“Blue” Gene Tyranny & Peter Gordon – Trust in Rock 3LP Unseen Worlds

Trust in Rock documents the last evening of an epic concert series held at Berkeley’s University Art Museum in November 1976, featuring an all-star ensemble of the Bay Area’s most unclassifiable musicians performing works by “Blue” Gene Tyranny and Peter Gordon. This band, and this concert, played at the nexus of New Music, jam bands, “pattern music,” and punk. Tyranny had quit Iggy Pop’s band in 1973; Gordon had already moved to New York and began playing with Arthur Russell and Rhys Chatham. Their combined band crossed styles and institutions and time, and was assembled from the effervescence of the Bay Area scene in the 1970s. It included Gordon on saxes and the RMI Synthesizer; Tyranny on the piano; local video-performance artist Patrice Manget on vocals; Karl Young on saxes; composer-performer-guitarist Paul Dresher, who played in Tyranny’s band Edge of the Road along with percussionist Gene Reffkin; Steve Bartek of the Mystic Knights of Oingo Boingo on bass; and M ills College student Janet Cuniberti on the funky Clavinet and RMI Synth.

Tyranny’s direct and profound songs are “concerned with influence, trust, self-reliance, and having to re-do what is true for you;” Gordon’s songs, with lyrics by then-partner Kathy Acker, give the performance a sexual and political edge, complimenting the intensity of his instrumental works. Though some of the works on Trust in Rock also appear on Peter Gordon’s Star Jaws and “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s Out of the Blue, many others are available here for the first time. At this performance, Gordon, Tyranny, and their band were not afraid to take the time to “listen to the interior state of something,” as Tyranny later put it: they put their trust in rock.

Trust in Rock by “Blue” Gene Tyranny