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Little Richard
Little Richard … You keep a knockin' but you can't come in – unless you bring a saxophone. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Library
Little Richard … You keep a knockin' but you can't come in – unless you bring a saxophone. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Library

Hot and dirty sax is what rock'n'roll is built on

This article is more than 9 years old

Courtney Love reckons the saxophone 'doesn't belong in rock'n'roll'. She's wrong: it brings the music to life

The problem is in part aesthetic. The saxophone does not look wildly rock'n’roll; rather it suggests the result of an unlikely liaison between C-3PO and a foxglove — the cork, the keys, the octave pin, the peculiar curve of the bell. There is something so frilly and fiddlesome about its appearance.

And then of course there is the fact it has to be not only learned but mastered before it can produce anything approximating a decent sound. Not to mention its association with elevator muzak and inoffensive restaurant soundtracks.

The result of which, of course, is that the energy of the music the saxophone creates differs to that of the two-chord punk assault; it lacks the raw and rough and rudimental effect that the guitar, say, can deliver.

But that does not mean Courtney Love’s dismissal of the instrument holds true; in a recent video interview Love discussed her antipathy towards the music of Bruce Springsteen, explaining that her main issue was one of instrumentation. “Saxophones,” she said, “don’t belong in rock'n’roll.”

I was at an Amazing Snakeheads show a couple of weeks ago, and I would beg to differ. This band is currently making some of the most thrilling music around, putting on some of the most mesmerising live performances, and in their hands the saxophone becomes a lone, menacing sound stalking through their songs. This isn’t Candy Dulfer, this isn’t Baker Street; this is a dark alley, this is a mad dog on a leash.

But Amazing Snakeheads weren’t the first artists to bring the saxophone to rock ‘n’ roll — and nor are they the only form of riposte to Love’s statement.

It was Lou Reed who made the famous appeal for simplicity in rock'n’roll: “One chord is fine. Two chords is pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.” But it was also Lou Reed who gave us Walk on the Wild Side, a song in which the saxophone becomes a pulsing, all-knowing thing.

But there are so many more, too: the vibrancy of Junior Walker’s playing on Shotgun, for instance, or Pee-Wee Ellis’s solo on Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey, or what Robert Christgau called the "solitary new-thing saxophone" of Steve Mackay on the Stooges' Funhouse. Think how those Little Richard records would sound without the sax. And remember, of course, the Birthday Party, to whom the Amazing Snakeheads owe something of a nod, who were not averse to a spot of sax themselves.

And then of course we have the focus of Love’s distaste, Bruce Springsteen; or more particularly we have Clarence Clemons, Springsteen’s saxophonist (since his death three years ago, his boots filled by his nephew Jake Clemons). In his eulogy for Clemons, Springsteen described “the force of nature his sound was”. And it is precisely this that I think the saxophone brings to rock'n’roll. To listen to Clemons playing — across Born To Run, Jungleland, I’m Goin’ Down and beyond is to hear such instinctive richness and raunch. Listen to Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out and hear how the saxophone gives the song its exasperation and humour and mirth. Listen to him play the final notes of Dancing in the Dark and see how it becomes the wild, flickering tail of the song.

The sound of the saxophone to me it is not about ripping anything up or starting again, rather it is the sound of life ongoing, the force of our nature, and all of the lusty glory, the defiant delight that lies in that.

Surely the most rock'n’roll attitude is to embrace that force, to say live and let live, to spread one’s arms wide to the idea that there are no rules; anything belongs in rock'n'roll. Yes, even the saxophone.

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