Mark LeVine is a longtime contributor to Afropop Worldwide, also a scholar, musician and author of numerous books. Here, he reviews Rikki Stein’s memoir, Moving Music. Afropop’s Banning Eyre recently interviewed Rikki Stein about the book.
If you were, like me, an aspiring musician born about a generation after your heroes of the Woodstock era, coming of age in the late ’70s into early ’80s, by the time you were old enough legally to drink the world in which “our” music existed had changed in profound ways, few of them positive. Hair metal was actually a thing, digital synths had ruined rock, Flock of Seagulls was popular, and Santana had gone from writings songs like “Incident at Neshabur” to “Winning.”
Every artist you loved was most likely long dead or would soon be: Hendrix, Morrison and Joplin, Duane, Otis, and then beginning a few years later Bob Marley, Keith Moon, Bonzo, and to end that horrible annus horribilis of 1980, John Lennon. Not to mention the remaining founding generation of bebop would by the beginning of the 1990s be largely gone from the scene, almost all far too soon. As was Marvin, and 2Pac.
But if you hadn’t fallen into the high fructose traps of ’80s music; fell in love with hip-hop but knew it had room to grow; if you loved funk but were digging ever deeper into its roots – quite literally a world of music was creeping up on you somewhere in the background of your life. A world you only caught glimpses of reading articles about The Beatles, Stones or Zeppelin spending time in India or Morocco in Cream, New Music Express or Guitar Player.
The Motherland in particular awaited, especially if you were a blues and a funk fanatic, taking the great bands of the late ’60s through late ’70s and tracing their roots backwards to the Continent, soon enough you discovered albums or pirated and bootlegged video of performances by some the greatest bands of your youth in Accra (Santana, Stevie, Tina – at 1971’s Soul to Soul), Kinshasa (James Brown, Celia Cruz, BB King – at Zaire 74), and Lagos (again Stevie, Randy Weston and Sun Ra – at FESTAC 77). You were blown away by Graceland but thought it could have gone even further. You started hearing about “desert blues,” World Beat and then Afrobeat, and vibed to amazing horn players like Hugh Masekela and Mano Dibango, who spoke directly to you when he explained that all musicians were “members of the same tribe.” Mostly, you knew you wanted to spend your life playing music that moved.
If you’re like me, then, reading Rikki Stein’s magisterial Moving Music will, for a start, cause even more envy in your soul about everything you missed and everyone you never got to know because you were born 10 or 20 years too late, but in whose stories Rikki Stein played a role, like Zelig but with purpose. The book will move you because Rikki’s narration reveals their human as well as musical sides of all these musical movement, while telling stories that transcend both.
It is strange writing about person whose life you’ve intersected with multiple times on multiple continents (I’ve known Rikki for over a decade), but who has also helped shape the careers of artists who so defined your life-world. He’s not the kind to sit around telling stories unless prompted, even though it’s clear from his eyes that he has more to tell than most. How many other music people can boast they’ve worked with Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page, the Yardbirds and the Kinks, the Pan African Dance Ensemble and the Master Musicians of Joujouka. And of course, Fela Kuti, as his last manager and guardian of his legacy.
Regardless of who Rikki’s worked with, most of the artists that touched his life possessed what Rikki early on in Moving Music describes as the “Underground Spiritual Game” (USG) – a term Fela created that captures how the highest forms of popular music make listeners and especially concert-goers “an integral part of that which is being observed. The music will rock your body, as can be seen as the dance floor fills, but [with] deeper spirit and purpose.”
If you’re extremely lucky as a musician or working in any capacity in this business, you experience the USG once in your career, working with an artist of such intensity, originality, purpose and all-around bad-ass funkiness that every time they play it’s like a portal opens up to a different musical, spiritual and social dimension. It’s a version of the life we’re all living that’s more vivid and connected, where the everyday and extraordinary politics of music created in environments of violence and repression reach their natural conclusion in the perfect groove, which doesn’t so much sublimate the politics surrounding the music as make elevate them to the level of art. Even fewer people get to swim in the USG for much of their career.
Rikki Stein’s life unfolded as most people who wind up in the arts world, which is to say that he clearly didn’t fit into the straight world in which he was born, coming to believe at a young age that he may have been “delivered to the wrong address.” While bouncing around various professions, from real estate to bar owner and running one of his father’s clothing shops, it was clear from the time he was a teenager that music was his true passion. Not merely or even the music that was on everyone’s radios in the late ’50s and early 1960s but jazz, especially the highest level of the late 1950s and 1960s – figures like Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and Sonny Rollins, whose practitioners he began to meet as an 18-year old assisting a local photographer in shooting them in the basement of the famed Ronnie Scott’s in London’s Soho district.
Soon thereafter he was working for the historical “pirate” radio ship, Radio Caroline, and then as a promoter bringing British artists to Belgium and beyond, and then managing French artists like Olivier Despax. This led to his first taste of the burgeoning first generation of Brit pop, bringing in the Kinks and the Yardbirds, and later the Animals and Moody Blues for European tours, with all the lunacy and imagination such groundbreaking rock n roll road shows produced, as well as to relationships that have lasted to this day.
If one’s horizons are limited to the post-British invasion era of rock music, this book would already contain enough stories to keep you entertained, but it was in fact after Rikki worked with the primus inter pares of the era – and any era – Jimi Hendrix, that the book becomes really interesting. After meeting the famed Atlantic record founders Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun and singing up to represent Barclay Records, Rikki made his first trip to the United States, moving into – where else? – the Chelsea Hotel, being taken under the wing of famed label head Seymour Solomon. In between hanging around with a litany of Beat and hippy figures, Rikki wound up in the Grateful Dead’s tour bus at Woodstock bus eating a large piece of acid-infused chocolate cake. “The plane had taken off and I wished myself a safe flight. But it did take me a full year to recall everything that happened over the next four days,” a period that included standing on the stage wrapped in a blanket on the side of the stage as Hendrix walked past, doing a double take at seeing his one-time promoter, before playing one of the most iconic sets in rock n roll history.
Sadly, that moment was to be undone not long after Rikki headed west to the Bay Area, winding up at the Rolling Stones’ disastrous and deadly Altamont concert, before being karmically redeemed at the historic Pit River reservation protest, to which he somehow found himself transported on the invitation of Peter Berg, co-founder of the social movement known as the Diggers, whom he’d befriended at regular meetings organized by Joan Baez’s sister, Mimi. Even Woody Allen couldn’t put this level of intricacy into Zelig; the movie’s artifice wouldn’t have been believable.
After an even more improbable return to France and pulling off a Grateful Dead concert for the ages, Rikki made a fateful trip across the strait of Gibraltar to Tangier, where the music called him farther south till he reached a small village in the Rif mountains called Joujouka (also spelled Jajouka). It was there that a local group of Sufi musicians, who’d been based in the village for upwards of half a millennium, had been performing an utterly unique, powerful and healing music for locals and, beginning in the 1950s, an odd-ball collection of Beats, jazz and rock musicians began traveling there to hear their magical sound, first brought to the wider world’s attention when Rolling Stones founding guitarist Brian Jones recorded an album of their music. Released soon after his untimely death, it bore the title Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan, to capitalize on both his notoriety and seeming connections to Greek mythology associated with their rituals.
The sleeve notes, written by Beat writer Brion Gysin, described a village that was home to an ancient tribe that played music like nowhere else on earth. The childlike painting of musicians on the front belied the intensity of the music inside the sleeve. As anyone who’s visited the village and participated in what is officially recognized (by the Guinness Book of World Records) as the “world’s smallest music festival” knows, spending a few days with the Master Musicians of Joujouka is an utterly life-changing experience, as it was for Rikki, during the almost two years he spent living there in the early seventies. His description of the process of immersion matched mine 40 years later almost beat for beat:
“They began to play a soft, gentle tune whose fragrant sounds wafted around the circle, establishing a perfect equilibrium. I sensed that there was something strange about the music but couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. Suddenly, it came to me. One of the Masters, the small one, was playing the melody, whilst the jolly giant was giving forth an unbroken, never-ending note that went on and on–and on. I stared in amazement, unable to understand how he could possibly play this effortless note-without-end and draw breath at the same time. How was he breathing? Through his ears? “It’s called circular breathing,” a voice said. But whose voice? It seemed to have come from somewhere within me… Suddenly, I jolted as if receiving an electric shock. My limbs trembled uncontrollably. I had discovered where the voice was coming from. The music! It was contained within that incredible sustained note! I looked into the dancing eyes of the giant flautist, who acknowledged this to be true with a gracious inclination of his head… The music rose in intensity as they responded to my salutations by clapping their hands in increasingly intricate waves of staccato rhythm, weaving in and out of the music in every conceivable permutation, to form a tangible force so far beyond sound that it could no longer be heard, but only smelt, like the most exotic perfume. I was transported on the most fabulous journey of my life…”.
And this was only the afternoon warm-up to the 7-9 hour nightly performances outside. The sense of teleportation was the same. The same shock at the sheer immensity of the music being surrounded by 12 or 15 or however many musicians in half circle, blasting the demons out of your soul with such force you felt 100 times lighter. And free. Rikki narrates the journeys that led he and them to Glastonbury and his friendship with several of the key musicians, all of which keep the book moving at a frenetic but immersive clip. As he moves on from the Master Musicians, only to rejoin them decades longer, we also get a glimpse of how important a piece a great manager is in a career-long puzzle by creating the conditions that allowed the core of the group to survive later vicissitudes till they could be reharnessed to the international scene by another master of the game, Irish rocker turned professor and impresario Frank Rynne, who created the now famous, perfectly tiny festival and helped shepherd them back to international prominence.
One year after my first visit to Joujouka I made my first visit to Lagos, heading straight for the Shrine, the renewed home of Afrobeat built by Fela’s family with proceeds from the sale of Fela’s catalog that Rikki helped orchestrate. Standing on that stage sitting in with Femi Kuti’s band, playing “Zombie” and other songs I’d come to love entirely, was precisely the thrill one would expect it to be for any Afrofunk aficionado. But this Shrine was only the third iteration, after the first was destroyed by Nigerian army troops on a raid that saw the entire place burned, many of Fela’s wives brutalized, and his mother, independence and women’s rights heroine Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti thrown out of the 2nd story window to her eventual death (Fela’s response was to march her coffin to the gates of the Presidential palace, as immortalized in the cover for Coffin for Head of State).
Rikki’s narrative of his time with Fela begins and ends with dancing – at the Shrine, till dawn, as well as numerous other locations across Africa and beyond. True to life, every time I’ve met him at Felabration, the week-long yearly celebration of Fela’s life and music put on by his family during his birthday week in mid-October, Rikki was dancing the night away till, more or less, dawn, or as long as the music kept going – always dancing and smoking, never drinking (as he discusses in the book). There isn’t much new about the details of Fela’s music or life in particular in Rikki’s telling of his decade and a half as his co-manager. What is interesting is precisely the details of how Fela, during what turned out to be the last stage of his career, kept up the Underground Spiritual Game even the stresses and costs of touring began to take their toll, and he died of AIDS in 1997. Working on the idea of what became the truly amazing Tony Award-winning musical Felaas well as the documentary Finding Fela by Oscar-winner Alex Gibney saw Rikki hone in on the USG as the key to capturing Fela’s life, music and politics in the most faithful way.
There really is no choice but to focus on the USG with Fela because no other force explains the ups and downs, travails, chaos and wonderment of his travels through the world, from the Glastonbury stage to the darkest prisons Nigeria’s then-military government had to offer (which led to a major American tour canceled), which held him for 18-months before finally releasing him in April 1986, after which he performed at one of the first major Amnesty International concerts – but only after lambasting the organization at a press conference that “In Africa, nobody gives a shit about Amnesty International. What you’re doing here is fine, but if you really want to do something worthwhile, do them in the places where the shit is happening.” No one familiar with Fela’s lyrics or persona should have been surprised at his brutal honesty, but it still reflected the challenges of managing someone whose music, politics and life were equally unvarnished in the extreme.
Fela’s tragic illness and death, and Rikki’s shepherding with the family of his legacy make for engrossing reading for any fan; his on and off again relationships with various French artists going back more than 50 years equally historicize a crucial moment in European popular music. Indeed, what struck me most in the remaining pages of Moving Music was his long relationship with the late Algerian-French raï icon Rachid Taha. As he tells it, “Rachid’s music, an ingeniously unique mix of rock, electronic, punk and Algerian chaabi and raï, carried him all over the world, earning him rapturous critical and public accolades. I’ve been fortunate during my life to have connected and spent time with individuals who, through their work and actions, were universally acknowledged as possessing an exceptional degree of integrity. Rachid Taha was one such person. His songs were unequivocal condemnations of racism, rallying cries for social justice offering gripping and provocative support for human rights, evenhandedly castigating his own Muslim brethren when such offenses were committed by them. In the same way that Fela communicated his clarion calls for justice wrapped in humor and deep musicality, Rachid’s songs were witty, rhythmically and melodically infectious diatribes that earned him love and respect not just among France’s immigrant population, among whom he was a huge star, but also internationally.”
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Rikki had met Rachid when he was already “at the mountain top” as a member of the famed group Carte de Sejour, and his narration of their time togethers exploring Paris’s nightlife as well as Rachid’s dignified way of dealing with a devastating form of Muscular Dystrophy, whose impingement of his movements led many fans and fellow musicians to assume he was often a bit too drunk on stage (something even musicians in the Paris scene who knew him well would lament to me, or whisper about heroin, if word was circulating about a difficult show). By reading Rikki’s story about their time together you realize no one with that level of drinking or drug problem could do over 150+ dates per year literally all over the world, wowing audiences from Glastonbury to WOMAD, Palestine and Vietnam. Here and in many other places, Moving Music sets the record straight on crucial misinterpretations or false flags of late 20th-century music history.
Rikki also ensured the continuity of the Fela legacy during the period he actively worked with Rachid by taking on management of his oldest son Femi, then a rising star in the world music scene, whose personality and more jazz-influenced sound were quite distinct from his fathers (unlike his youngest son, Seun, who’d begin his career more or less continuing his father’s musical legacy, with members of his Egypt 80 band to guide him). The number of careers Moving Music touches upon, the sheer volume of music Rikki Stein helped produce or shape, from African dance ensembles such as Les Ballets Africains, to French heart throbs and interactions with global icons like Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno, transcends the limits of terms like “manager,” “producer,” A&R” or even impresario. They point to a lost art of making connections and webs of relationships across continents that helped shape the music business, including the global African music and world music scenes, for half a century, making them perhaps the most creative musical forces on earth during this time.
While this book will no doubt inspire musicians and fans who already love these genres, we can hope it also inspires a new generation of behind-the-scenes forces in the business, who can help move the music, the artists who create and perform it, and the industry people who more often than not hinder if not outright ruin it, back to a foundation of the Underground Spiritual Game that has always animated the most powerful, creative and at least for a time, successful pop music. That would be quite a legacy indeed, and no one should be surprised if Rikki Stein is dancing away the night till he wrangles that outcome as sure as he wrangled Fela and 50+ other music
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