, spiky, metallic chord stabs for a bit before launching into a flat-out destructive (and fucking anthemic) riff. It sets the tone for the rest of Jungle Rot, which is essentially extremely well-executed bluesy psych jams. This isn’t one of those crate-digging disappointments that has one scorcher and two or three middling jams among a largely faceless bunch of trash. Every song on here kicks ass, with Brigman turning again and again to the deepest, druggiest strain of psychedelic revelry.
It also doesn’t hurt that Brigman is an absolutely blistering guitar player firmly in the acid rock mold. And though he’s fleet of finger, his technical prowess never gets in the way of the mood of Jungle Rot, which is always drunkenly aggressive in a way that threatens (but never quite devolves into) sloppiness.
Even when he takes a break from shredding with aplomb and slows down, as he does on the sweet-sounding ballad “Schoolgirl” (naturally about sex), Brigman’s m.o. of keeping the mood good and confused shines through. (Writing about this album really makes you run out of synonyms for “druggy” and its variants.)
I used to think Spacemen 3‘s brand of drug-addled, minimalist psych was, for all its simplicity, essentially unprecedented. Not so. George Brigman proves that there is nothing new under the sun. And while I’m inclined to doubt that Sonic Boom and Jason Pierce were aware of Jungle Rot before they released The Sound of Confusion, simply because it’s a pretty underground record (and this is before, y’know, the age of the internet, this time when everything is available to everyone again), there was at least a sonic precedent indirectly pointing toward that band’s strung-out riffage.
http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/playlist/George+Brigman+Jungle+Rot/28264213
Hi, I’m George Brigman’s current bassist, and there quite are a few innaccuracies in this brief retrospective of George’s career. Why do you only focus on Jungle Rot and pass over his other releases from the 70′s-present like they don’t exist ? Jungle Rot, although it’s his best known album, is also George’s least favorite album. He wishes that people would focus on his current work (most recent, 2007′s Rags In Skull) as well as I Can Hear The Ants Dancing, which he feels are more representative of his music. Secondly, he didn’t just stop making music after Jungle Rot. He followed up Jungle Rot with a 1977 single “Blowin” Smoke”/”Driftin” , then Ants was released in ’82 (cassette only first edition)followed by the 7″ EP Silent Bones, and the Dutch import Human Scrawl Vagabond in ’86. There was a hiatus until Rags in ’07, but keep in mind, the murdered bassist you speak of, Mitch Meyers had nothing to do with Jungle Rot, and I believe he died in 1981. Meyers appeared on Ants and Silent Bones. George worked with a bassist/vocalist named Al Marcum after Mitch Meyers and before me, who appears in a couple videos from the early 80′s that can be seen on YouTube.
Another misconcepcion is that George is some type of proto-punk artist or fan. Jungle Rot was the product of a 20 year old guy who had been playing guitar for a year and a half, and who idolized The Groundhogs, Captain Beefheart, Johnny Winter, Harvey Mandel and The Stones. He was out to make a blues rock album, not a New York Dolls or Stooges record, and any similarity is accidental, but maybe a happy accident. But George doesn’t listen to any punk or garage artists, maybe with the exception of Blue Cheer. He’s more of a prog fan actually, in addition to the artists I’ve mentioned, he’s also really into Soft Machine and Gentle Giant, and on the more metal end of progressive spectrum Budgie, early Rush, and Blue Oyster Cult’s first three “black and white” albums.
John,
Thanks so much for the comment! I’m sorry it took so long for me to reply. That’s mainly due to the fact that this is a pretty low-budget affair, here, and I often don’t log in to the back end here unless I’m going to post something. And that’s not too too frequently.
First, thanks for reaching out! I’ve never had a member (or even a friend of a member) of a band I’ve written about contact me before, so this is obviously pretty neat for me.
Now. I’ll own up to the inaccuracies you mentioned—after all, you’re much more likely to know what’s true and what’s not about George Brigman’s career than myself! However, I gotta be honest: The intrepid staff here at Play One Note consists of little old me, and that’s it. I don’t really run a large fact-checking operation here. What’s more, this blog is for me more than it is for other people. I like writing, I like music, and I like writing about music. I don’t have any particular blog focus, beyond the nebulous guiding term “psychedelic,” which, c’mon, what the hell does that mean, anyway?
So here’s my process. I’ll be listening to music, and I’ll absently put on an album, and it catches me, and even if it’s the bajillionth time I’ve listened to it, I’ll be profoundly moved by it. So I’ll write about it. Now, I don’t get press releases, so if I’ve come across the album sans info (such as with Mr. Brigman’s Jungle Rot), I’ll spend a bit of time reading about it so that when I write about it I don’t sound like a complete idiot. Obviously, when I come across incorrect information, my attempts fail.
Now, two minor quibbles. You mentioned that Jungle Rot was Mr. Brigman’s best-known but least-favorite album. It is, unfortunately, the only one I’ve heard, and I like it so much that I chose to write about it. Perhaps if I’d have heard Rags in Skull or I Can Hear the Ants Dancing I would have opted to write about one of them. Alas, I have not. I will say that, in my opinion, Jungle Rot is one of the greatest albums, new or old, I’ve heard in the past year.
As far as the “proto-punk” categorization is concerned, well, that’s just an example of silly over-categorization we music obsessives will sometimes indulge in. Nevertheless, it’s a useful one, as far as my purposes are concerned, anyway. The term “proto-punk” means, literally, “first punk” or “earliest form of punk.” By its very definition, the artists engaging in proto-punk (or proto-anything, for that matter) are not aware that what they’re doing points toward the formation of punk down the road due to the very simple reason that punk didn’t exist yet. Nobody, contemporarily, was referring to the Stooges or Captain Beefheart as “proto-punk.” And yet, they were. So, in sum, since the proto-punk label is applied retroactively, we sometimes use it to refer to artists who had no affinity with the nascent punk scene.
At any rate, it sounds like Mr. Brigman has awesome taste in music. I’ll seek out his favorites in his own discography. I wish you all the best of luck, and thanks for commenting!
Just decided to check back today to see if you responded to my comment, thanks! Yes, Jungle Rot is certainly a great album and is what got me into George’s music too. I found an original copy, still sealed for a dollar at a flea market back in 1996 or ’97. I finally tracked George down in Summer of 2000, and started making music with him, recording about 40 songs so far. I can however understand George’s frustration with people dwelling on Jungle Rot. Every artist is more into what they are doing “in the moment” than what they’ve done in the past. I have friends that I played music with in the late 70′s and early 80′s who only want to talk about things I wrote and recorded before I could play very well, or had proper recording gear. We all have our favorite period of any artist’s work though.
With George, he started off very simply, which drew in the garage/punk crowd (I’m guilty of being one of those guys myself), but that was certainly never his intention. He aspired to the complex rhythms of Beefheart, Soft Machine and Gentle Giant. If you listen to Harvey Mandel, then listen to the instrumental tracks on Ants,Silent Bones and Rags, you really hear that influenece.
Jungle Rot was a great example of what an inspired, relatively beginner rock musician could do with a Gibson SG,some borrowed bass guitars, some effects pedals, a couple reel to reels, and a sit in cover band drummer, playing drums as an overdub to already recorded tracks (opposite of how a band normally does it) in a low budget local studio (trust me I was in RMT in the early 80′s as a teenager, my friend did some session work on bass there, and it was a little ramshackle storefront operation). Also as a side note, none of the other guys pictured on the sleeve played on JR, and they were not even musicians.
George thanks people for buying and loving Jungle Rot; it’s been his best selling record, even though that’s just a meager sum of money. He just wishes that the same people would give the rest of his music more of a shot. He’s come a long way since, in terms of writing, playing ability, etc.
Please feel free to conatct me about anything George related. I am also one of the admins of the George Brigman Jungle Rot Facebook page which was actually started by a fan in Spain. Cheers!
John, this is great stuff! It’s always neat hearing about the creation tale behind great albums like Jungle Rot. That bit about the drum overdubs is just amazing.
I can certainly understand and sympathize with an artist being interested in what they’re working on currently. It only makes sense. This is one reason why I’ve never understood why fans are disappointed when they go to a show of a long-running act who focuses on playing newer material during their set. I mean, if you had been in a touring band for 30 years, would you be wanting to play songs you wrote half a lifetime ago instead of the ones you just put out? Hell, no! So I get that.
I salute Mr. Brigman for his work, and I look forward to hearing more of it.