Brooklyn Bugle » Existential Stuff

Thank You, Vin Scelsa

Tim Sommer — Wed, 01 Apr 2015 04:08:51 +0000

Here is a stereo set, bought at Korvettes, overheated and smelling gently of warm plastic. It sits on a deep shelf in a teenager’s suburban bedroom.

It’s left on all night, and most of the day. It hums and buzzes and hollers and sighs as teeth are brushed in the morning, when homework is done in the afternoon, as diet sodas are sipped over impenetrable algebra in the evening, and when the lights go out after the news at night.

Mostly it plays LPs and 45s, largely British, full of accents and attitude and slurring power chords and sly observations, “Lucifer Sam” and “Well Respected Man,” “Honaloochie Boogie” and “Baba O’Riley.” Sometimes it plays cassettes of comedy shows taped off the TV.

When it’s not doing any of these things, the radio is on.

The signals, beamed from an Empire State Tower twenty miles to the west, arrive glowing and cozy, vibrating in the sweet, low/mid-range of the 1970s: highs ducked, the bass inviting and sensual, sluicing under and around you like a favorite sweater. Except to hear ballgames and scraps of news, it’s never set to the hissing sibilance of AM.

Even when the radio is top-loaded with songs offensive or uninspiring (to be useful only for triggering a Pavolovian nostalgia dribble two or three decades later), the frequency is still full of friends, which is to say, the voices of the DJ’s. They create the impression that they are speaking directly to you, sharing insights and discoveries (extreme, plain or passionate) with you and only with you.

And their names still shiver my heart to this day: Alison Steele, Meg Griffin, Pete Fornatele, Jane Hamburger, and most of all, Vin Scelsa.

Vin Scelsa announced his retirement this week, after nearly half a century speaking from the heart to the hearts of music lovers – or just lovers of his company – in the New York City area. As I have stumbled across decades, states, and careers, I could say I have only infrequently thought of Scelsa – but that wouldn’t be true. I thought about him all the time (even if I didn’t keep up with his work, which I now regret).

He was my friend. He was never far from my mind. Although I never met him, never even laid eyes on him, a lifetime ago he invited me into his world, which was open minded but discriminating; local in flavor but global in scope; optimistic but realistic; cynical but always inclusive of an ellipses which invited positive change; non-judgmental but with a healthy suggestion of the arched eyebrow of taste. In ways I can never quite detail, he helped shape me. As much as I might claim that I am a child of the golden age of open-minded/no-playlist FM radio (when mightily powerful New York stations would follow the Grateful Dead with Wreckless Eric, or the Good Rats with the Ramones), or the child of the Anglo-discoveries of Trouser Press magazine or the NME, or the child of the high ambition of shadowy and sepia-colored 1980 New York City, or the child of the great shabby and sexy god of 1980s college radio, perhaps the most significant midwife in my birth as a would-be Prince in the Kingdom of Outsiders was Vin Scelsa.

(The only other person on radio who ever reached me in quite the same way, who made me think they were a friend in the night speaking only to me, was Steve Somers, when he did the overnight for WFAN in the 1980s; but that’s another story, I suppose.)

I am delighted that this is not an obituary, but just a few words to honor a great man who contributed enormously to shaping my own strange and opinionated heart and mind, and the hearts and minds of thousands others, too. Today, we are generation (and more) past those school nights I spent in the winter dark and the spring gloaming scanning his weighty pauses for meaning; and I find that the music he played is not fully recalled, and that doesn’t really matter. Instead, I celebrate that I found — in his words, his joy, his doubts, and in his hope-fueled cynicism — an affirmation of the user-friendly idiosyncratic. Vin Scelsa was a coach compelling me to be myself and directing me to find the power of art and individuality in rock’n’roll.

Every time over the last forty years I have grasped for the peace-guns of music to reach someone’s soul, every time I have recognized that a few bars of music and a couple of guttural shrieks contain the ore of revelation, release, and revolution, anytime I have tried to make sense of a personal worldview that encompasses Boston and Wire, Rush and Rudimentary Peni, I am echoing the imprint of Vin Scelsa.

I have long believed that punk rock had only one (broad, all-encompassing, and all-loving) definition: To be open minded, to not fear the obvious, and to not fear the extreme (the extremely simple, the extremely quiet, the extremely loud, the extremely original).

I recognize, looking back forty years, that I have Vinnie Scelsa to thank for that.

Thank you so much, Vin Scelsa.

The Birth of Hardcore Punk In New York City (Part 2)

Tim Sommer — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 04:08:16 +0000

The End of the Beginning

Bitte, Kann ich haben eine Fribble?

As discussed in Part 1, the first generation of New York City Hardcore Punk bands (1980 – ’82) were essentially musicians trying to reclaim punk and post-punk for a younger audience. Most of the contributors to the budding hardcore scene had been 12 – 16 years old when the Pistols and Ramones emerged, and had therefore been too young to actively participate in that “first wave.” But circa 1980, these same people (now in their late teens and early 20s) were very eager to create their “own” punk rock and post-punk, informed by the earlier music yet inclusive of a musical and iconographic style that reflected a changing social and creative environment.

Few of those ’80 – ’82 NYHC bands played music that would now be recognized as pure hardcore, and nor did they want to. I believe they considered themselves punk acts, post-punk acts, art-rock acts, activist rock acts, funny-rock acts, etcetera, but as they were swept away by the momentum of an exciting national movement, virtually all of them adopted some aspect of the iconography, lyrical harangue, and hyper-kinetic rhythm that was characteristically hardcore. In some ways, it is unfortunate that virtually every American “third wave” punk band (the first wave being the initial ’75 – ’77 explosion, and the second wave being the ’78 – ’80 group, typified by Stiff Little Fingers, Undertones, Ruts, et al.) were engulfed, to some greater or lesser degree, by the hardcore thing; ideally, a “pure” punk third wave should have been allowed to flourish in America, as it did (to a certain degree) in the U.K. (and although much of the U.K. “third wave” was lumped under the Oi Movement, in general there was more of stylistic and philosophical continuum between first/second wave punk and Oi then there was in the U.S. between first/second wave punk and hardcore. Now, that sentence sounded a bit academic, but if you stuck with me, I’ll buy you a Fribble one day).

False Prophets, Even Worse, the Undead, and Stimulators (to name four) were pretty much straight punk rock acts, each with differing stylistic and ideological accents; Reagan Youth, AOD, and Kraut were more-or-less straight-up punk bands, too, but they occasionally integrated double and quadruple-timed hardcore rhythms; and the wonderful Nihilistics seemed on one hand to borrow from Crass and on the other anticipate the Swans. In fact, in this “first” generation of New York Hardcore, the only acts I would label as being (more or less) “pure” hardcore would be Heart Attack, the Mob, and the Beastie Boys (let me note here that Heart Attack were a blunt, often stunning group, shattering and direct, and they’ve never quite gotten their due; after Misfits and Bad Brains, they were probably the best band on the scene).

(It’s important to note that the groups who are most frequently identified as being “early” NYHC bands – say, Murphy’s Law, Cro-Mags, Agnostic Front – evolved after this first wave. Those bands were a distinct and very powerful second generation of NYHC…but right now, we are discussing the diverse and occasionally shambholic first generation.)

Out of this small list, the clear leader was the Bad Brains; none of these groups could ever hope to hold a candle to the explosive, radical, original genius and nearly miraculous level of craftsmanship and showmanship the Bad Brains brought to every gig during this time.

The Bad Brains constant gigging provided the centerpiece for the first era’s socializing (and band forming), and the Bad Brains were also extremely supportive of the scene growing up around them. Although New York also laid a somewhat tenuous claim to New Jersey’s Misfits (who were also very damn fierce in terms of performance, songwriting, and iconography), the Misfits more or less abdicated as potential scene-leaders, choosing instead to focus on a more global and long-term game plan.

It is also very important to note that the Bad Brains changed radically towards the end of this first era; by the end of 1982, their gigs were largely oriented towards their reggae compositions, and by mid-1983 they had made a more-or-less full transition to reggae. I could theorize that the Bad Brains absolutely unchallenged musical superiority intimidated this first generation of bands from playing pure hardcore (and it’s true that the explosion of area bands playing music clearly identifiable as hardcore happened only after the Bad Brains stopped playing so damn fast); but I don’t think that’s true.

I think it’s far more likely that the ’80 – ’82 NYC scene bands played a more “traditional” form of punk simply because a) they wanted to, b) their prime desire was to interpret ’75 – ’79 punk in their own Lower East Side way, and c) their main interest was in the teen empowerment and generationally distinctive inconography implied by hardcore, not in the caricature hardcore sound itself.

By mid and late 1982, the next generation of New York hardcore was becoming established. This would be the generation that would perform music immediately identifiable as hardcore, and would later be more firmly identified with the story of NYHC. Personally, I lost interest; by late 1982, the on-stage efforts of any band you saw — even if it was a well known national or international act — were overshadowed by the antics of the audience, and personally, I couldn’t quite make sense of a musical scene where the moshpit and the stage-divers seemed more important than the music itself. I am not looking down my nose at that behavior, I’m really not; it’s just that not my, uh, thing. Circa ’82 I had also noted that some of the first-generation hardcore bands were trying to take steps away from their original sound, and were being (at best) ignored, and more frequently ridiculed; a perfect example of this was TSOL, whose outstanding, pre-goth, keyboard-driven second album, Beneath the Shadows, was largely ignored; similarly, Bad Religion’s second album, the synth-heavy, slower-rhythm’d Into the Unknown was subject to so much ridicule that the band later virtually denied that it had ever existed. A scene in which an act was prohibited from growing creatively was of little or no interest to me.

Now, none of this is to denigrate the next (post ’82) generation of New York-based ”pure” hardcore bands; not only did these groups contains some mighty players and some extraordinary characters (John Joseph of the Cro-Mags is one of the great frontmen in New York rock history), but the ultimate success and staying power of speed metal and death metal has validated these groups hunches and innovations.

Looking back, I recognize that the first generation of NYHC was, to a great degree, hardcore only in name. We had a tremendous desire to link the new “third wave” punk coming out of the East Village with the maelstrom of new punk (labeled as hardcore) coming out of the rest of the country. Ultimately, I believe that it may have been unfortunate that we had to “tag along” on a national movement (as ferocious as that movement was); it’s very interesting to consider what would have happened if we had allowed this “new” third-wave New York punk to assert itself without the stylistic and ideological limitations of hardcore and without having to be tagged with the label of a movement that ultimately became creatively restrictive.

Finally, Sting is a tool, and we warm ourselves with the salty tears he sheds over the failure of Come Sail Away or Ship’s Ahoy or Capeman, or whatever that musical he wrote was called.

In Part 3: New York Hardcore and My Part in it’s Upfall

ISIS, Kid Rock, and the Death of Compassion

Tim Sommer — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 05:08:41 +0000

Today, we talk about two wars. Both challenge essential freedoms we have long taken for granted.

In troubled times, both globally and personally, we rely on one factor to provide hope and establish stability: our belief in the essential humanity of man. Often, there’s another factor that provides comfort: music, and our belief in the essential humanity of the people who make and love music.

Listening to music, loving music, gives us common ground with our fellow man; it means that not only are we engaged in the special energy and beautiful empathy implied in songs new and old, but it is also implies that we understand, implicitly or explicitly, that

the sound of American music is the sound of America’s disenfranchised, empowered by song.

But first, let’s talk about War.

We have always believed in the humanity of the common man, even if we have disparaged the humanity of their leaders. We believed that when we looked the enemy in the eye, we would see men and women like ourselves; we would see our brothers, our friends, our fathers, the sons of mothers. We hated the leaders, not the led.

We believed that the “enemy” was a government, misguided or cruel, but the armies were made of men and women much like ourselves. This is the essential faith we have in humankind, the one that compels us to not just fight, but to also rebuild: we separate Hitler from the Germans, the Kaiser from his soft-faced armies; behind the uniforms, we see men who dream of football, Christmas, and girls back home. We separate the cold, didactic hysteria of Mao or Stalin from the millions who suffered underneath them; we believe these ordinary citizens dream of freedom, dream even of the tabula rasa once implied by the American dream, just like we do. We separate leaders from the conscripted, and we hold on to the truth that we are all born the same, even if the flags that fly over our cradles are different.

This kind of thinking sustains us, leads to beautiful moments of history like the 1914 Christmas Truce and the 1948 Berlin airlift. More importantly, it makes us believe that war is an atrocity, an aberration, not the standard modus operandi of man. It even makes us believe that Lynyrd Skynyrd would probably defend the rights of Rosa Parks, but more on that shortly.

However (and this is a big goddamn ‘However’): The next war will be different. The men of ISIS have a core of belief absolutely alien to us; I am not here to either delineate or condemn their thinking – I will do neither, they are men, they are born of mothers, they are victims of indoctrination, deprivation, and oppression, just like us – but I will make some assumptions about the way they think: they are serving a fundamentalist belief that lies deep in their hearts, and does not come exclusively from the well-guarded sanctum of some governmental palace or limestone’d capitol. Their belief comes from the same part of their soul that compels breath, hunger, survival. They are not conscripts; we will be fighting an army where every soldier holds in their bosom the heart of a leader. We will be fighting the Borg. This idea is completely alien to us; we associate armies with pawns; but

when we fight ISIS, we will not be fighting pawns. We will be playing on a chessboard where every man is king.

So be fucking careful out there, okay?

Next: War, the cultural kind.

We have always believed in the good intentions of our pop stars, even if we have disparaged their corporate overlords or the excesses of their stardom. We have believed that we were all on the same “side,” regardless of musical taste; I mean, whether you were into (or in) Buffalo Springfield or Grand Funk Railroad, no one wanted to get drafted; whether you were Jeff Buckley or the Carpenters or Ice T (or one of their fans), no one wanted their head bashed in by a cop. The “establishment,” whether it was personified by Reagan, Nixon, Bush, or Thatcher, was a country without empathy; we, the children of rock, stood on opposite shores, observing and jeering at the “establishment.“

When we saw other members of the Fraternity of Music, long hairs, short hairs, pink hairs, and suede heads, we intrinsically believed we were seeing others who believed in the capacity of art and music to make peace, achieve equality, empower the disenfranchised. We assumed other members of this Fraternity stood for compassion, tolerance, and equality. The occasional affirmation of a right-leaning stance from a member of Generation Rock was considered an aberration.

So, here we are, dear reader, 778 words into this piece, and hopefully comfortable in the bosom of an idea or two, which I now recap: first, our general belief in the essential humanity of the Family of Man, the framework that has guided is through the centuries of war and reconstruction; and secondly, our general belief in the essential humanity of the Family of Pop, which made us see a lover of freedom in the face of every silky-haired singer and spiked-hair guitar-slinger.

Both ideas are no longer valid. Both can no longer sustain us.

Instead, we see the face of Kid Rock, and we see the face of ISIS.

Rock has been Kid Rocked. And this has happened at the worst possible time, just when we need to temper the extremist intolerance of the coming war with compassion and empathy.

Each group – ISIS and Kid Rock — fails to recognize that mercy and compassion is a great form of justice in and of itself.

And the highest, most ideal aim of government is compassion, and the highest aim of musicians and artists is to insure that compassion is enforced.

As I have stated before, everything about our culture of American pop – and I mean everything — originated with the disenfranchised people of our country; and every moment you listen to music (and every moment you create music), this genesis must be recalled, because this reinforces compassion and empathy. From Stephen Foster’s faux-slave songs to the modified Appalachian howls of Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams to the sex-calls of Elvis to the rhymes of Run DMC and all the manifold descendants of all these pioneers,

American music was the creation of those forgotten by the American dream: truck driving sons of Parchman convicts, the urban and rural poor, the immigrant Jews and Italians and Irish, all the people who had nothing and built America…they built American song, too, American pop, American rock’n’roll.

Every song you hear, whether it is the retching machinery of death metal or the most superficial EDM, contains the musical DNA of America’s bruised, insulted, exploited, poor, and oppressed.

The Buddha said that you should see the face of your mother in the faces of those who abuse you; at some point in the tumble of eternity, reaching eons into the past and unknown millennia into the future, everyone has been your mother. Likewise, every time you listen to a song, any song, you should see the faces of Ledbelly, or Big Mama Thornton, or Irving Berlin, or Lee Hayes, or Maybelle Carter, or any of the other citizens who turned their suffering into song, and translated oppression into joy.

There is zero room in the pop landscape for the racism and proto-fascist teabaggery of Kid Rock (who I will target specifically, as Ted Nugent is just a useless old windbag, grasping at the straws of the Fox News culture to sustain an income). I am tired of this shit. The stakes are too high.

We will fight the lack of humanity with humanity; we will fight hatred with the ubiquity of love; we will fight the ignorance of fundamentalist prejudice with the awareness of the common empathy of all humans of all sexes.

Jesus Christ I sound like a hippie.

And why not? We need them more than ever. Hippies, that is. Especially if they listen to Rudimentary Peni and the Mekons and not crappy jam bands.

I Officially Give Up and do that whole Band/Letters in Your Name thing, creating an excuse to talk about Impaled Nazarene and Weinstein Dorm.

Tim Sommer — Mon, 02 Mar 2015 09:44:56 +0000

You have surely noticed that the Internet is absolutely lousy with these lists where someone assigns a band to each letter of their name. Perhaps you have even compiled one of these yourself.

For the most part, these lists are self-effacing yet bursting with arrogance, a way for our friends to remind us of all the cool bands they like, such as Wire and the Feelies and John Zorn (by the way, no one actually really likes John Zorn; it is, however, very possible to like him theoretically. In this sense, he is to music what Joyce’s Ulysses is to literature). These alphabetical musical biographies are not easy to compose, so they are all literally trembling with intent. In my opinion, this letter/band exercise is an ultra-indulgent waste of time; but then again, I am of the opinion that humans should spend a lot more time discussing the TV show I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster.

So, I’m going to join the fun!

John Astin and Marty Ingels of I’m Dickens He’s Fenster.

T is for The Kinks. Because when I was young, I studied the Kinks the way others studied the Beatles (as I detailed here). Sensitive, poetic, acutely observing, self-destructive, monstrously clumsy yet delicate, espousing doe-eyed love and dumb-angel lust,the Kinks epitomized the maddening hot-and-cold experience of being a touchy and skeptical teenager, and they did this better than any other band. The Kinks’ mixture of fey flippancy, monkish self-reflection, and garage-rock bumbling made the Beatles frippery and the Stones’ mannishness seem positively mainstream; they were exactly what a delicate, uncertain outsider like myself needed to guide him through the garden-maze of the horrors of high school. Thank you, Kinks.

I: Impaled Nazarene. Because the future belongs to death metal. Even if you hate the genre – shit, better if you hate it – the flag of the armies of the disenfranchised, the barely employed, the lovers of the loud, the haters of the ‘normal,’ all of these things we thought ‘punk rock’ stood for, is flown far, far better by death metal. It’s extreme shit, and death metal underlines the fact that all us fools who thought Television or the Dictators were extreme were just totally full of shit. And it’s ten times more popular than punk rock ever was. And even if much of it sounds like Rush played by bikers on speed, a lot of it is really, really fucking good.

M: The Move. Because they are one of the three most underrated bands of all time (the others being the Damned and the Small Faces, as explained here), and because they were virtually a precise cross between the Beatles and the Who, and at the same time they presaged Sabbath. That’s hot.

By the way, the theme song for I’m Dickens He’s Fenster was called “The I’m Dickens He’s Fenster March,” which may be one of the greatest song titles of all time. But anyway…

O is for Opeth. Because while you were busy trying to convince me that I should listen to Neutral Milk Hotel and insisting that the freaking world revolved around Wilco, a pile of bands who evaded the hipster radar were making strange, extreme, and thoughtful music of massively high quality. Usually, I consider Porcupine Tree the prime example of this – a band who consistently do what people think Radiohead do – but since there is no ‘P’ in my name, I’ll go for Opeth, who make shimmering, intense music laden with art and intention, starshine and aggression, and who sound like Pink Floyd if they morphed with Slayer.

T: Trouble. Because when metal really sucked, when it was a lot of hair bands mixing drums WAAAY too loud and re-cycling the most obvious aspects of Slade and Hanoi Rocks very, very badly (and WORST OF ALL creating the idea of the “Power Ballad,” which is to music what Dr. Mengele was to Twins), Trouble summoned the ghosts of Budgie, Blue Cheer, and Sabbath and released chunky, sinewy, slithering, riff-filled oily slabs of rock that anticipated the best aspects of stoner and doom metal while somehow making us realize that Black Flag’s overly-sincere attempts to ROCK were pale imitations of the real thing…the real thing being Trouble. Jesus Christ I just re-read that and realized that was ONE long sentence.

H is for Hey, I didn’t mean to disparage Wire, because they are one of the best bands ever. Like Werner Von Braun, most musicians aim for the stars, and imagine themselves purveyors of great, immortal art and perfection; like Werner Von Braun, most musicians just desire to make a big hit in London, where they will sadly be confused by the tipping protocol and pretend that Blur are a lot more important than they actually are (I am a little confused about that metaphor, too, probably because I am still busy thinking about I’m Dickens He’s Fenster). Between 1977 and 1979, Wire achieved what virtually no other band has ever accomplished: they attained perfection, releasing three consecutive flawless albums. Seriously, Layne, how many bands have released three straight albums that are literally immaculate in execution and conception, and which reveal a mixture of startling energy, challenging artistry, and remarkable melody? If 1977s Pink Flag is the most joyful, immediate, and shocking of this trio, perhaps the most rewarding is ‘78s Chairs Missing, which adds a profound intensity and intimacy to the punk vocabulary, and integrates almost pastoral melodies into the gentle tsunami of Wire’s art-punk, post-Eno sound. Yeah.

Y: Young Marble Giants. Along with Durutti Column, YMG invented the possibility of quiet punk, blowing a great wisp of gentle into the post-punk world without losing any of the power.

Now, I’m not going to bother doing the last name, I mean my last name, other than to note this: Many years ago, when I was a resident of the Weinstein Center for Student Living at NYU, I lived next door to a rather extreme and kind wit named Larry Kase. One day in the cafeteria, Larry politely inquired about a song I was playing over and over during the autumn of ‘79, and which he could hear through the wall; see, he was rather surprised that someone had recorded a number called “Here Comes Tim Sommer.” He was, of course, misinterpreting the Undertones song “Here Comes The Summer.” And if you listen to it through the wall, yes, indeed, it does sound like “Here Comes Tim Sommer.” So, the remaining letters in my name — S, O, M, M, E and R — is for “The Undertones.”

P.S. Paul Simon is a tool.

Saturday Night Live Turns 40; Tim’s Visits to the Show Turn 38.

Tim Sommer — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 11:04:23 +0000

The fairly unspectacular memories that follow are dedicated to Alan Zweibel, who was inordinately kind to a 14-year old boy 38 years ago.

When I watched the occasionally thrilling circus of self-congratulation that was SNL 40, more than anything, I saw myself. I’m sure a lot of us did. When we revisit old episodes of Saturday Night Live, we flash back to where we were and who we were when we first saw these actors, these sketches. I found myself entirely conscious of how I reacted to the show when it was a bright, sassy miracle that suddenly appeared on my TV during the dreadful years when Junior High was preparing to end its’ reign of humiliation and cruelty.

A rather gruesome example of the American model

Historical Context: Circa 1975, there were essentially two models for non-sitcom television comedy: The American and the British. The American model involved light satire, broad sketches, musical burlesques, and guest stars, and was typified by (the wonderful) Carol Burnett, Sonny & Cher, Tony Orlando & Dawn, and a rather large stack of forgettable summer replacement shows. It had fairly direct roots in the Vaudeville format omnipresent in the earliest days of television variety.

Beyond the Fringe, the Rosetta Stone of all modern sketch comedy

The British model involved high-concept and frequently absurd sketch comedy, acute topical satire, an ensemble cast, and minimal guest stars; it was typified by Monty Python, The Frost Report, That Was The Week That Was, lesser lights like the Two Ronnies and the Goodies, and many brilliant (but unknown in America) shows like Not Only But Also, At Last the 1948 Show, Do Not Adjust Your Set, etcetera. It had direct roots in the cool, crisp satire of Beyond the Fringe and the Dada hysteria of The Goon Show.

These two branches did not meet, at least not in any real or lasting way,until NBC’s Saturday Night came along. NBC’s Saturday Night (I am deliberately using the show’s original name, which was not altered until 1977) was the child of three very distinct but compatible bloodlines: The National Lampoon (from which it drew the heart of its’ writing staff and its’ acidic attitude – also, a chunk of SN’s original cast came from the Lampoon stage shows), Toronto’s Second City Troupe (which gave Saturday Night some cast members and, more importantly, the general skill-set and acting style of its’ performers), and Monty Python (whose ensemble style, penchant for absurdity, and non-punchline based sketches was possibly the most visible influence on SN). Put the three together and throw in a soupcon of Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, and you had the DNA for NBC’s Saturday Night.

If you were sitting in front of a television in late 1975 and early 1976, this bizarre, beautiful, feisty, fluid object startled you. It was, quite literally, like nothing on American television; the unsubtle and unpredictable sketch format felt vaguely familiar to those of us who were already Pythonophiles, and the language and the attitude of the new show had a resonance if you were acquainted with the Lampoon; but aside from that, it was an Atom Bomb. If you watched a lot of television and listened to a lot of comedy albums (and being a lonely, trivia-obsessed and highly curious 13 year old, that would be me), Saturday Night seemed to achieve the impossible: it was obnoxious, unpredictable, cocky British-format humor,Americanized.

I instantly became obsessed, and starting with the third episode, I found myself glued to the TV every Saturday at 11:30. I would even carefully balance my cassette recorder and tape every new episode, to aid the process of memorizing, analyzing, and understanding this exciting new object.

I turned 14 in March of 1976; I grew a few inches, lost the baby-fat bursting face and peanut-shaped body so permanently memorialized in my Bar Mitzvah photos, and I suddenly found myself somewhat confident in my abilities to actually achieve the goals that my obsessively nerdy mind had latched on to. In the long term, this set me on a course to insert myself into the world of British and American punk rock; but more pertinently, I recognized that Rockefeller Center was only a short ride away on the LIRR. By the autumn of 1976 and the onset of Saturday Night’s second season, nothing was going to stop me from trying to investigate my obsession first hand.

A Long Island Rail Road Train, circa 1977. This was the magic carpet to my dreams.

So I did.

Now, this story isn’t going to involve sex or drugs or even encounters that are particularly anecdotal or remarkable. This story just is, well, what it is.

Throughout the second and third season of Saturday Night, I began regularly going to 30 Rock on show days. Sometimes I waited on the stand-by line, a few times I actually had tickets, but the most interesting times were when I just snuck in. I found that if I put on my older brothers’ tan corduroy jacket and wore his well-tempered Frye Boots (which supplied me with a somewhat jaunty, adult step), I could basically look like someone who might belong in Studio 8H. I can’t recall the precise method I used to slip past security, but I remember that it wasn’t too hard. I think the trick was to keep your head up (if you keep your head down, it’s fairly obvious you’re trying not to be noticed; keep your head up, and you look like someone who isn’t trying not to be noticed, therefore you belong there); to move smoothly but not rapidly; and to have that slight angle to your shoulders that says “Hey, hold that elevator!” I am quite damn sure it wouldn’t be that easy now (though I will note that I did do this trick again in 1996, when I was visiting a friend who was working on that week’s show). When push comes to shove, I really think it was the corduroy jacket that made it so easy; the other fans hovering about wore down or denim, and it seemed like an inordinate amount of the staff wore corduroy.

When I would get up to 8H, I would find a spot in the hallway adjacent to the big studio and just lean against a wall and try to stay compatibly invisible. I wasn’t pretending to be a writer or musician or whatnot; rather, I just wanted to pass for someone who had some small but not intrusive reason to be there (maybe people would think I was the younger brother of a cast member, or the guy who had just dropped off an important prop). Sometimes, if I felt exposed, I would look at my watch and glance around with a small frown on my face, as if I was waiting for someone to hand me something that hadn’t come yet.

I didn’t talk to anyone. I wasn’t there to engage, I was there to observe. There was only one person I revealed myself to; that was one of the writers, Alan Zweibel. I was very curious about his craft, and for some reason he seemed approachable. He could not have been nicer. Seriously, I will always recall that this busy, brilliant man took the time, on a show night, no less, to be kind to a wide-eyed 14-year old passing as a devil-may-care 18-year old. I also talked a little bit (on different visits to 8H) with Dan Aykroyd and Laraine Newman, and they were both nice, especially Newman. Again, I am grateful for her unnecessary kindness.

Not very exciting, right?

Alan Zweibel, an SNL writer who was extremely kind to an annoying 14 year-old.

But it was hugely exciting to be 14, to be captivated with the process of television, to be utterly obsessed with this exciting new show, and to just be able to lean against a wall and watch the incredible, beehive-like buzz of frantic activity and visible tension as the live show unfolded in the hours and minutes before it aired. Who needs anecdotes when you had a front seat?

Somewhere along the way, in the nearly 4/10ths of a century since then, I lost the Frye Boots, the corduroy Jacket, and the cockiness that would allow me to just stroll past security at a live network TV show. But I had it once; it served me well on those nights, and many other times, too. Nothing bad happened to me because I did such ridiculous things – some kind of inner compass of common sense counter-balanced my nerve — and I just followed my dreams onto a train from Great Neck to Penn Station.

Remix: Is Music Ready For The Apocalypse?

Tim Sommer — Mon, 23 Feb 2015 05:08:26 +0000

Listen, no person, no matter how much they froth with opinions, should be above an occasional mea culpa, and here’s mine: I should have known a bit more about Mr. Kanye West’s catalog before jumping to some of the conclusions I espoused in last Friday’s column. Having said that, pray allow me to state this: I had some very important points to make in that column, and the stuff about Kanye was really just a small part of it – goddamn small, actually. In fact, waving my arms about Kanye was honestly just the equivalent of a carny barker trying to get you through the door of the tent.

So, here’s the remix. I want to re-state the stuff from that column that was actually important, without the distraction of the fumbling Kanye stuff. Thank you for listening – I mean that.

America, I am a member of your luckiest generation: Those of us born between (roughly) 1956 and 1975 were born into an era pregnant with prosperity and endless invitations to escapism, and we came of age in a time when this nations’ penchant for invention and daydreaming soared without the clouds of impending disaster and involuntary conscription. We are the luckiest generation: we have lived the rough bulk of our life in the downy-soft years after the threat of Vietnam yet before the apocalyptic Goliath of the caliphate wars and environmental catastrophe. Personally: I was 9 when the shadow of the draft ended, and it is likely I will live most – and perhaps all – of my active life before things become really dark, both figuratively and literally. Our children, our grandchildren, and you (if you are under a certain age) are going to grow up and grow old in a very, very different world than the dynamically inventive and often wonderfully trivial era that has is ending.

Every freedom we have taken for granted, whether it is the freedom to practice our religion, the freedom not to practice any religion, or the freedom to drink fresh water, will be assaulted.

Will your music, your art, and your culture rise to the task?

From Chapel Hill, North Carolina to Ragga, Syria, from the West Bank to Paris, from Manhattan to your hometown, the corpses of those killed in the name of religion are going to pile high in the streets; the bodies of 88,000 and more children, slaughtered hysterically because of the country or creed of their birth, will be laid at the feet of 88,000 mothers; hysterical statesmen, waving testaments old and new, will demand allegiance to a holy land; weapons created by cold-blooded scientists in the last century to defend freedom will be used by hot-blooded hysterics in this century to end freedom; the flashing, shattering scythes of the middle ages and the darkness of the Toba Extinction will return to our world, grim twin revelators riding the pale horses of virulence and deprivation.

Will you be watching the Kardashians?

It is entirely feasible that we will soon find ourselves returning to the constant state of religious war that existed throughout most of history (remember, as recently as 1683 Ottoman troops were at the gates of Vienna); simultaneously, assaults to the environment will force our children and grandchildren to radically alter the way they live and ration things their ancestors took for granted; and continuous breaches of internet security will compel us to redefine the word privacy, and even more likely, force a sizable portion of the wise men and women of this planet off the grid, into an existence that both denies and combats progress.

This is our future.

Will music meet the challenges of this new world? Will music motivate the people of raped Gaia to fight for positive change? Will music mobilize armies to stand up for the disenfranchised, the hungry, the frightened, the abused? Will music provide amiable distraction that somehow creates joy but avoids numbing? Will music incite courageous and productive dissent? Will music underline atrocity and suggest solutions? Will music rouse brotherhood, and combat ignorance?

The model for a utile, user-friendly, informative and provocative pop has existed in the past, and must be recalled and implemented again. Let us consider Phil Ochs and the MC5, performing in Lincoln Park in Chicago during the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention; let us recall the theories, screeds, pranks, and radical distribution models of Penny Rimbaud, Crass, Woody Guthrie, Will Geer, Billy Childish, Alan Ginsberg, Paul Krassner, the Mekons, and everyone else who thought that art could inform, balm, spotlight the truth, highlight hypocrisy and witlessness, provide facts, and inspire accord.

In the future, entertainment can continue to feed escapism and act as the clown distracting children on the way to the death camps; or it can be a utility, a bridge to unity, information, and power. From the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement to the cotton fields of the old South, from Welsh mines to lunch counters in Mississippi, from Lincoln Park in Chicago to the Compton, the story of music and the story of activism is inseparable. And the story of every single aspect of our pop, whether you listen to country, death metal, or rap, is synonymous with the story of America’s disenfranchised. Seriously, friends: the DNA of every goddamn thing you listen to can be found on slave ships and in the hollers of Appalachia. American music is the sound of those who had less, the sound of those who had to fight to be heard, fight to eat, fight to vote, fight to survive. Whether you’re Jack White or Lightning Bolt or Bon Jovi or loathsome Paul Simon, when you make music, you are echoing the noise of America’s disenfranchised screaming to be heard, or seeking joy in their toil, or setting a melody to the fight for equality.

Our music is a talking drum, passed down from the disenfranchised of the past for the use of the desperate of the future.

And that future is near. Our children, our grandchildren, ourselves, will need the Utility of Music more than ever. Music must mean something, say something, fight for something, take risks, announce agendas, denounce lies, and tell the truth.Music is beauty and power. Do not fucking forget it. Honor it. Playtime is over. Rock’n’roll is just beginning.

Be Woody Guthrie. Be Crass. Be Phil Ochs. Be Jon Langford. Be Victor Jara.

You owe it to the future.

Don’t Know Much About History: The 10 Albums Kanye West Must Listen to Before He Makes a Bigger Fool of Himself

Tim Sommer — Thu, 19 Feb 2015 02:08:13 +0000

Before I address the fuckery of Mr. Kanye West, I want to avow the following:

America, I am a member of your luckiest generation: Those of us born between (roughly) 1956 and 1975 were born into an era pregnant with prosperity and endless invitations to escapism, and we came of age in a time when this nations’ penchant for invention and daydreaming soared without the clouds of constant disaster and involuntary conscription. We are the luckiest generation: we have lived the rough bulk of our life in the downy-soft years after the threat of Vietnam yet before the apocalyptic Goliath of the caliphate wars and environmental catastrophe. Personally: I was 9 when the shadow of the draft ended, and it is likely i will live most – and perhaps all – of my active life before things become really dark, both figuratively and literally. Our children, our grandchildren, and you (if you are under a certain age) are going to grow up and grow old in a very, very different world than the sweetly and dynamically inventive and often wonderfully trivial era that has is ending.

Every freedom we have taken for granted, whether it is the freedom to practice our religion, the freedom not to practice any religion, or the freedom to drink fresh water, will be assaulted.

Will your music, your art, and your culture rise to the task?

But first:

There are two ways to respond to the reckless foolishness spouted by Kanye West. There’s the macro and the micro. Let’s start with the micro:

Kanye West (credit: David Shankbone via wikimedia)

Mr. Kanye West speaks about respecting artistry.

He is assuming, as many have, that the biggest, most complex, and most deliberate work of art is the greatest work of art; he posits “how could something that involved so much effort, and the talent of so very many highly paid experts, not be the greatest work of art?”

Mr. West does not recognize that, more than ever, music and art that is mobile, efficient, didactic, socially pragmatic, and deeply emotional may reach the heart and minds more effectively. In fact, as we move into the darkness, these qualities are essential. In the future, there may be only two types of music: the purely frivolous and diverting, and the mobilizing, informing, and polarizing.

But more to the point, if Mr. West asks us to respect artistry, I ask him if he has listened to the following works:

Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys
Soused by Scott Walker/Sunn O)))
Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel by Stuart Dempster
In C by Terry Riley
Meninblack by the Stranglers
Murmur by R.E.M.
Barrett by Syd Barrett
Happy Sad by Tim Buckley
Vienna Concert by Keith Jarrett
Future Days by Can

Mr. West, I say this with genuine respect for your artistry, creative energy, and courage:

When you have listened to three of the ten albums I have listed above, THEN you can talk to me about artistry.

Secondly — and more importantly — the macro:

The rest of this century is going to look very, very different than the relatively complacent, plush, and pleasant times we have lived in since the end of the Vietnam-era draft. From Chapel Hill, North Carolina to Ragga, Syria, from the West Bank to Paris, from Manhattan to your hometown, the corpses of those killed in the name of religion are going to pile high in the streets; the bodies of 88,000 and more children, slaughtered hysterically because of the country or creed of their birth, will be laid at the feet of 88,000 mothers; hysterical statesmen, waving testaments old and new, will demand allegiance to a holy land; weapons created by cold-blooded scientists in the last century to defend freedom will be used by hot-blooded hysterics in this century to end freedom; the flashing, shattering scythes of the middle ages and the darkness of the Toba Extinction will return to our world, grim twin revelators riding the pale horses of virulence and deprivation.

Will you be watching the Kardashians?

This is our future.

Our music is a talking drum, passed down from the disenfranchised of the past for the use of the desperate of the future.

And that future is Near. Our children, our grandchildren, ourselves, will need the Utility of Music more than ever. Music must mean something, say something, fight for something, take risks, announce agendas, denounce lies, and tell the truth.

Music is beauty and power. Do not fucking forget it. Honor it. Playtime is over. Rock’n’roll is just beginning.

Be Woody Guthrie. Be Crass. Be Phil Ochs. Be Jon Langford. Be Victor Jara.

You owe it to the future.

Die Toten Hosen: The World’s Biggest Punk Rock Band

Tim Sommer — Thu, 05 Feb 2015 07:44:49 +0000

I have just learned of the death of Jochen Hülder, who passed about three weeks ago. I ask for your patience as I write a few words about the passing of a man you’ve likely never heard of, who managed a band whose name probably only a few of you will know.

Jochen Hülder managed a band called Die Toten Hosen. Die Toten Hosen are likely the biggest band you’ve never heard of.

Jochen Hulder, 1957 – 2015

Under Hülder’s extraordinary, creative, inventive guidance, Die Toten Hosen (who formed in Düsseldorf in 1982) grew to become (by far) the biggest rock act in German history, and one of the most successful rock acts in the non-English speaking world. And it isn’t just that DTH were/are big (and they are really, really big; it would be safe to say that in Germany, they are bigger than U2 and the Foo Fighters combined, and when it comes to their place in German rock culture, perhaps the only effective comparisons would be Queen or the Stones); it is how they are big.

Die Toten Hosen (which translates as The Dead Pants) were The Clash who became the Beatles, and under Hülder’s guidance, they never forgot, not for one moment, the musical, political, social, economic, cultural, and stylistic values that lay at their origin. Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, those of us who supported punk rock knew a secret: that if the world could actually hear the music un-adulterated, they would really like it. It often seemed there was an active conspiracy to prevent a large-scale American audience from hearing the beautiful, powerful, melodic, passionate, meaningful music of America (and Britain’s) punk bands; it was taken for granted that Joe Plumber and the programmer at Joe Plumber’s radio station would never play true punk rock. Nirvana, amongst others, changed that perception dramatically in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

You will dig this. I promise.

Hülder and Die Toten Hosen took the logic of the mass acceptance of punk rock for granted. They accepted as fact the idea that every rock fan in the country would want to hear the sound of classic UK/U.S. punk rock, and they took it for granted that including advocacy, charity, and compassion in that mission was an absolutely requirement; they also embraced the controversy that their left-wing and pro-immigrant positions engendered not only without fear, but with joy.

Hülder took a band whose primary musical models was Sham 69, Johnny Thunder’s Heartbreakers, the U.K. Subs, etcetera and not only said “This band can be bigger than Led Zeppelin,” he actually made it happen (note: Johnny Thunders’ last performance was as a guest on DTH’s version of “Born To Lose”). He did this via remarkable, corny, aggressive, and sometime ridiculous marketing tricks, all based on the idea that everyone in Germany needed this music and this message in their home. Some might compare Hülder to Malcolm McLaren, except we must recall that McLaren was a charlatan and a thief who ultimately cared far more about his own self-promotion and his own sense of concept than he cared about the success or well-being of his artists, and the last thing McLaren cared about was using his music to effective positive social, economic, and cultural change. Hülder never forgot the big picture.

Now, I’m not going to pretend that DTH’s music was pure as the driven snow – ultimately it evolved, quite effectively, into a high-quality and ballad-laden punk/pop/classic rock hybrid that (to American ears) might sound like Bon Jovi guesting with the Real McKenzies and playing Vibrators and Lurkers songs – but they did it the right way, they were a punk rock band that took over the world (at least the considerable parts of it that spoke German), and never sacrificed the values and joy that made them start off in the first place, and they recognized that an essential part of being a punk rocker was standing up for the oppressed. Oh, and some of their best songs are just the kind of extreme, riotous, fist-in-air singalong drinking songs you always hoped a German punk rock band would play.

I have written, on a number of different occasions, of how completely and utterly important it is to make this extraordinary cultural meme called rock mean something; about how obscene it is to appropriate the clothes and words of the disenfranchised, without actually working for the disenfranchised; about how rock’n’roll is the almost magical distillation of the artistic, melodic, and rhythmic innovations of people who had nothing, who were the utter dregs of society, and how we must honor that legacy.

Die Toten Hosen actually pulled this off. And we have to recognize Jochen Hülder as one of the greatest rock managers of all time.

Van Halen Save the ’70s

Tim Sommer — Wed, 04 Feb 2015 05:08:04 +0000

I’ve been thinking about the 1970s…specifically, about how much they sucked.

If you are too young to have truly experienced the 1970s, you probably don’t know how dreadful it really was. History tends to be quite goddamn kind and only remember the “cool” things about the decade, and all the groovy music; I mean, when the ‘70s are discussed, it’s all about Bowie and Big Star and the Stooges and the Sex Pistols, etcetera…maybe with a gentle, ironic half-grin we add the Bee Gees and the Carpenters to the list.

In the 1970s, there was a TV show based on the movie Animal House. For the Love of God, there was a TV show based on Animal House.

But take it from someone who was there: It sucked. The music was horrific; for every Buzzcocks or Can there were literally a dozen Kansas’s, Styx, Atlanta Rhythm Sections, or England Dan’s and John Ford Coley’s. The fact that I associate the ride to Hebrew School with the song “The Night Chicago Died” probably soured me on Zionism forever. For every sharp-witted and inventive television show like Saturday Night Live, Mary Hartman, or SCTV, there were ten Hello Larry’s or Tabitha’s, not to mention a big, steaming, coiled pile of mindless summer replacement variety shows (for some reason, The Jerry Reed When You’re Hot You’re Hot and When You’re Not You’re Not Hour is strangely absent in montages of the cultural highlights of the decade).

And people LOOKED LIKE ASS. Important Freaking Note: When “modern” TV shows and movies show people “dressed” like the 1970s, for some reason they almost ALWAYS have ‘em looking like how people looked like in the early/mid-1980s. WTF, as Jefferson Davis said while Union forces captured him on a misty but warm spring morning in Irwinville, Georgia in 1865. This stylistic wishful thinking is a constant and disturbing confusion. That Square Pegs/Charlie Rocket/Pamela Stephenson/Downtown Julie Brown thing is a distinctly (and tragically) 1980s look, YET WHEN PEOPLE ON TV DRESS ‘1970s,’ THAT’S HOW THEY DRESS. For fuck’s sake, it is a ludicrous distortion of the actual aesthetic misery of the time. What people REALLY looked like in the 1970s is too unfathomable and unpleasant for most contemporary humans to even confront – in fact, it even defies description, except if you can somehow conflate Ron Jeremy with the ugliest house sound-guy you ever met. You have GOT to remember that GROOVY LOOKING PEOPLE like Joe Strummer or Chrissie Hynde or Walter Lure or Mick Ronson or even Randy Mantooth WERE IN THE VAST MINORITY. I mean, you were LUCKY if someone looked like Bill Macy from Maude.

Literally NO ONE in the 1970s looked like this.

(I will note, however, that women had it a little better, and any male who survived the 1970s is likely to have fond memories of peasant blouses and leotards worn out of context.)

Now, I personally have AMAZING memories of the 1970s – Manhattan’s Soho when it was still shattered, shuttered, lit strangely golden and full of mystery; the East Village when it was still a Beat Secret; flats on Spring Street that cost $175 a month and had a bathtub in the kitchen and a bathroom in the hallway and a rock star’s name on the buzzer panel; and god knows when the music was good, it was really, really goddamn good.

This is superstar Linda Blair and bassist Paul Goddard of the Atlanta Rhythm Section. This is a little more accurate, though to tell you the truth, this isn’t even THAT bad.

But when it was bad it was mightily, enormously bad, and yeah, me likee my Wire LPs and my Mott the Hoople records long long time but LET AN EYEWITNESS TESTIFY: the great music of the decade was FAR overwhelmed by “Dust in the Fucking Wind” and “Carry On My Wayward Freaking Son” and the Fucking Theme From Grease. Jesus CHRIST even the Who recorded “Sister Disco.” If you were wandering around high school and middle schools in the 1970s, as I was, the soundtrack was not “Surrender” by Cheap Trick and “Suffragette City” by Bowie or “Dreaming” by Blondie, NO MATTER WHAT PEOPLE WANT YOU TO BELIEVE NOW. It was fucking Carry Fucking On My Mother Fucking Wayward Son.

Now, this kind of era-distortion is certainly not rare: the common myth that the ‘50s were all boring and virginal is total bullshit (damn, just three minutes watching Louis Prima dry-hump a stage on the Ed Sullivan Show will toss that lie out the window), and lord knows even Hogan Heroes is more historically accurate than Happy Days. And as much as we look at the 1960s through a haze of flowers and smiley faces, during much of that decade it sucked to be African American, it pretty much sucked to be a woman, in a lot of the country being caught with one slim joint could result in you getting legally fucked for life, and half the teenagers in America lived in imminent, pants-pooping fear of being shipped off to Vietnam. Flower Power my ASS.

Having said that, there is ONE song that REDEEMS every single excess of the 1970s; there is one single song that proudly and boldly announces “Hoorah! You have made it through that gruesome, distasteful, patchouli-and-weed-scented hirsute and sloppy, sludge-like leviathan of a decade, and here is your reward!”

And that song is “Everybody wants Some” by Van Halen.

Recorded in the waning weeks of that distraught decade, it somehow both typifies and improves upon every wrong thing about the 1970s,while being stunningly, screamingly powerful and beautiful. Hairy, hoary, horny, creepy, corny, it integrates the crunching simplicity of punk with the utter bombast of the decades most obscenely indulgent rock memes; in fact, I might be hard pressed to think of a song that appears to have learned more from punk while simultaneously repudiating the very idea of the upstart movement.

I mean, the track is the very definition of musically and conceptually indulgent, exploitive, wasteful, and distasteful, yet it sounds more punk rock than most of the era’s more deliberately simplistic and primitive recordings (in fact, I find it slots in very, very well alongside the chunky, leaping, slurp-chord thump-punk of the U.K. Subs and Sham 69).

“Hurry Up Harry” by Sham 69 which, for some reason, reminds me of “Everybody Wants Some,” in a good way, that is.

Like a lot of Roth-era Van Halen, the band achieves a near-perfect blend of musical showboating and chordal simplicity (reminiscent of the Kinks or the Raiders) applied where it counts, i.e. underneath the melody; couple this with an extraordinary production sheen that polishes yet is so powerful it is almost disabling, and you have a song that makes you rethink everything you thought you knew about musical indulgence and high-end pop metal.

This is a song that doesn’t lie, I mean it is what it fucking is, a punk rock song about trolling for hookers played by buzzed-up nerdy alchemists, and it achieves the massively impressive trick of being the musical equivalent of driving on the 15 from Los Angeles to Las Vegas while looking at yourself in the mirror while doing 144 mph. This is a fine fucking line, my friends; one wrong move and you are going headfirst into the World’s Tallest Thermometer in Barstow.

The World’s Tallest Thermometer, outside of Barstow. I dedicate this picture and its’ caption to my great friend Ace Baker.

But Van Halen don’t make that wrong move, some extraordinary inner compass (probably a blend of the essential utter simplicity of the song, Roth’s complete, absolutely gormless assumption of the horny-wolf character straight out of a Warner Brothers cartoon, and producer Ted Templeman’s willingness to let the band blow and make mistakes) keeps them heading straight through to Yermo and beyond; tribal rock drums have never sounded better (I’d have to go back to Tommy Ramone on “Let’s Dance” to find a better dumb angel drum tattoo), Edward has never struck a better balance between his tweaking histrionics and the demands of a gorgeously simple rock’n’roll chord sequence, and David goes so far in the wrong direction yet with such a ridiculous love for his audience and the character he is playing that anything he says is forgiven.
I mean, there was some very solid mainstream rock in the 1970s: Thin Lizzy, Deep Purple, Budgie, Queen, Blue Oyster Cult, and piles of others who I am considering separate from either the blue-based thing (Zeppelin), the arty-opium thing (Floyd), the proto-punk thing (Roxy, Mott) and about a thousand and eight etceteras; but when dumped into a big pile, it left a hangover that sounded a lot like eight cars in a High School parking lot playing Foghat, Montrose, UFO, and Starz at the same time. I mean, that’s not the reality, but it is the hangover. And that hangover really, really sucked, and it basically took Public Image Limited’s Metal Box/Second Edition to clear away the emotional, physical, and psychological distress caused by the 1970s.
But “Everybody Wants Some” somehow made it all worth it. If we had to put up with all that bullshit, all that bad hair and bad clothes and bad music and bad Nixon just to make it to the big rave-up/crash into the chord changes between the 1:10 and 1:20 mark, then I’d put up with it all again.
All of it? Even “Karn Evil 9”?
Yes, even “Karn Evil 9.”

Superlatives, The Column

Tim Sommer — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 05:08:31 +0000

I’ve read the data: my readers respond when I insult icons, dissect shabby and rotting pop phenomena, or reel off subjective but very vocal ‘best of’ lists. So, as much as I enjoy tumbling into great downy word-beds influenced by Ginsberg, Pound, and Joseph Mitchell, today I am giving the people what they want: I’m going to list some of my favorite (and least favorite) rock-type things, culminating in the crowning of The World’s Douchiest Artist.
Now, let me note this list is ENTIRELY SUBJECTIVE and completely based on my personal experience, and I make ZERO claims otherwise. When I list my favorite songs, shows, or records, I recognize that my world-view is relatively limited; for instance, I don’t know very much about jazz, so Oscar Peterson or Keith Jarrett or even Miles could have made something that would shake my musical foundations to their very core, but I was too busy listening to Hawkwind, Fu Manchu or the Kinks to discover it.
So as you go on this little journey with me, remember that I’m not pretending any of this is absolute (though a lot of it probably is).
What was THE best show I ever saw? If I could go back in time and see ONE band on ONE night again, who would it be? Easy. Hanoi Rocks. At Danceateria in 1983, I saw them define soaring, leaping, splitting, snarling, rock’n’roll; they combined thirty years worth of rock memes into one glitter-metal-punktastic night, taking the most acrobatic, cartoonish, and extreme aspects of the Who, Stooges, Dolls, and Damned and blending it (literally) perfectly into one loud, tight/loose, hissing, sassy, sashaying beast of PURE JOY. Honorable mention: The Clash (any/every show I saw ’79 – ’83), Stiff Little Fingers (1980), and R.E.M. circa ‘82/’83.

Hanoi Rocks, circa 1983.
What was THE live performance that turned me into a Puddle on the Floor and Changed My Life? Young Marble Giants at Hurrah in NYC in November 1980. The show was an exhilarating master class in expanding the possibilities inherent in a rock combo; these three unassuming, pale people walked on stage and introduced to me the idea that quiet and shocking, hushed and gigantic were compatible. YMG were a tsunami of tension wrapped in beauty, punk rock power tucked in a pocket of a cloud.

Hey, I was at this show.
This painting by Hitler instantly brings to mind “Karn Evil 9″ by ELP, obviously.
What is the Worst Song of the Rock Era? (N.B., the work of any and all jam bands is exempt, for reasons I explain here) Recently, a friend was attempting to explain to me that the loathsome, artistically venal and conceptually corrupt ELP were not all bad, and they directed me to the songs “Lucky Man” and “Hoedown.” I explained the following: Hitler was a pretty decent landscape painter, but that hardly matters, does it? Now, let’s assume “Lucky Man” is a reasonably charming painting of the Vienna Opera House. “Karn Evil 9” is the London Blitz. 46,000 civilian dead. Does one nice watercolor make me forget 46,000 civilian dead? No, I don’t think so.
If I had only ONE song to listen to for the rest of my life, What would it be? “Hallogallo” by Neu! (please note, as always, the exclamation point is part of the name). The first track off of Neu!’s first album consolidates the spacious, gorgeous, revolutionary open-mindedness of Krautrock, the nearly-sinister power and maxi-minimalism of the Velvet Underground, the lessons of 20^th Century avant-garde composition (like LaMonte Young, Schoenberg, Cage, Reich, Riley, etcetera), the wah-joy heaviness of Hendrix, and A LOT OF DRUGS into one EXTRAORDINARY song. In addition, EVERY musician should be COMPELLED to listen to “Hallogallo” – it is an extraordinary lesson in harmony, power, and patience, and it serves as a sweet, sweeping enema for all bad musical habits. Honorable mention: Nothing. “Hallogallo” is THE BOMB, figuratively and literally.

The Three Albums You Must Own: Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys, Metal Box/Second Edition by PiL, and Ramones by The Ramones. Each of these are aesthetically nearly perfect, conceptually extraordinary, monstrously influential, and of unquestionable historic value. Honorary Mention: The Beatles by The Beatles (The White Album).
I know what you’re thinking at this point: “Tim, I have always been confused by the fact that during the Civil War there were Slave-Owning states that REMAINED part of the Union. I mean, Tim, we were always told that the Civil War was this slave vs. non-slave kind of thing. So are you telling me that Lincoln and his honchos actually ALLOWED states where slavery was still LEGAL to stay in the Union?” Why, yes, that’s true. The CSA was made up only of stated that SECEDED from the Union; if you were a state where slavery was LEGAL but you DIDN’T join the Confederacy and stayed in the Union, Lincoln and the U.S.A. was perfectly happy to have you. HISTORY IS FULL OF GRAY AREAS, you see. Remember that.
Michael Des Barres.
Who is The Nicest Rock Guy Ever? Easy. Michael Des Barres. Not only is he one very talented and charismatic dude (and, if you recall, his song “Grim Reaper” landed in my ten-greatest riffs of all time list), he is also consistently kind and gracious without being superficial and patronizing, and he makes every fan feel like a friend. Everyone in the freaking business should learn from him; being nice in no way compromises the intensity of your work or your ability to be deeply artistic or rocking.
Finally, Who is the Douchiest Artist of All Time?
Once again, I issue the caveat a) that this just reflects personal experience and b) I never personally interacted with either Paul Simon or Lou Reed, both of whom, I understand, are likely candidates for this honor. Having said that…
The Douchiest Artist I ever met was Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. I present this honor without comment, other than to say the singer was okay, kind-of. Runner-ups are Jesus and Mary Chain and Ric Ocasek.
This guy was unnecessarily a rude prick to a 16 year-old fan 37 years ago and I have never forgotten.
I want to say a few words about Ric Ocasek, because there’s a lesson in there that I never, ever forgot: I encountered Ric Ocasek when I was a wide-eyed 16 year-old. And he was a total dick to me, for no discernible reason. And I have never, ever forgotten the fact that a “rock star” would actually make the effort to be rude to an excited young fan. A musician – either in a live situation or off-stage – has only one chance to make a first impression on a fan/listener, and the impression you make will stay with them for life. Most of the people you meet and most of the people who see your band will only see your band that one time. So never throw away a show, never be rude to someone who just wants to acknowledge that they enjoy their work. I mean, of course this doesn’t apply to stalkers or people who interrupt you during meals or personal conversations. But you get the idea.
Godfather of Slocore OUT.

Tim Sommer’s Letter to Blink 182 Fans

Tim Sommer — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 09:44:52 +0000

I understand that Tom DeLonge of Blink-182 has written a long and heartfelt letter to his fans, explaining and apologizing for his group’s dysfunction and inactivity. I respect that kind of outreach. In fact, I respect it so much I thought I would write my own letter to Blink-182’s fans.
Dear Blink-182 Fans:
I have never really listened to Blink-182, but I respect them.
Maybe that surprises you. Well, a long time ago, I learned there was an unspoken brotherhood amongst musicians and music geeks. Whether you are a member of Bon Jovi or Lightning Bolt, chances are you were the guy or girl in your high school who had the coolest record collection, who new insane and arcane details about your favorite musicians, who followed about fourteen weird bands for every one group in the pop charts. Seriously, it’s an odd secret, but I guarantee it’s true: Pretty much anyone who’s put the time and effort into learning an instrument, pursuing a career, and putting up with all the bullshit surrounding the music business is bound to be a serious lover and student of music. So, regardless of any personal relationship I may or may nor have with Blink-182’s music, I respect them as brothers, people who cared deeply about music, and who made that obsession into a lifelong career.
And I respect their fans.
See, I am not going to play that game where I look down on you because you like Blink 182 but don’t like hipper, older, more obscure, or more credible bands. For instance, I enjoy 20^th Century neo-classical music; I like, oh, Aaron Copland, Krzysztof Penederecki, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Iannis Xenakis, etcetera. But there’s definitely someone out there who will go “That guy is a douche! He doesn’t know any Morton Gould or Benjamin Britten! What a Neanderthal that Sommer cat is!” Now, the fact that I can’t name any compositions by Benjamin Britten doesn’t mean I love or enjoy Terry Riley any less. And the same goes for you. Just because you can’t name any songs by, oh, the Dils or Crass or the Weirdos or the Pointed Sticks doesn’t mean that you aren’t as moved when you hear a song by Blink-182. If a song reached your heart, if you heard something and thought “I cannot wait to share that with my best friend!” or “Looking forward to hearing that song got me through class today,” that’s all that matters! What possible difference does it make how famous or how obscure it is. Shit, I spend a lot of my time listening to music you probably couldn’t even spell, but it still makes me deliriously happy to hear “Ray of Light” by Madonna, and I have no trouble screaming that fact to the world.
I am not going to look down on anything that moves anyone, provided it doesn’t espouse any hurtful or hateful bullshit or dogma.
See, there’s nothing wrong with popularity, nothing wrong with liking the popular. Regardless of whether you listen to the most obscure noise from Brooklyn or the most mainstream pop, you probably listen to it for the same reason: it moves you, it distracts you, it makes your day better, it gives you something to talk about with your friends or the people you want to be friends with, it says something for you that you cannot say yourself. I feel that way when listening to “Fiery Jack” by the Fall or “Brando” by Scott Walker; someone else may feel the exact same thing when listening to Nickelback or Darius Rucker. The messenger may change, but the listener’s motivation and heart stays the same. A song that creates an amazing shared memory for someone is a spectacular gift, and I am not going to ridicule it, whether it’s by the Mekons or Miley Cyrus.
Now, as long as I have your attention, let me tell you a little about punk rock.
To me, more than anything else, punk rock means the freedom to be yourself and have your own opinion, and dream big dreams and love those dreams with all your heart, despite the naysayers; I believe punk rock is literally the opposite of conformity and bending to peer pressure. More than a “sound,” it is just the idea of an unfettered, un-tethered imagination. I also believe it is essentially a simple art form, where you discover and express beautiful, strong, powerful, intensely creative dreams that others might say are “too obvious” to express; in other words, people looked at the work of Picasso, Mondrian, and Pollock and said “My kid could do that,” or they heard the Ramones and said “Shit, anyone could play like that.” But NO ONE had painted like that, no one had played like that. If you could do it, why didn’t you do it? If your kid could have done it, why didn’t you encourage him or her to do so? Often, beauty, genius, and invention are as obvious as the air we breathe. Punk Rock artists discover a new country, the one that was in front of us and under our feet and in our dreams the whole time; the one whose beauty and power was so obvious, it was like discovering a delicious, nutritious fruit just sitting there hanging from a low branch of a tree, and everyone else said “If it’s that easy to pick, why hasn’t someone already eaten it? It must suck.”
Having said that, consider your love for Blink 182 a doorway. Let that door lead you to the soul, spirit, joy, compassion, simplicity, artistic adventure and discovery, and immediate magic of Punk Rock. Don’t mourn the demise of your favorite band; instead, celebrate what you loved about them and let that door lead you…
To the truth: Punk rock, first and foremost, is an expression of what moves you, without the shadow of peer pressure.
To the visceral: punk rock is about discovering the beauty and power of the obvious and everyday; the hum of a refrigerator can be punk rock; the ticking of a signal indicator can be punk rock; the one-chord passion of an old rockabilly song can be punk rock.
To the adventurous: blow it all up and put it back together any damn way you want, any goddamn way that has the power to move you; and if it moves you, there’s a very good chance it will move someone else. That strange sound you want to hear over and over? I bet someone else wants to hear it, too. Trust your ears and heart.
Perhaps you have the desire to be a “real” punk. If so, please note: A lot of the visual and iconic language of your “movement” is borrowed from the language of rebel politics and the battles of the disenfranchised to gain equality and socio-economic power. Go to the roots of this iconography: Don’t just “say” fight for your rights; actually fight for your rights, and other peoples. Literally nothing is “more” punk rock then helping those who have less, those who have no power, and protecting those who are in harms way. It’s not enough to “give the wrong time/stop a traffic line” as the brilliant Johnny Rotten wrote in “Anarchy in the U.K.” Ideally, a punk should give the right time to someone who can’t afford a watch, and clear traffic in front of an abortion clinic.
Oh…if a band you like has ever done anything intentionally racist, sexist, homophobic, or refused to condemn any section of their fans that have done the same, then none of this applies. Any band that doesn’t defend the disenfranchised, that is the artistically, economically, socially, sexually, politically disenfranchised, are just posers.
Good luck to you. Timothy A. Sommer
P.S. Here are some records you might like: “Teenage Kicks” or “My Perfect Cousin” by the Undertones; “Where Were You” and “Memphis, Egypt” by the Mekons; “Into the Valley” and “The Saints are Coming” by the Skids; “Babylon’s Burning,” “Staring at the Rude Boys” and “West One” by the Ruts; “Hurry Up Harry” and “Hersham Boys” by Sham 69; “Endangered Species” and “New Barbarians” by the UK Subs; anything at all off of the albums Damned Damned Damned, Machine Gun Etiquette, The Black Album, or Strawberries by the Damned; “Nobodys Hero” or “Alternative Ulster” by Stiff Little Fingers; “One Chord Wonders” by the Adverts; “The World the Day Turned Day-Glo” by X-Ray Spex; the entire Pink Flag and Chairs Missing albums by Wire; “This is the Modern World” by the Jam; and a thousand and eight more, especially the Metal Box/Second Edition album by Public Image Limited, the greatest and most creatively brave punk rock record of all time.

NYC Drive: The Best Show In Town

Tim Sommer — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 06:18:48 +0000

Without a doubt, one of my favorite television channels is NYC Drive. It features only one program, continuous but ever-changing: an endlessly compelling movie about the City of New York, told via static aerial views of the highways, bridges, parkways, and rivers that disfigure and delineate the great town.
24 hours a day, 7 days a week the NYC Drive Channel (Channel 72 on Time Warner cable) cycles through about two dozen live traffic cams, posted at various places in the five boroughs. The shots are all taken from a reasonable distance, allowing you to take in a healthy slice of the landscape (along with the roads and the anonymous automobiles moving rapidly or flaccidly along them).
Seen for a few moments or seen for a few hours (believe it or not, it invites continuous viewing), NYC Drive is luxurious, elegant, sublime, moving, revealing and hypnotic, yet strangely frantic (the shifting of the images seems to defy a clock, and no image is ever the same twice, even if the camera is perfectly still); it is like the great New York movie Wim Wenders never made, a perfect, objectively dry yet subjectively wet conjuring of a city whose evocative power is so extreme it defies the almost brutal, robotic stillness of the cameras.
The images – each identified in some kind of effective shorthand (LIE & Van Wyk, FDR and 115^h,Maj Deegan & 167, Bowery & Canal, QB Bridge & York, and so on) each have a compelling charm, and each (with the single exception of Times Square) feature virtually no human figures (the Times Square camera is also returned to like a refrain, far more frequently than other cameras, and it is held on screen far longer, almost as an identifying tag). Every one of the many cameras also broadcasts with (sometimes dramatic) differences of clarity and tone, and this further adds to the effect of the piece when seen as a whole, since there is just enough similarity to create a hypnotic effect, but more than enough difference between images to keep one alert.
During the day, these strange, sometimes faded images, scarred oddly and intermittently by color (the Brooklyn Bridge shot would appear to be entirely black and white, except for the blurt of orange in a yield sign), seem timeless, having both the slightly herky-jerky quality of an old 8MM film and the majestic sweep of an early Technicolor movie whose colors have faded into something strange, old and new; the tiny rumors of color also recall the chips of paint found on old Roman and Greek statues, something to be investigated further by experts, or filled in by people with either experience or imagination.
This is New York as palimpsest and blank page, both a history to be written over and a story to be filled in. The New York City of NYC Drive is lonely, surreal, colors muted or mystical, saturated and sensational; it is both sooty and heavenly, toy-like and almost Soviet-era brutal. This city is ready to be filled with souls and dreams and transients and travelers, it is the definitive image of New York City as tabula rasa.
Watch the damn thing (especially if you like the glacial, gorgeous films of Wenders or Tarkovsky). For me, NYC Drive is the story of a place, a great place, ripe for imagination and self-fiction (for largely gone are the questions of commerce, gentrification, phony Elmos and real landlords); it is all I ever wanted the city to be: a canvas for the possible, a treasure box to hold the weight of the past, a surface and safe for all the dreams of glory and mammon and even repose the city is built on. Staring at the endless but constantly changing pictures of NYC Drive, I realize these images recall my very earliest hopeful impressions of the city: the muted, promising, swelling skylines and speeding headlights of the Million Dollar Movie intro, and the quick flickers of the city as the effervescent, unpredictable, and romantic place you would see in the openings of newscasts, sitcoms, or sporting events.
I only wish there was music – perhaps the spacious,deeply emotional instrumentals of Roedelius or Satie, or maybe the motorik-motor-ticking pulse of Neu!, Kraftwerk or the Feelies; or maybe some mix of cool, candle-lit instrumentals by Air or Dave Brubeck; and, of course, the sinuous, gently satanic majesty of “Rhapsody in Blue.” But the silence works, too, because your heart fills the quiet in with memories, hopes, and even fragments of just the right music.
NYC Drive is a very slowly pulsing, ever-moving, shiver-happy and shiver-sad movie loaded with the images of childhood dreams and distant hopes; and the glorious nighttime feed is bound to remind you of that one perfect night when the Checker carrying you and your date passed through a cloudy stack of man-hole steam, and the Subway Inn neon broke bright and wet on the windshield.
Because at night is when the feed really comes alive. The Manhattan-based shots dissolve into vivid, almost lurid golds, blues, whites, and oranges. Aspects of the images seem to become clearer with the night, whereas other factors dissolve into beautiful blots of almost-churchlike bronze and gold; and in shots where the rivers creep in, the water shimmers with 800 shattered split-moons.
Outside of the Manhattan cams, the more color-less night images look barely defined but compelling and identifiable, like fantastic pin-drawings; or they wobble like kinescopes; or they are cool and full of graphite-grays and bursts of white, like old spy images of Eastern Europe (at times oddly splashed with a spot of color on the horizon, like a distant Cathedral seen from a train window at night).
I really can’t say enough about the magic of watching NYC Drive, either as an interstitial curiosity to be clicked to during commercials of another show, or to be watched at length, with the attention you would give to a great art film. I don’t know whether the enchantment of NYC Drive is intentional or accidental, but the effect is real; it is the story of the city and your hopes, fast, static, full of gravity, full of lead, hazy and precise, colored bright and modern and ancient pencil-gray.
And I have to imagine – it has to be intentional, right, because who is watching the TV to figure out what roads they should avoid?
And perhaps, most importantly, I have actually used the word Palimpsest into a column.
P.S. Sting is a tool.

Happy Voyages, Joe Franklin

Tim Sommer — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 04:38:20 +0000

When his city hummed with radio waves, autumn colored incandescence heating up bakery brown Bakelite, He lived to be lit by the stars of the golden radio city, He lived to find relics in the smoky shade of the old Rialtos.
He lived to recall the pre-atomic radioactive shadow of Jolson.
Baby faced in Ballrooms actual and imagined, he had been bitten and beamed at by Banjo Eyes and found his one true church:
Wintergardens where the sacrament was the croon and cry of immigrant America, slippery with Yiddish and leaping with long Italian syllables.
And this was his world, the world created by Jews and minstrels and men of gossip and kings of jazz. On shellac and magic Philco, they were more perfect to the heart than sloppy reality. Life in Newsprint was always better than the newsprint-colored world, and what truth, sepia sad, could compete with the cartoon curve of a Dagmar’s hip?
When the winter-white bathtub-colored sky above his city hummed with terrestrial television waves (and the bunny ears bent to catch them), the pictures from the Motorola fluttered and hissed and he knew: there was no love, no laughter, no tears greater nor more authentic than those we would find when persistence of vision fooled our eyes and made us think the flicker was real.
When his city was full of Robert Moses modern, and the Zenith was tube-heated and so sexy-warm to the touch, and in the TV Guide there was a big C next to the talk shows and summertime fun hours; when the children sat Indian-style in Great Neck dens and overheated Chinatown flats and Grand Concourse kitchens and Captain Jack taught us, all of us equal in his eyes whether we be belly-full or belly-empty, about Hal Roach and Moe Howard.
And behind a desk and a cool, Canada Dry he reminded us, like a Buddha, that everything old was alive in the new; and that Tony Pastor knew Weber & Fields and Weber & Fields knew Lillian Russell and Lillian Russell knew Ziegfeld and Ziegfeld knew Fanny Brice and it went on and on and eternally returned to the beginning and the middle and it could not be more beautiful.
When his city hummed with the slap and jaw of the three Card Monte men in a Times Square shattered and burst and smelling of ammonia and weed, everything yellow like old Scratch’s stucco and the vials crunching crisply underneath hurried feet, he insisted we make time for King Vidor and Johnny Ray and a self published author from the Tuckahoe, and it could not be more beautiful.
I looked through a window in his building once (true), a building full of Bialystocks and tragic hopefuls and hope-nots huddled by dairy-creamer creased coffee machines, and I squinted through wire’d windows, dark with soot at any time of the day, out to the Deuceland below; and if you looked through half-closed/half-happy eyes you could see his city, as he saw it, clocks clicked back and El Morocco black and white, a pigeon-colored world turned at dusk to Roxy Rainbow light fogged by camel smoke rings and a Canadian Club just within reach.
I looked into his eyes once, true, and saw Phil Silvers and Cantor and even sweet Veronica Lake in the shark’s teeth tick of the sassy iris. Pass me your world, dear friend of so many nights, of every age of my life; give me your century, your hungry, sassy Jews, your prat-falling Irish, your Midwestern Cleopatra’s and Neopatras curved of plenty, your crooners, your jugglers, your tin pan beggars and boastful losers, your soon to be’s and once weres; give me your century, the last century, when the arc lights were high and the overture started at 8:05, sing me the song of your century, give me the paint with which you touched up tense reality and made it tender and alive with song and silent film.
And he is the last of this world, and I love him so.
And to love him without irony is to love the hope felt when you were a child and you lost a breath when the blue lights caught the star on stage.
Joe Franklin March 9, 1926 – January 24, 2015
Suis Generis
And apropos of nothing/everything:

Kraftwerk’s Incredible Invention (and Where It Came From)

Tim Sommer — Fri, 23 Jan 2015 09:44:50 +0000

“The simplest description of emptiness in the Buddhist teachings is this sentence: This is because that is. A flower cannot exist by itself alone. To be can only mean to inter-be. To be by oneself alone is impossible. Everything else is present in the flower; the only thing the flower is empty of is itself.”

— Thich Nhat Hanh
Where do we find the origin of the profoundly original?
Earlier this week a Kraftwerk Symposium took place in Birmingham, England, and frankly, THAT’S FANTASTIC. Kraftwerk are INARGUABLY the second most influential band of the past half century, and a concentrated academic examination of their work is not only long overdue, it makes me happier than a peanut butter cup wrapped inside a larger peanut butter cup. I wasn’t able to make it to the symposium because I had a previous commitment to, uh, have a life (not to mention that my time is consumed pressuring the International Court at The Hague to charge Dick Van Dyke with Crimes Against Humanity for his English accent in Mary Poppins).
Now, Kraftwerk are not my favorite band – they’re not even my favorite krautrock band – but that has nothing to do with their importance. In 1973 and ’74 (on their 3^rd LP, Ralf und Florian and coming to fruition on the legitimately historic Autobahn album), Kraftwerk replaced all elements of the pop/rock rhythm section with a pulsing, throbbing, quantized synth; in other words, they replaced the drums and the bass, without exception, with simple yet satisfying synth burps and nothing but simple yet satisfying synth burps. Make no mistake: although other artists had experimented with using the synth as a defacto drum or bass supplement or substitute (for instance, the Beach Boys on “Do It Again,” even the original Doctor Who Theme, remarkably devised by Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire in 1963), no artist had said this is our sound; this our body and our soul, and we now challenge you to accept that a complete pop music rhythm section can be created by the quantized synthesizer.
Every synthetically thumping rhythm section you have heard since then – from the obvious Kraftwerk homages like “Funkytown” and Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” to the ubiquity of the modern tsk-and-burp/boots’n’pants beat in virtually all modern pop and dance music – can be traced, without fail, to Kraftwerk’s amazing invention. NO other moment in pop is as absolute and viscerally fundamental as “Autobahn.” I’ll be honest: I am a fairly avid student of this shit, and I am hard-pressed to find a moment in post-World War II mainstream pop history that is as absolutely new and defining. There have been plenty of other remarkable scene changes in the last 70 years (Hardrock Gunter and Ike Turner’s use of distorted electric guitar in r’n’b and hillbilly music in 1950 and ‘51; Bo Diddley replacing the old pick and slap of hillbilly rock with fat ham slabs of rhythm roar half a decade later; Dave Davies invention of the modern bar chord riff in 1964; the Ramones massive, massively original, and massively glorious reduction of all existing rock memes in ’74; and so on), but Kraftwerk’s invention of the totally self-contained synth-generated rhythm section is likely the biggest purely musical scene change in the history of rock/pop. I mean, the Fabs are, no doubt, the most influential band of all time, but Kraftwerk are a very, very close second, and very likely number one if you drop long held generational prejudices against dance music.

Having said that…one must acknowledge that the basic roux that flavored Kraftwerks’ gumbo had to come from somewhere (please re-read the quote that begins this piece – only a fool or a fundamentalist Christian believes in Virgin birth). Now, the foundation of the Kraftwerk sound was a pulsing, metronomic beat that mesmerized with a steady tick and minimal chord changes. Keep that in mind. Perusing the program for the symposium, I’m not sure this point was actually addressed:
Circa 1971, after their release of their peculiar, anti-jazz, anti-pop, bongo-and-flutey first album, Kraftwerk briefly had a three-piece line-up, comprised of Florian Schneider (flute and synths), Klaus Dinger (drums), and Michael Rother (guitar). Video and audio of this short-lived line-up reveal a band playing intense, punching, pulsing jams with minimal chord changes, resembling precise mongoloids playing “Sister Ray,” or perhaps you could say they sound like some stoned, happy, and aggressive Germans trying to blend Stooges/Hendrix shrrrroarrr-wang-wang with the mono-chord jams of early NYC minimalist composers like LaMonte Young and Tony Conrad. The music of Schneider, Dinger, and Rother is vastly original – it reduces the idea of “jam” to John Cale drones married to a caveman surf beat. This sound reached it’s fullest fruition when Dinger and Rother split off to form Neu!, a band whose phased, ticking, rumbling, endless one-chord explorations made for some of the most original, powerful, and influential rock ever recorded.

(the Incredible Schneider/Dinger/Rother Kraftwerk, late 1971)
But Neu! wasn’t the only child of the brief and brilliant Schneider/Dinger/Rother Kraftwerk. The future, commercially giant Kraftwerk was Neu!’s remarkable twin. It is clear – very goddamn clear – that when Schneider reunited with Ralf Hutter (who returned to the band he co-formed in 1972), there was a conscious decision to leave the odd, dumbed-down proggy thumps, bells, and whistles behind (again, the early Kraftwerk sound resembles a very stoned, very, minimalist free jazz group doing collegiate exercise in interpreting Stockhausen), and instead attempt a sound that IMITATED Dinger and Rother’s ultra-minimal motorway beat (the actual name is “motorik”) that hinted at long highways, minimal variation, and maximum energy.
So I posit – shit, I barely need to posit it, there’s plenty of evidence to back it up – that the “Autobahn” sound that reinvented pop was “just” an attempt to replicate on synths the sound that Dinger/Rother had brought to Kraftwerk during their brief time in the band. Now, NONE of that is to minimize the invention; and there is great, ENORMOUS, radical genius in Hutter and Schneider’s decision to reinterpret Dinger and Rother’s motorway drive with synths and synths alone – but I am anxious to give credit where credit is due. I will add, for the sake of accuracy/completion, that an academic-type could make a fairly strong case for the sound of the Schneider/Dinger/Rother Kraftwerk being a more simplistic, driving, spacious exploration of the herky-jerky seizure-on-the-railway sound that the Schneider/Hutter/Dinger Kraftwerk had explored on a first-album track called “Ruckzuck” – remember, “Everything else is present in the flower”.
Now back to those emails to the International Court at The Hague.

Tom Petty’s Tiny, Muppet-like Feet, and Other Observations from the Life of a (Sometimes Assholic) Music Journalist

Tim Sommer — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 05:08:53 +0000

I had the extraordinary good fortune to begin a career as a music journalist when I was barely 16. In the spring of 1978, Ira Robbins, one of the inventors of Modern New Wave/Punk culture, hired me as an office boy at Trouser Press magazine, and for some reason began running some of my stories. Actually, I had begun interviewing some pop figures for fanzines and my high school paper even before then.
Until that time, musicians were people who existed only in the heated sibilance thumping and hissing out of the Korvettes-bought stereo set; and they lived only in posters on my suburban bedroom wall, and the pages of the NME, Melody Maker, Sounds or Trouser Press (the only magazines an anglophile teen like me would deign to read); and they were only seen from the balcony of the Palladium, through a blue haze of sweet weed smoke and an array of dull yellow, red, and green lights. But once I began interviewing these cats, they began actually appearing in front of me in real life. The first musicians I recall interviewing were Johnny Fingers and Pete Briquette from the Boomtown Rats and Paul Weller from the Jam, followed quickly by the Bay City Rollers, the Yachts, and the Sinceros; then the floodgates opened when I started hosting the interview show on WNYU (and I began getting additional journalistic assignments from the aforementioned Sounds, Smash Hits, the Daily News, and other publications). Soon, I was thinking of these people as peers, not Gods, and I even formed some long-lasting friendships with people I first met during interviews, like Martin Atkins, Michael Stipe, and Robyn Hitchcock.
The excitement never wore off, and I always considered myself very lucky to be doing something so gorgeously ridiculous and (usually) getting paid for it; but sometimes – especially when I worked for MTV and VH-1 in the 1980s and early 1990s – the interviews were done out of obligation, and my sense of reverence wore off. In fact, I often found my professionalism challenged, for one reason or another, and often had to fight the urge to act completely ridiculous.
Tom Petty around the time I found myself disturbed almost to the point of hysteria by his tiny Muppet feet (not pictured)
While at VH-1, circa 1990, I once interviewed Tom Petty, and was hugely disturbed by his tiny little feet. Yes, he had teeny little feet, the kind you’d see dangling from a Muppet. It was terribly distracting. I was genuinely afraid I would say, “Now tell us what was it like working with Jeff Lynne on your new album, titled Tiny Little Muppet Feet?” And I had to fight the urge to follow up that question by saying “Let’s talk about your new video for the track ‘My God, I can’t help thinking those tiny little feet would look great in a pair of 1979-style Capezios, like the kind the theatre girls would wear in high school. Seriously, man, I can’t stop staring at your feet and wondering, ‘Why aren’t you wearing Capezios, perhaps in pink or puce or some suitably 1979-ish pastel color, on those tiny little Muppet feet?’ And who will be directing that video?”
Once, in a non-interview setting, I was introduced to Roger Daltrey. Nothing had prepared me for how short he was. I had assumed, based on the low-angle shots in the Woodstock movie and The Kids Are Alright film, and all the imaging of him as a flaxen haired, laser-halo’d Rock God, that he would be, well, a lean and solid giant, about the height of Michelangelo’s David (or at least as tall as Ed Koch). But he stood in front of me, like something about to be trotted out in the Toy Group at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Years earlier, I had met Angus Young and Malcolm Young from AC/DC, who really are as small as under-nourished 6th graders, but I was prepared for that. No one had forewarned me or sent me a memo that said “Oh, Roger Daltrey will be in your office in 5 minutes, he is only slightly taller than a G.I. Joe with Kung Fu Grip.” I should have been warned, really.
G.I. Joe with Kung Fu Grip
Speaking of Kung Fu grips, I had a slightly different encounter (again, in a non-interview setting) with Sinead O’Connor. We were introduced by a mutual friend outside a trailer at some event – I think it was 1990 – and she shook my hand. She had literally the strongest handshake I had ever felt. Genuinely – I am not making this up – my hand hurt for three days afterwards.
Sometimes, I lost the fight to maintain decorum. During my VH-1 years, I interviewed Genesis. Let me (briefly) explain that we were “faking” a two-camera shoot – that is to say, this was all being taped with one camera, and would later be assembled to make the viewer think we shot the thing with two cameras (i.e., one camera on the artist, the other camera on yours truly, asking questions and sagely nodding his head while listening to the band’s stupefyingly uninteresting and unrevealing responses). As part of the this process, once the question-asking part of the interview was over, we positioned the camera over the band’s shoulders, and ran tape of me fake-listening and doing the afore-mentioned sage nodding. So, we set up the cameras for this shot – again, you’d see the back of the heads of Phil Collins, Tony Banks, and Mike Rutherford and you’d see me, sitting in front of them, clipboard in hand, acting all Morley Safer-ish (or at least Charles Osgood-ish). And I just couldn’t help myself and acted like a disrespectful prick. When the cameras rolled, instead of pretending to listen astutely to the band like I was supposed to, I actually pretended to nod out and fall asleep. Then, when we re-set the shot for another take, I acted like I was gently weeping, overcome by the sadness of hearing the band recount the tales of recording the We Can’t Dance album. I should underline that the band were three feet away from me, staring me in my arrogant, insouciant faux-weeping gob, as I was doing this. Genesis was not amused. Then again, very few people were in any way amused by the We Can’t Dance album.
Very shortly afterward I left VH-1.

Reconsidering Elvis Presley

Tim Sommer — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 05:08:53 +0000

Somewhere in the sun-dulled suburbs clinging to Memphis, bleached yellow by the low, bright winter light and dotted by Super 8 signs on alien legs and baby-shit colored buildings labeled Dental Plaza, lies one of the Rosetta Stones of rock’n’roll.
There are many of these stele all over the Western World, some half-buried, some fully revealed, some forever lost; they can be found in the bricked up doorways of alleys in East Hollywood, in Hamburg cellars long-ago wiped clean of piss and beer, in New Orleans shotgun shacks where the Gods themselves were treated for cruel Gleet.
This particular stone, our Memphis Stone, has sat in plain sight for 60 years. It is not so much that the words are unreadable as there are those who refuse to read them; some would say they are heresy, they not only defile the legend of the Poor Truck Driver but they also insult his fans.
The message, so obvious that it has defied revelation, reads like this:
Elvis did not succeed because of the myth that he was the first white boy who sang like a black man. Elvis succeeded because he was the first white boy singer who looked like a pretty white girl.
In the 60 years (!) since Elvis debuted, we have become so used to the idea that pop stars are pouting man-girls that sexual ambiguity and the idea of rock has become synonymous. Think of the Rolling Stones’ Lips logo, think of teen doe McCartney, think of all those narrow, serpentine singers pregnant with licked-pussy lips and lissome hips, think of rough-trade aping Jim Morrison virtually begging for a man-fuck, think of Botticellian Bolan or Stipe (and that’s before we ever address the more deliberately ambi-sexualists like Bowie, Dee Snider, power bottom Rob Halford, or Marilyn Manson).
We are so used to all this that it’s a bit hard to believe that the concept once didn’t exist. Pre-Elvis singers might be handsome, but nobody outside of the eccentricities of vaudeville displayed femininity, or looked pretty and hard. Caucasian male vocalists, band leaders, and pop stars were wiry, beefy, bovine, beaming, brilliantined, priestly, aquiline, avuncular, handsome, lantern-jawed, gawking, agape, owlish, even fey; and in the realm of hillbilly music, they were either doughy or carried the withered, sunken, accusing faces you see in old Civil War photographs.
But none had been pretty like a girl, and certainly none had combined it with an absolutely assured male presence that was virtually palatable in every photo or recorded yelp and hiccup.
By re-inventing the male pop star as half-animal, half-girl (and becoming a unicorn-beautiful Satyr/ louche sex fiend in the process), Elvis Presley not only made the white world safe for his feral (albeit compact) r’n’b/Cajun-Appalachian-Opry crossover, but perhaps more importantly, he spoke to the un-voiced wish of millions of American girls: that their objects of desire did not have to resemble ManBulls like Vic Mature, but rather the ones they wanted to fuck could actually look like the best part of themselves. The fantasy a young girl saw (or wished she saw) when she looked in a mirror – the heart shaped face, the fucked-to-bliss almond eyes, the wet liver-puff lips – could now be pinned on a Real Boy, and that real boy played real sex music, barely hiding a half-masted woody while drizzling innuendo and cat-in-heat howls over lyrics about trains and milkcows and momma.
Girls could now dream of fucking someone prettier than they were; girls, many of whom were drawn to that lonely long-lashed angel who promised them a sensitivity the Shop Class boys could never offer, now had someone who embodied their romantic hopes, as opposed to their romantic fears.
The lasting aspect of the cultural tsunami triggered by Elvis the Pretty was threefold:
Elvis made it safe for mainstream American girls to desire the sensitive. Brando and (to a greater degree) Tony Curtis hinted at this, but Elvis bought it home; he had the same gently sculpted, edgeless face that you saw on the humanized bunny dolls that Sharon, Ruth, Beverly, and Gloria had been snuggling with in their beds since before they could speak (or squeal). Like McCartney a decade later, his almost unfinished face was only a half-step away from the quickly-drawn hearts a girl might scrawl in the margins of her Social Studies textbooks. Now, contrast that to Sinatra; Sinatra was very nearly beautiful, but he had a roughly hewn gob that was more Rushmore than David.
Secondly, Elvis cast the template for the look of rock, and by that, I don’t mean the obvious rockabilly rebel pose or ghoulish quiff; by introducing that gender bend, by asserting that the masculine and the feminine, bundled up in one lithe and saucy package, could sell sex and song (and all the ancillary marketing that goes with the exploitation of teens damp and engorged), Elvis announced that the rebellion, the break from the past, would not just be musical, but sexual.
And finally and most importantly, by introducing the feminine into the mainstream cultural vocabulary, Elvis drew the line in the sand that identified the battleground for the future culture wars. From that moment forward, from the first Wynonie-esque honk that lanced from his lopsided lady-lips, it would be freaks vs. straights. The spirit of the 1960s, including its fullest blooming in the frippery of Haight Ashbury, the fervor of Stonewall, and the fuming junk-drones of the Velvets, begins when Pretty Elvis bursts on the consciousness of mainstream America in 1954 – 56. The delineation of the Shirts and the Skins in the Culture Wars would not have been possible without Elvis’s absolutely brilliant and adamantly natural ability to be a true man and a true man-girl.
Now, having said all that, does the music matter?
Of course it does, and much of it is brilliant, but most of us can find more satisfying (and savage) r’n’billy with our eyes closed. Sure, his music was a great ticking-and-shaking shriek across the landscape, but it was the shattering, shuddering specter of the gorgeous man-woman/woman-man shaking his hips like a belly dancer on a State Fair Midway that made America, especially the little girls who had been seeking an ideal companion who shared their curves and kitten-gentle eyes, buy into the revolution.
Now, Elvis isn’t as big as he used to be. See, if you came of age in the 1970s (or earlier), Elvis was a slurping, onyx-haired Golem of cool and kitsch whose name was synonymous with rock’n’roll. At one time in the Land of Rock, Elvis Presley was considered the supernova against which no sun block could provide adequate protection. I am just old enough to remember this time, when all roads led back to Elvis, and no conversation about the history and creative shape of rock music could be had without Elvis being referenced. A silhouette of Elvis at the microphone (or Elvis holding his guitar, splay-legged, or even merely an un-detailed rendering of his profile) could literally represent the idea of rock’n’roll. As late as, say, 1979, it was unimaginable that you would have a generation of music fans – knowledgeable or casual — who barely gave a shit about Elvis.
But relatively quickly – by, say, the mid or late 1980s – Elvis’s ubiquity dissipated. There are a lot of reasons, and we can address those elsewhere.
And I miss him. And it’s time to reconsider him and honor him for what may have been his greatest achievement: as the father/mother of the feminine in rock, and it was the gender blend/bend that made rock what is: the language of the anthem of all outsiders.

Lance Loud: The First Real Boy On The Sun

Tim Sommer — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 05:08:04 +0000

In 1973, I was unarguably a child, arguably pre-sexual, and extraordinarily curious about the world around me. I was also constantly aware that I was being conned. I knew that the people I saw on television were strangers; not just strangers to my way of life (full of the usual oppressions, limitations, disenfranchisements, and handicaps of pre-pubescence), but also strangers to reality: these characters, these Bradys, these Partridges, these summertime replacement sketch comics, they were caricatures that reflected reality no more – and often far less – than cartoon characters did.
Very few eleven year olds are free. Not only are they almost completely dependent on family and parents, but their worldview is defined by available and accessible media (and their generational peers vomiting up the same). At that age, in any era (not just the rotary phone/terrestrial television world of the early 1970s), even in this era, young people are a grotesque and addlepated mofungo of their environmental influences; we don’t know who we are, but we try to form an image of ourselves based on the slivers and shards of a thousand funhouse mirrors the world throws all around us. In fact, virtually none of these mirrors reflect our actual selves in any functional or useful way. Each child is full of great depth, in many ways the same depth they will presume and assume as adults, yet we have to construct a world out of the largely one-dimensional residue of what adults presume to be our usefulness as consumers.
The list of the fears that shadowed my 11 year-old world was long and common: the end of the world; the mortality of my parents; the thick shadows of the bullies or the lock-jawed disapproval of the teachers; the terror caused by lifts home from Hebrew school that never came; not to mention the foreshadow of sex, mysterious almost to the point of being otherworldly. Honestly, not a single minute of any television show spoke to any of these issues, yet television was our world, our refuge from screaming families and fall-out drills and all the aforementioned everyday terrors.
I was aware, when I watched anything except for the news (Vietnam! Spiro Agnew! John Lindsay! Mario Biaggi! The Columbo Family! Joan Whitney Payson! Aristotle Onassis!) that I was not watching reality; I was not watching anything that told me about who I was and who I might become.
Into this world, this world of fear and fakery, stepped Lance Loud.
He was light, he was beautiful, he was an angel, he was utterly unlike anyone I had seen on television (and I watched a lot of television, being lonely, strange, and chubby), the world to him seemed to be a suitor to be charmed with a flip of your hair and a sly comment. Even within the documentary format of the show that featured him, An American Family, he seemed hyper-real, like the birdsong heard for only eight seconds that is more beautiful than any recorded composition.
I immediately fell in love, even though I knew nothing yet of sexual desire, much less the mechanics of homosexuality. I fell in love with his joy, his lithe, rubbery spirit, this person who seemed free and real and so strange yet so utterly familiar; he was the dreams I had not yet had (but only suspected); and what was most important about Lance Loud wasn’t that he was the first openly gay person on television (more on that in a moment), but he was the first utterly real person on television, the first person who reflected us at our most sensitive, at our most truly silly, at our most casual and cavalier and intense and introspective, at our most flippant or flirtatious; he, alone of anyone on the Empire of Television, seemed to understand that we might dance in front of a mirror and be someone we never could be (or precisely the person we would become!), he alone seemed to understand that while riding a bike down a suburban street we might pretend, for 48 seconds, to be the king of an empire that had the same name as our street. In other words, he was the first person on television with an interior life.
When I looked at Bobby Brady, I saw no interior life; and when we are children, when our lives are full of the most beautiful secrets (mostly the secrets of our strangeness, for every child is strange, for one minute an hour, or one hour a day, or for one year of a life, until the strangeness is hyper-normalized out of them!), when our lives are full of the belief that the world is full of infinite possibilities and infinite miracles and a million ghosts and a million stars, we are ALL interior life; and Lance Loud, long and grinning with lips that split the screen, clearly not only had an interior life, his interior life looked like ours, and he wore it on the outside.

Now, that’s just my personal perspective. In a more universal sense, let me state this clearly: Lance Loud was the first announced gay man on American television. Do you know how fucking huge that was? He was Jackie Robinson, he was Louis Armstrong, he was Neil Armstrong, he was Chaplin, he was Crosby, he was that important. In our revisionist perspective, we see the world of the 1950s and ‘60s as being full of visible gays: but not only were these gays unannounced, they were often broad caricatures, easily dismissed, objects of fun or ridicule. Paul Lynde, Liberace, Truman Capote, these gentlemen were caricatures, and deliberately ridiculous, and the source of ridicule, and if they waved any flag, it was the flag that their sexual predilection was like the name of a Hebrew God, not to be spoken aloud, and thereby easily denied and easily mocked.
But here was Lance Loud: Lance Loud might have been gay, but he was also our brothers, our sons, our neighbors, our schoolmates; he was a part of us (and if we were deeply a fantasist, like so many of us were, he was most of us, he was the best part of us!), he was gay, he was on television, he was real, he was not a figure of fun or ridicule, he was gay and the on television and more realistic than any boy next door; which is all to say that Lance Loud wasn’t just the first gay on television, as deeply important, indeed historic, as that is; he was also the first real boy on television.
He was complicated, shaded, confused, arrogant, funny, tragic, he was everything we suspected a sensitive soul such as ourselves might be, but we had never seen one before outside the shadows of our own hopes!
He also carved the idea, somewhere in the willing, supple, and soft balsa-wood of my brain, that our fantasy self, our fantasy I, so private, so lonely, could one day be a we, we might meet others like him, like us, we might meet Morrissey or Michael Stipe or Dean Johnston, he instilled the idea that we were not overly sensitive, but appropriately sensitive; Not overly artistic, but appropriately artistic; Not overly bookish, but appropriately bookish; Not overly fey, but utterly beautiful in our own true boy skin.
Lance Loud was the first true boy on the sun, which is to say, he was real, he reflected a thousand and eight hopes and flaws and realities and shades of masculinity, and the sun was the television, beaming his brightness all over America.

A Visit from St. Grohl

Tim Sommer — Wed, 24 Dec 2014 05:08:29 +0000

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the hall
Not a creature was stirring, except for Dave Grohl.
Others may be dreaming of Santa and his sleigh,
But for the Concierge of Rock, ’twas another busy day.
As children were nestled all snug in their beds,
Visions of interviews danced in Dave’s head:
Some director wanted to ask him about BTO
He didn’t know much, but it would be on HBO!
A TV host wanted Dave’s thoughts about Kanye
(His answer would be broadcast on Sabado Gigante).
Before Dave could even consider what was to be said
Jeff Lynne called up, he needed some cred.
Could Dave show up in the studio at nine?
They were cutting an all-star version of “Telephone Line.”
Then Brad Paisley texted, just as it started to snow
Would Dave be able to back him at an awards show?
Then Nickelodeon called, would he help salute Starsky & Hutch?
Of course! When it came to TV, there was no such thing as too much!
Then suddenly came a knock at the door
It was Mission of Burma, to discuss a reunion tour.
They already had a drummer, but that wouldn’t get in the way
Dave could sing back-ups and play djembe.
Then the phone rang with a terrible clatter
Dave sprang from his chair to see what was the matter.
The voice on the receiver said something crass
Jann Wenner needed Dave to come help wipe his ass.
Jann barked “Get here soon! I need to go badly!”
It was one of the services the Concierge provided gladly.
Quickly, Dave summoned his ‘copter via his phone
So he could attend to the hygiene of his master at Rolling Stone.
More rapid than eagles the whirlybird came,
Then Dave whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:
“Now, Taylor! Now, Pat Smear! And Nate and Chris, too!
We need to assist ol’ Jann with a poo!
To the top of the porch! With all due speed!
He said he’d put me on the cover anytime I need!”
So high over the housetops the Foo Fighters flew
With a trunk full of Charmin, and some sani-wipes, too—
On the way they stopped briefly to see Stevie Nicks
For a ballad she was writing, Dave had promised some licks.
Oh, they also had to drop by the house of Bob Mould
Dave had to pay him for all the Husker Du songs he stole.
As leaves before a hurricane did they fly,
And before long they had arrived at Jann’s penthouse in the sky.
Ol’ Jann was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
“Sorry for the mess, Dave Fricke and I had a fight,
Let’s get going boys, I don’t have all night!
“Now, I’ll sit and do my business, then I’ll bend over the tub,
And then Mister Dave can give me a rub.
Be gentle and soft, and as thorough as you can,
Because, you must remember, I can always find another band.
Why, just one rough scratch, and you’ll be back where you started
And I’ll hand the TP to my ol’ pal Chris Martin.
Oh and Dave, please don’t forget how you got here
Future Islands are simply dying to clean up my rear.”
Dave reassured his master with an eager grin,
And spoke these words while wagging his tiny chin:
“I’ll polish, I’ll dab, I’ll powder you, too,
Please don’t desert your most loyal Foo.
Oh, sadly, it’s true, all your warnings and stories
If poor Kurt hadn’t died, I’d just be Tico Torres.
Last week I had a nightmare, I awoke with a start,
And realized I wasn’t half as talented as Grant Hart.
So that’s why I keep wiping, and working ‘til I fall over
I don’t know the meaning of over-exposure.”
Jann was chubby and plump, jolly and full of sass,
And laughed when he saw Dave wiping his ass.
“You’ve done well tonight, and don’t mind the stench
Now hurry along, you just got a call from Benmont Tench.
He’s working on a track with G.E. Smith and Liz Phair
It’s not very good, but cameras will be there.”
With a wink of his eye, Jann rose from his throne
And beckoned Taylor and Pat to quickly go home.
Of course Dave had to stay, even as it neared 12 O’clock
A call had just come in from 30 Rock.
Dave shouted after his friends, as they sped into the night
“Happy Christmas to all, Fallon needs me for a cameo tonight!”

Our Five Favorite Christmas Songs

Tim Sommer — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 05:08:23 +0000

For me (and, I suspect, others of my generation) Christmas will always be the Yule Log on WPIX, the muted glow of midnight mass televised live from St. Patrick’s, and the commercial with all the Channel 4/Live At 5 people singing in the Rockefeller Center Skating Rink
(Speaking of which Sue Simmons will have her Revenge on Seattle!)
Oh I am so confused.
Christmas does that to me, raised a barely-practicing Jew but one who was enchanted by the rituals associated with the birthday of the king of compassion. I always loved the solemn songs and the prayers, like adamant whispers, booming sibilant in the high-ceilinged cathedrals of Manhattan and Rome, and the enforced hush of the hours before midnight on Christmas Eve. I love how Christmas is a ritual of kindness; other holidays enforce thankfulness or remembrance or underline history, but for one day, we are asked to be kind, even the gravest and/or the most greedy are compelled to consider compassion; and it seems that this quality is most present on Christmas Eve (and not the grabby, shouty, often lonely day), specifically in the hours between, oh, and ten and two, and I love the stillness that falls in that time. Those are the hours of the anti-shriek, as the eve folds into the still-small day; it is the year’s most pure moment of reflection, especially for us Americans, who know not of Poppies or Armistices and other foreign occasions when reflection is the rule.
Sue Simmons
Aside from that, for some reason Christmas will always remind me of local TV, the lost, shambolic glory of regional news and local commercials and crummy re-runs, for some reason I see Bill Mazer’s face and I hear the Chock Full O’Nuts theme song, which is all, I suppose, to say Christmas makes me think of the past, but not the bad parts.
I am not a great lover of Christmas Music, but there are some seasonal songs I hold very dear; a few of these make me smile, and a few bring true chills. So here are my five favorite Christmas songs, more or less. Oh, when you click on these links, it is likely you will have to see those one of those freaking ads for that Sting musical, Trouble At The Mill or Workin’ Class Boatman or Capeman or whatevertheflip it’s called. I apologize in advance for that — those things can be a real mood killer. But back to Christmas:
Jona Lewie Stop The Cavalry
My absolute favorite. Lewie blends a deeply somber lyric with a jaunty two-step beat, mixing loneliness, an anti-war message, and Christmas into one dark yet utterly irresistible package. True, the political message here is a bit, oh, soupy – the First World War musical setting plus lyrical references to Churchill and a nuclear fall-out zone make this a bit like walking out of the room a few too many times during a Doctor Who episode – but there’s something just, oh, perfect about this song, perhaps because it touches on the two central feelings endemic to the season – missing a loved one, and hoping for peace. When you add to that Lewie’s absolutely original Cajun-meets-Kraftwerk musical style, and his affecting everyman vocals, you have a treasure that never, ever fails to get me right here.

It’s probably worth noting that although this might seem like some new wave oddity to Americans, in the UK “Stop the Cavalry” has ascended to become the seasonal standard it deserved to be.
Jerusalem
Although this song is essentially the alternate national anthem of England (in much the same way, say, “God Bless America” is here), it is still largely associated with Christmas (and major sporting events, where it is sung as a nationalist chant).   Based on an extraordinary poem by William Blake and set to music in 1916 by Sir Hubert Parry, it is likely one of the prettiest melodies ever recorded, married to some of the most graceful and evocative words ever written; from this short poem alone, three common and extraordinary powerful phrases have entered the English lexicon: “This green and pleasant land” (as a description of England), “Bring me my Chariot of Fire!” (tho’ originally found in the Bible, let’s just say Blake/Parry’s use popularized it), and most striking, “Dark Satanic Mills,” three words that evoke the Industrial Revolution better than many multi-volumed books on the subject. Now, there are literally thousands of versions of this song I could have showcased, but I have chosen this version by Fat Les, both for it’s clarity and drama (Fat Les is the recording alter-ego of British comedian Keith Allen, who Americans know best as the father of singer Lily and Game of Thrones actor Alfie).

Also, did you know – speaking of Jerusalem – that actress Marcia Gay Harden is a 32^nd-generation descendent of Herod the Great, the Roman King of Judea?
Christmas Night in Harlem
There are a lot of goddamn good reasons to include this one, not the least that it gives me a chance to showcase Louis Armstrong, the artist who is the cornerstone of the American Pop Century. It’s a strange, beautiful, boppy tune that takes you to a land that might never have been, but it’s a helluva song. Raymond Scott, the extraordinary composer/electronic music pioneer who virtually invented the weird collection of hyper sugar-jazz we have come to know as “cartoon music,” wrote it in the 1930’s and it’s totally worth hearing his version, too, which can be found here.

Also, that Marcia Gay Harden thing isn’t remotely true, but why not, right?
Paul Sanchez I Got Drunk This Christmas

Paul Sanchez’s name belongs alongside Springsteen, Randy Newman, Warren Zevon, Joe Ely, Steve Goodman, Kinky Friedman, and other great lyricists/melodicists who use story-songs to tell us the bittersweet legend of the American dream and its’ dreamers. I MEAN THAT, DAMMIT. He gets a little better known every year, and that is a very goddamn good thing. There are a lot of reasons Paul’s one of my all-time favorite songwriters, and this song is one of ‘em. “I Got Drunk This Christmas” is deeply funny, deeply dark, and should be a classic. Now, I wish I had access to a better recording of this track, but this one will do the trick.
Pogues Fairytale of New York

Because you have to, right, and in many ways it’s an excellent compliment to Paul’s song. It also showcases the spectacular Kirsty MacColl – BOY, does this song come ALIVE after she enters! — one of the most expressive and absolutely riveting vocalists of her era, and her too-early death only makes this song more melancholic. Oh, and also my old friend Peter Dougherty, a true prince of New York, directed this video, something I actually didn’t know until I wrote this column.
Bonus Track: Hugo Largo Angels We Have Heard On High
Recorded about 26 years ago, this is my own contribution to the world of Christmas music, and an example of the magic I made with three of my favorite people, Mimi Goese, Hahn Rowe, and Adam Peacock. I am very proud of this indeed. Oh, this fades up, so don’t be confused if the audio takes a while to get, uh, going.

Merry Christmas to you all, from the Godfather of Slocore.

We All Know the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame Blows. Can We Try to do Something About It?

Tim Sommer — Wed, 17 Dec 2014 11:08:33 +0000

Listen, there is very goddamn little need to add my churning, gasping puffs of breath to the howl of outrage over the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. First of all, there are a lot more important things to wax indignant about; secondly, saying the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame is full of shit is like saying the rents in NYC are too damn high, or that Dick Cheney is a war criminal, or that buffalo chicken doesn’t belong on a slice of pizza, or that Sting, the Shabbos Goy of Reggae, is a tool: it is so obvious that it no longer needs stating.
Sting: Shabbos Goy
Breaking News! The Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame is full of shit! In other Breaking News, water is wet, the New York Yankees threw the 2014 season to make a billion dollars carting around the horny corpse of Derek Jeter, and Jim J Bullock is gay!
(Nevertheless, we add parenthetically…The following artists are NOT in the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame: Roxy Music, the New York Dolls, the Smiths, the Carpenters, Cheap Trick, the B52s, Joe Cocker, ELO, Joy Division, the Monkees, Sonic Youth, the MC5, and most horrifically – in my opinion – Kraftwerk, who ARE ONLY THE SECOND MOST INFLUENTIAL BAND OF ALL TIME. Let me also gurgle that in 2015, the Hall is presenting Ringo Starr with the Award for Musical Excellence – THAT’S NOT A TYPO. Presenting Ringo Starr with an Award for Musical Excellence is a little like presenting Dave Grohl with an Award for Public Reclusiveness.)
But rather than CONTINUE the dialogue regarding how truly ridiculous and corrupt the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame is, instead I would like to suggest A CALL TO ACTION. This is pretty straightforward:
FIRST. I call on all my acquaintances/associates who are voting members of the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame to resign, and do so publicly.
I’ll be honest – I don’t know WHICH of my friends are voters, but I am goddamn sure I know a few. This isn’t like the Student Council at Great Neck South, where you earnestly convince yourself that your Voice of Dissent will surely make a difference. Friends, your intelligence, perception, and knowledge of musical history mean NOTHING within the overall context of the CLOWN COLLEGE that is the Hall of Fame. This is a BULLSHIT organization and YOU KNOW IT, and WHOEVER YOU ARE, I GUARANTEE, I mean I one-hundred perfuckingcent GURANFUCKINGTEE that the STATEMENT YOU WILL MAKE BY RESIGNING AS A VOTING MEMBER WILL MAKE MORE OF A DIFFERENCE THAN WHATEVER IMPACT YOU CAN MAKE BY STAYING. Let me repeat (because I LOVE repeating myself, even more than I love those donuts they used to have at Stan’s Donuts in Westwood that had an entire peanut butter cup INSIDE the donut): The MC5, the Dolls, Sonic Youth, and Kraftwerk are NOT in the fucking Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. How can you LEGITIMIZE being part of such an asinine group?
Stan’s Donuts in Westwood. Proof of God, both merciful and cruel.
You CAN’T. Period…unless they are employing you and/or giving you health insurance. It’s damn hard to get a job and it’s hard to get health insurance. Shit, if you were a friend of mine and The Josef Mengele Memorial Institute For the Creative Exploitation of Twins was giving you health insurance, I would probably give you a pass, especially if they gave you Dental.
Secondly, I call on people I know of intelligence, taste, and influence to band together to form a RIVAL Hall of Fame that can TRULY honor the creative innovators, business pioneers, and commercial dynamos of pop and rock history. Of course, you don’t have to CALL it the Hall of Fame, we’ll think of another suitable name.
This time, I will name names, and suggest some people of influence and intelligence, all of whom are well aware of the intricacies, magical achievements, and beautiful dark alleys of rock and pop history, and who would be ideal to start this thing: Danny Goldberg, Chris Morris, Steve Hochman, Tim Page, Michael Alago, Nik Cohn, Hugo Burnham, Ira Robbins, Merle Ginsberg, Evan Davies, Martin Atkins, Steve Wynn, Steve Lillywhite, Doug Herzog, John Rubelli, Karen Glauber, Jim Testa, Seth Swirsky, Leyla Turkan, Sally Timms, Paul Sanchez, Perry Watts-Russell, Janet Billig, Mitch Easter, Ben Sandmel, Binky Phillips, Karen Schoemer, Jack Rabid, Carol Kaye, Moby, Martha Quinn, Matthew Kaplan, Roy Traikin, THIS IS ALL JUST OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD, but DAMN, wouldn’t you trust THESE PEOPLE to help honor the great men and women who helped make rock’n’roll the defining meme of our generation?
And I sincerely doubt ANY of these people would sit around making up awards for the E Street Band or putting Hall & Oates in the Hall of Fame BEFORE the MC5 or the Dolls. Rock’n’Pop is a beautiful and meaningful story with powerful repercussions in so many aspects of our lives; the people who built this business and made this art form deserve to be commemorated in a legitimate way.
So do something, people, or stop fucking complaining.
A slice at Benny Tudino’s in Hoboken. Quite honestly, the only food worth dying for.
And I’ll underline this (since I love repeating myself more than I love the pizza at Benny Tudino’s, but less than I love Hawkwind): IF YOU ARE A VOTING MEMBER OF THE ROCK’N’ROLL HALL OF FAME, RESIGN. RESIGN NOW. Make a statement that their BULLSHIT is, well, bullshit.
Godfather of Slocore OUT.

Derwood Andrews, and the sound of a post-punk, post-blues Catcus Acid Milkshake

Tim Sommer — Tue, 16 Dec 2014 09:04:31 +0000

Let’s put it this way: If TONE POET, VOL. II was a new album by Beck, it would almost certainly be a serious contender for the Grammy for Album of the Year; if it was by, say, Bob Dylan, it would be the certain winner. If Tone Poet, Vol. II was a new soundtrack to a Coen Brothers film curated by T Bone Burnett, it would be a much-talked about evocation of 21^stCentury Blues; and if it was a new release by, oh, Mark Lannegan, post-grungers all over this great land would be getting stoned and telling their friends it was the best album of the year.
Bob Derwood Andrews, 21st Century Ambient Blues Hero.
But Tone Poet, Vol. II is the extraordinary new album by a relatively little know artist named Derwood Andrews. This deeply sensuous and luscious exploration of ambient blues and Americana is rootsy, meditative, and utterly magical to listen to; if you have ever pressed your ear against an acoustic guitar and just heard it ringing, if you’ve ever just wanted to live within the sound of an open tuned steel guitar, if you ever wanted to hear the sound of Clarksdale meeting the sound of Joshua Tree (with a very, very heavy dose of surround-sound hydrophonic/acidphonics), you will love this album. Tone Poet, Vol. II is an album for people who love the SOUND of the guitar, by which I mean the deep, rich, natural ambience and harmonic of a beautiful, open-tuned instrument; it’s also an amazing exploration into old American forms, made dreamlike yet tactile, new, and resonant to the heart.
Derwood Andrews is an English ex-pat living in the California desert, and he exists in that strange, sometimes frustrating netherworld between cult artist, undeserved obscurity, and intentional mystery. I will admit that I know a lot about his work between 1977 and 1981, and relatively little about what he’s done since then. However, what he recorded between ’77 and ’81 contains great power and magic, so I’ll devote a few words to it:
Generation X (Derwood Andrews 2nd from Right)
Bob Derwood Andrews was the guitarist for Generation X, and plays on their first two (essential) albums (their self-titled debut and the sensational, deep, and much overlooked Valley of the Dolls). After leaving the band in 1980, Andrews and Generation X drummer Mark Laff went on to form the band Empire and record one truly remarkable record. That album, Expensive Sound, is very goddamn close to being a classic, and Empire may be one of the best “single album” bands of all time (i.e., bands that only lasted long enough to make one album — I generally rate Empire right up there with Young Marble Giants and the Rich Kids). Expensive Sound is a deeply personal take on punk, turning the shout of punk into an intimate bedroom murmur; it presents a series of deep confessions over hushed riffs and loaded spaces, and it is like no other album of it’s time. On one hand, it summons the bittersweet sepia whispers of the Go Betweens or Big Star, on the other hand it anticipates the highly personal riff, rip, and confess style of Nirvana (it is highly speculated that Kurt Cobain was greatly influenced by Empire).

Additionally, around the same time, Andrews helped make another extraordinary album. In 1980, Andrews and Laff collaborated with Sham 69’s Jimmy Pursey to record Pursey’s first solo album, the sadly overlooked and rather wonderful Imagination Camouflage. Solid yet artistic, Imagination Camouflage album combines the bite of Valley of the Dolls with the sandy, sad depth of Expensive Sound, but with a bit of PiL and Peter Gabriel hanging over the proceedings. I have long advocated that Valley of the Dolls, Expensive Sound, and Imagination Camouflage need to be viewed as a rare and extraordinary trilogy, the sound of Andrews and Laff trying to wrestle a new kind of artistry out of punk that blends classic ‘70s britrock dynamics with a deeply emotional mindset that anticipated both Grunge and Emo. Fucking remarkable work, and this “lost” trilogy really deserves its’ own column (maybe at another time, when I am not so distracted by the continuing horror of those ads for Sting’s Lost Sailboat or Trouble Down At The Mill or whatever the fuck that atrocity is called). But anyway…
I sadly didn’t keep track of what Derwood Andrews did after the early-ish ‘80s, other than I knew he moved to the Southwest, and he played a one-off reunion gig with Generation X in London in 1993. I am quite damn sure that there was a lot of wonderful work that I missed, but I am catching up with the story again in 2014, with the amazing Tone Poet, Vol. II.
Deeply modern, deeply old, this is a motherfucker resonator of an album. Tone Poet, Vol. II is full of songs that are so lightly but perfectly sketched they feel almost as if Andrews just transcribed them out of the desert air; this is complimented by a Lanois-esqe attention to depth of sound that is absolutely mega-sensuous, like a cactus milkshake poured slowly over a crossroads where the devil and the hi-def meet. The landscape is completed by a frisson of ultra-simple synths effectively swooping in every now and then and occasionally goosing the rhythm. Unlike the more tightly-wound, Beck-esque Tone Poet, Vol. I, Vol. II is pure Ry Cooder-in-a-planetarium National Guitar opium blues; in fact, if you ever wished that Ry Cooder, Chris Whitley, and Daniel Lanois made an album together while chewing on about a dozen Benadryl, then this is the album for you (and you can listen to excerpts and/or buy Tone Poet, Vol. II here).
Like Scott Walker and Sunn O))) in their Everest-high and Marianas Trench-low Soused album, Andrews is finding an effective new vocabulary for traditional American melodies and musical/lyrical topics; the slow, sighing, echoing, whisper-in-the-ear blues of Andrews recalls scratchy old 78s, sassy medicine show whistles, lonesome yodelers and lonely twelve-bar bar bands, but it sounds naked, rich, and fresh. More than anything else, Tone Poet, Vol. II is just gorgeous to listen to, and wraps around you like a thick, slightly scratchy, sleepy blanket.
I’ll add one more thing. Very recently, Billy Idol told me that he would happily reunite with Generation X. Whereas I am not advocating that (as much as I’d like to see it), it would be fascinating to hear Idol, a vastly underrated and sensitive melodicist and lyricist, bring his penchant for big-screen prom-night pop into the mushroom-laced abandoned drive-in in the desert world of Derwood Andrews. Both artists are exponents of different caricatures of the American Musical Dream, and it would be very interesting to hear what they would make together.

Darius Rucker, Race, and Turning a Moment in Time into a True Movement

Tim Sommer — Mon, 15 Dec 2014 05:08:35 +0000

I understand that Darius Rucker is on the pants-end of a social media ass-kicking because he sang “White Christmas” at the Rockefeller Center Tree Lighting, in the midst of a night of protest and outrage over the non-indictment of Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the choke-hold death of Eric Garner.
http://youtu.be/Gv0jE8fYrWM
I will admit that the rough lines of the story don’t look especially good. But I want to say this:
There is not a single white American who has ANY idea what it is like to spend FOUR SECONDS as a black man in America. Repeat: if you are white, all your wisdom, empathy, indignation, and activism does not qualify you to be an ANT standing in the SHADOW of the CHALK OUTLINE of the actual experience of being BLACK IN AMERICA.
So unless you are an African American, and SPECIFICALLY an African American descendent of a slave, do not even freaking open your gob.
I knew Darius Rucker, and YOU, no matter HOW full of IRE you are about Eric Garner or Michael Brown or ANY of the horrors inflicted by white America on people of color, ARE NO DARIUS RUCKER. He is the real fucking deal and he shall NOT be crucified because of his success within the halls of white America. Darius was born and raised on the low-end of socio-economic spectrum in the U. S. of Inequality, and just because he fought his way out and achieved great successes on stage in front of (almost entirely) white audiences and made a hefty living off of the white man’s dollar DOESN’T mean that he HASN’T been made aware, constantly, in ways noxious and obscene, of his race. I have seen it with my own fucking eyes; I have seen this princely, talented man be gruesomely harassed and harangued because of the color of his skin, I have seen dull, thick white manatees wave rebel flags in his face and I have seen him refused service, all because he dared to be a black man in a white man’s world. So as far as I am fucking concerned, Darius Rucker can get on stage at the Chabad Telethon and sing “Mysterious Coon” (very cool old medicine show blues recording) and he would be ABOVE even ONE whispered syllable of criticism by ANY white man, because NO white man knows DICK about what it is to be a black man in America, even what it is to be a RICH SUCCESSFUL BLACK MAN IN AMERICA.
A moment from the Chabad Telethon.
Secondly, there’s a lot of chatter out there about how all the recent (and remarkable) protests of the police murders of young black men somehow represents the emergence of a “new” civil rights movement in America. Nice thought, but…
As valuable as these protests are, as acutely necessary as the awareness of these crimes are, as wondrous as it is to see young people actually CARING about something other than Iggy Fucking Azalea and The Desolation of Flipping Smaug, I STRONGLY feel the following:
Until the voices of dissent and protest, young and old, can LINK the crimes of police and grand juries with voting rights, grotesque inequalities in available public education, and access to health care and social services for the poor and non-white, this ain’t a “New” civil rights movement. Absolutely, as it stands it is indeed some long over-due noise about an important cause, and it might be the ROOT of something, but it NEEDS to coalesce into something more: AT THIS VERY MOMENT, as I type these words, operatives of the Republican Party, LOADED with money and organized tighter than a Steely Dan rhythm section, are planning ways to keep POOR PEOPLE and BLACK PEOPLE and other outcasts from “their” version of the American Dream AWAY from the polls in the next Presidential election in 2016.
FIGURE OUT A WAY TO LINK TODAY’S OUTRAGE OVER THE MURDERS OF ERIC GARNER, MICHAEL BROWN, TRAYVON MARTIN, et al with the plot to keep the blacks and the poor from voting in 2016; figure out a way to link it with the CHASM between public education available to the inner city poor and private education available to the scions of the white and wealthy; figure out a way to CHANNEL that outrage into creating reasonable options for healthcare and social services amongst America’s disenfranchised, and THEN you can call it a “New” Civil Rights Movement.

Seriously, let’s start here: All you people at those beautiful and moving Die-Ins? STAY STRONG, STAY ORGANIZED, GET MORE ORGANIZED, AND GO TO STATES WHERE POOR VOTERS AND VOTERS OF COLOR NEED THEIR RIGHTS PROTECTED AT THE POLLS. Because the next Presidential election is going to be decided based on YOUR ability to stand in the way of the Republicans very well-constructed plans to keep America’s disenfranchised OUT of the election booth. Make plans NOW to use your new desire to “make a difference” and your ability to use social media to organize and GET YOUR ASSES TO THOSE STATES WHERE THE BLACK AND POOR ARE GOING TO BE STOPPED FROM VOTING.
THEN you can lay a legitimate claim to being part of a new Civil Rights movement.
And leave Darius Rucker alone. He is the real fucking deal. However, Darius, if you’re reading this, I recommend the following: GET SOME OF YOUR WHITE COUNTRY SUPERSTAR FRIENDS TO HELP PROTECT THE VOTING RIGHTS OF ALL AMERICANS IN 2016.
And Sting is a tool.

The Ten Greatest Guitar Riffs of All Time, Revealed!

Tim Sommer — Thu, 11 Dec 2014 09:44:00 +0000

There is a delicious squabble going on in the webbernet: Kinks’ guitarist Dave Davies is appropriately livid that his brother Ray has recently taken credit for the earth-changing guitar sound Dave devised for “Your Really Got Me.” Now, Dave doesn’t contend that Ray more-or-less wrote the riff; he just is alarmed that Ray is taking credit for the sound, which was as significant an element of this stunning scene-change as the riff itself.
Dave Davies
Any follower of the Kinks (especially one cognizant of the mercurial and frequently downright-unpleasant behavior of Ray Davies) is barely surprised by this most recent kerfuffle. Without a doubt, Dave’s story is the one to be believed. In July 1964, when Dave stuttered and distorted the bar-chord that Bo Diddley had fiddled with a decade or so earlier, he literally invented an entirely new avenue for rock music; it is one of the fundamental moments in the history of the guitar.
In any event, the whole thing got me to thinking about riffs. I have been a serious fucking acolyte and proselytizer for the Church of the Riff pretty much since the day I first heard “You Really Got Me.” Riffs are the crosses the rock’n’roll Christ was nailed to, the stone upon which the rock’n’roll church was built. Riffs are the raised print on the calling card of rock. Me likee riffs long time.
Jesus (artist’s interpretation). Somehow, he has worked his way into this discussion.
And no, I don’t consider “Louie Louie” the Baby Jesus of all riffs; in its’ first incarnations, the “Louie Louie” riff is a fiddle-thin piano plink transcribed to guitar; admirable in composition, but pale in execution, especially when held up to the Kinks sonic farts to come. For all intents and purposes, the riff era begins in June of 1964, when Dave slugs out those hefty F-G’s.
And by “riffs,” I am talking about something fairly specific: a sequence of bar chords played on the guitar in a repetitive fashion, with a significant element of the song introduced or sung over the chord sequence. For instance, “Can’t Explain” by the Who is (what I call) a riff; the (nearly as arresting) “Mississippi Queen” by Mountain is not (great part, but too much single-note diddling and not enough bar chords). Likewise, the extraordinary, branding arpeggios that inaugurate “Don’t Fear The Reaper” isn’t (for the purposes of this discussion) a riff, but the slug-like bolts of armor that open BÖC’s “Godzilla” most certainly is. And anything keyboard-driven is not up for consideration, which eliminates worthy riffs like “Tin Soldier” by the Small Faces or “Open Your Eyes” by the Nazz.
Got it?
So I thought I would take the time to list my favorite riffs. Yeah. These are more or less in order. Yeah.
Jailbreak Thin Lizzy

There is so much to say about Thin Lizzy — they almost literally invented the modern day rock ballad, their influence on U2 (and all modern posture rock) is incalculable, along with Springsteen they showed their was a middle ground between proletariat crowd-rabble rousing and sensitive and credible songwriting, and Phil Lynott is one of the great rock stars of all time – but I often just prefer to think of them as the writers of the greatest riff in rock history.   It’s “Can’t Explain” re-written by Free, it’s “Gloria” running for a subway, it’s a big chunk of rubbery tuna gulping for breath between slabs of mayonnaise, it is almost dream-like in it’s weird mixture of gigantic and intimate, it is the riff’s riff.
I Need You The Kinks

After the success of You Really Got Me, the Kinks tried a lot of variations on the slurring bar-chord thing, each a little better than the one before. This is the apotheosis; it’s as if the Kinks saw into the future they had created, and just let the beast loose, predicting the feedback howl of The Creation or Hendrix, the punk aggression of the Stooges or Pistols, and the junkyard repetition of Suicide or krautrock.
Cities on Flame With Rock’n’Roll Blue Öyster Cült

Yes, I know it’s a re-write of Sabbath’s “The Wizard,” but it’s a superior re-write, dammit, reducing the somewhat frantic jumble of the Sabbath original into a menacing slur that sounds like an eight-story Golem trashing the car-part yards that one used to find near Shea Stadium. True, it almost disqualifies itself due to its’ single note-to-bar chord ratio, but those first three chords just announce the Fall of Man as well as anything ever recorded, so this has to get on the list.
Grim Reaper Detective

Let’s say someone gave Led Zeppelin an IV-drip full of pure Costa Rican coffee beans, then told them to spit out a riff based on the “Odessa stairs” sequence in the movie Battleship Potemkin, with the further instruction to make it sound like “You Really Got Me” played sideways by someone describing the Running of the Bulls, and you have this strange, aggressive, gorgeous riff. I also believe this is the only riff here that’s from an out-of-print and non-streamed record, and that’s a goddamn shame. I will further note that if you grew up on Long Island in the 1970s, you knew this as the song in the Speaks commercial.
I Want You The Troggs

Clearly, just a re-write of the “Wild Thing” riff that had made the Troggs famous, but because they’re, well, the Troggs, they couldn’t help but make it dumber, fiercer, and more threatening (and did I mention dumber?); this is the sound of a bully stealing the meds from a school for children with downs’ syndrome and then burning the place down, and then going to fuck his girlfriend, who looks a lot like Juliette Lewis after she drank a lot of cough syrup.
AC/DC, who are not on this list, for reasons explained immediately to the left of this picture.
Now is probably a good time to answer a question you are most surely asking: Why is there no Sabbath or AC/DC on the list? AC/DC aren’t here for the same reason you don’t put John Entwistle on a best bassists’ list or Pet Sounds on a best albums list: their presence is so obvious that to include them would just humble, obfuscate, clog, and complicate the completion of the entire project. For instance, you could inarguably include at least three AC/DC riffs in the top ten – “Highway to Hell,” “Sin City,” and “TNT” — and could make a good case for including four, five, six, or seven; so if one is going to functionally complete a list like this, you have to do it without AC/DC. Let’s just call them Lords of the Riff, and be done with it. As for Black Sabbath, I’ll be frank: What Sabbath did (and to a degree, invented, though the Move, also from Birmingham, seems to have dabbled with it first) was pretty freaking amazing, but their brethren and offspring actually improved on it; the stoner and doom metal movement that emerged in the late ‘80s and beyond took the Coyote Crawl of Sabbath’s slabber and turned it into Cerebus Slobbering through the sludge of Hades; basically, you can pick up any CD by Fu Manchu, Weedeater, Wo Fat, Electric Wizard, Orange Goblin, and many, many more, and you’ll see that they’ve basically bettered Sabbath at their own game.
Now, back to the list.
Roadrunner Jonathan Richman

A lot of great riffs are re-interpretations of earlier classic riffs; “Roadrunner” was a taming of the Velvets’ world-ending and feral “Sister Ray,” but they replaced the drug beast howl of “Sister Ray” with a clarity and krautrock motorik discipline, and even an overlay of Fabs/Big Star sensitivity.   It’s one of the great stompy-fisty riffs of all time, “Autobahn” transcribed by the Dave Clark 5.
Farmer John The Premieres

It’s curious that this riff appears nowhere in Don and Dewey’s original version of “Farmer John” (a wonderful, but riff-less, dose of amphetamine r’n’b via the Everlys); I would love to know how the Premieres came up with this, and why they attached it to this song (anyone who wants to contribute some thoughts/theories, please do so). It’s a slightly more elaborate, more syncopated, and less drunken variation of “Louie Louie,” and Neil Young did a kickass version, too, in which he underlined the proto-Sabbath slur of the riff by filling it with volume and morphine.
Godzilla by Blue Oyster Cult

BÖC have the honor of being the only band represented on this list twice. A profoundly influential riff – along with a pile of Sabbath riffs, this piece alone virtually sired Stoner metal — BÖC have strapped a standard Sabbath slur to the back of a twelve-ton slug and created a perfect personification, via guitar, of the Lizard God honored in the lyrics.
Sweet Jane The Velvet Underground

Stately, patient, majestic, instantly embracing, not so much a swagger as a confident, straight-backed march to the table that’s been waiting for you at the hippest club in the city.   Would love to know where this came from; an earlier memorable VU riff, “There She Goes Again,” was appropriated lock, stock, and barrel from Marvin Gaye’s “Hitch Hike,” but I can find no source for this.
Making Time The Creation

An angry, arty, chunky interpretation of what the Who, the Small Faces, and the Move were doing, only the Creation do it perfectly. There’s something decidedly odd about the chord selection, making me think that perhaps it was composed backwards. It’s a shame Hendrix never covered this; there’s a deeply beautiful drunk on a tightrope snarl here that he would have nailed.

The Dark Night Of Dave Grohl: A Cautionary Tale

Tim Sommer — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 07:22:45 +0000

It had been a long night. Damn, it had been a long week.
The Pepsi machine in the stairwell of the Super 8 motel outside of Dothan, Alabama refused to take Dave Grohl’s dollar. He smoothed out the bill and fed it into the slot a third, fourth, and fifth time. No luck. On another occasion, he would have given the machine a good whack with his Converse; but he just didn’t have it in him tonight. He crumpled to the floor, back against the machine, and wadded up the dollar and threw it into a corner.
That night, he had made a surprise appearance at a meeting for Dollar General Employees of The Gulf Coast. He had seen an online ad trumpeting “Dollar General’s Tribute to HR,” so he had showed up at the George Wallace Memorial Convention Center, drumsticks in hand, ready to join the band for a version of the Bad Brains’ “The Big Takeover.” But it turned out that the “HR” stood for Human Resources, and there wasn’t even a band there (just a DJ, playing “Captain of My Heart” and “The Logical Song,” over and over). Grohl ended up standing in the parking lot in front a bunch of heavy-set women humming songs by the Wipers, a situation that seemed to antagonize the locals.
Madame.
It was his third surprise guest appearance of the week; on Friday night, he had sat in with the band at Jefferson Davis Middle School in Frankfort, Kentucky when they played a medley of Wings’ songs for the 8^th Grade Academic Awards Presentation; and on Saturday, he had been in Clearwater, Florida, to guest-drum with Kansas on TBN’s We Love God’s Country Best of Christian Music ’14 show starring John Davidson and Newly Re-Born Madame.
But tonight had not gone as planned. Not only had he been misled by the Dollar General Event, not only had the soda machine rejected his dollar, but the Mitsubishi Mirage he had rented did not have Satellite Radio, a cashier at the Sonic had ridiculed his lack of a chin, and most significantly, U2 had performed that very night in Times Square with Bruce Springsteen and Chris Martin, and NO ONE HAD INVITED HIM.
How could such a thing have happened, he wondered, cradling his head in his hands, his sneakers sticking to the Mountain Dew stained floor. You can’t have something like that without me!
Grohl had been a part of every single moderately-visible all-star guest opportunity since the night in Spring, 2002 when he had joined Steve Morse, Captain Sensible, Leonard Phillips and Jim “Dandy” Magnum to run through a couple of Dickies songs at a Salute to the Cocoanut T-Zer. Anytime and anywhere a reasonably recognizable punk rock semi-icon was needed, he had been there (of course, there was the time in 2008 he had missed the chance to sit in with Foghat at the 5-Cherries All-Slots Casino in Tunica, Mississippi, but that’s only because Bobby Rondinelli had a CB radio in his van and heard about the gig first).
But he was a NATURAL to sit in with U2! That was a NO-BRAINER! And he HADN’T EVEN BEEN CALLED!
Soon, there were hot tears running down Grohl’s face. He wrapped his arms around his knees, and tucked his head so low to the concrete that his newly dyed locks brushed some discarded Parliament Menthol butts that had been left near the vending machines. He cried so hard he began to feel faint.
Suddenly, he became aware of a strange, chilled mist in the air; it felt like when you turn the air conditioning in your car too high on a rainy day. He raised his head. There was a peculiar brightness to the sky; it soon became so bright that he had to shade his eyes. The vapor and the change in the air began to coalesce in one location, just a few feet in front of where Grohl sat, and about six feet off the ground. The only thing Grohl could think was that it was like when the Good Witch appears in the Wizard of Oz.
Soon, the cool fog began to take a human form. Grohl recognized the phantasm instantly.
“Kurt…Kurt, is that you?”
“OF COURSE it’s me. Who did you think it was? Lonesome Dave from Foghat?”
“Funny you should mention that, because I was just thinking –“
“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
“Oh…okay.”
“Dave…You need to chill out, man. Take a little break.   You are everywhere. I mean you’re more over-exposed than MC Hammer.”
“MC Hammer?”
“I’ve been dead for 20 years, remember? My cultural references are a little, uh, stale.
“Yesssir, Hammertime, Hammertime, alllrigh, that’s funny.”
These last words were spoken by a new specter, pale, fuzzy, and green, that had appeared alongside Kurt.
H.R.
“HR? is that you?!?” said Grohl.
It was indeed HR from the Bad Brains.
“Yesssir, that’s me, I am HR, yassssir.”
“But you’re not dead,” Grohl sputtered.
“No, nosir, I am not. I am just really really high. Thought I had a gig in town. Was very confused.”
“BUT ANYWAY,” the Kurt poltergeist interrupted, “Listen, man, you don’t need to be the Official Party Guest of rock’n’roll. I mean, you’re a perfectly good musician. I like your stuff. I mean, I liked it more when they were Husker Dü songs, but all in all, you do a pretty good job. You can just lay back a bit. You don’t need a TV show. You don’t need to back every 14-year-old country muppet at every country awards show. You literally don’t prove a thing by proving you’re good enough to play with, oh, I don’t know, Zac Brown. I mean, Zac Brown, for the love of the baby Jesus?!? You played with ME. What more do you need to prove? I mean, you played with ME, you played with Kurt Fucking Cobain. You were MY drummer. Go ahead and make your nice little REO Green Day records, go right ahead, but you were ALREADY part of the greatest show on earth. I mean, go right ahead and sit in with Mission of Burma every now and then, but you have totally taken this thing too far. Is the world a better freaking place because you played with P Diddy or Juliette Lewis?!? Just freaking relax. I mean, you’ve done really, really well for the guy who replaced Dale Crover. Plus you’re STILL doing better than Dave Pirner.”
Kurt’s took a long draw from HR’s joint.
“Dave…Dave, are you paying attention? Seriously, man, you’re like the thing that fucking wouldn’t leave. Were you like the middle child, or something? WHY do you need so much attention? You’d think being Nirfuckingvana’s drummer, and having a few hit records on your own, would be enough. But here you are showing up on every freaking talk show that’ll have you, it’s sort of like the way Mason Reese was in the 1970s. Except he never played with Nirvana, so he had an excuse. Dave? DAVE?!?”
But Dave Grohl wasn’t listening. He was just finishing writing a text.
“Good to see you, Kurt, real good, man,” Grohl spat out, distracted. “It’s all good, it’s all good, y’see. No more problems. I just got a text – G.E. Smith wants me to sing lead in a tribute to Desmond Child and Rouge, TONIGHT, on the Chabad Telethon, so I am OFF to Los Angeles. That’s right – ME, fronting Desmond Child and Rouge. I am back in action, baby!”
Kurt began to fade back into the ether.
“See, it’s like this, brother Kurt… I’ll be everywhere—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a moshpit full of people who can’t tell Nickelback from Fugazi, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a ‘70s rocker and a camera pointed in his or her direction, I’ll be there…Wherever there’s an awards show and some country pop artist singing some song written by some team of hacks, I’ll be in the back bashin’ at the cymbals…Anytime there’s a billionaire rapper or hack movie star lookin’ for some credibility by having a famous rock’n’roller collaboratin’ with ’em, I’ll be there… An’ anywhere there’s a network exec looking for someone who middle America thinks stands for rock’n’roll—why, I’ll be there, too. See you soon, HR, and happy trails, Kurt – I gotta make a plane to Los Angeles. ‘West Side Pow Wow’ won’t learn itself.”

Re-Assessing The Legacy of The Clash…or Not.

Tim Sommer — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 09:44:47 +0000

Kill Yr Idols, Part II (of Many). Let’s take a look at the Clash. If you came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s and defined yourself as a follower of new music, the Clash were a central band in your worldview. The Clash were so central, in fact, that one rarely stops long enough to make any sort of reasonable assessment of their recorded legacy. This has been even more difficult since the too-early death of Joe Strummer 12 years ago.
Likewise, The (truly) monument-like achievement that is London Calling tends to HANG over the (relatively short) career of the Clash like Andre the Giant at a birthday party: If Andre the Giant showed up, chances are people won’t notice that the cake and the punch weren’t very good.
The author was at the show pictured on the front sleeve of this album. Good for him.
In fact, London Calling is such a remarkable achievement that it makes us overlook how singular it is within the Clash’s catalog, and I guess that’s what I want to address. Arguably, it’s their only non-mediocre album; inarguably, it’s their only truly great one. To put that into perspective, even Generation X put out two great albums, and the Damned and the Stranglers each have four inarguably great records; the Clash’s most significant artistic competition, Stiff Little Fingers, put out four first-rate records, all worthy of multiple cursory and detailed listens, during the same years the Clash were active. Now, I’m not saying that any of these bands are better than the Clash: London Calling is one of the greatest and healthiest (in terms of concept and realization) albums ever made, and that counts for a lot. It is just that we have to examine this possibility that it’s the only really good Clash album – and how does that impact their legacy?
The Clash began as the result of a fairly simple premise: Dr Feelgood plus Mott the Hoople divided by Woody Guthrie. Their first album (and when I refer to their first album, I am talking about the initial UK release, not the American re-releases), is hollow sounding and rife with thin sloganeering. A small handful of great songs (“Janie Jones,” “Garageland,” “Remote Control”) are surrounded by hastily-assembled collections of riffs and catchphrases; and a catchphrase + a riff does not necessarily add up to a decent song, as evidenced by “48 Hours,” “Protex Blue,” even “White Riot.” I would say this was a one-off problem, possibly a result of going into the studio too early and too eagerly, except for the fact that the band fell into the exact same habit again and again during their career (most notably on Sandinista!, but on Give Em Enough Rope, too). It also suffers from unsatisfying one-dimensional production – the Jam, for instance, got a lot more mileage out of equally thin material on their first and second albums, merely by having (far) better production (important note: the American version of the first album is far superior, due to the addition of some of the Clash’s best and most unique material: “Jail Guitar Doors,” “Clash City Rockers,” “Complete Control,” and “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” — if we were to count the American re-boots of the first Clash album as “true” albums, this would likely be a different story).

(Forecasting the beautiful diversity of the London Calling album, on “White Man In Hammersmith Palais” the Clash begin a song about feeling like an outsider at a reggae show with a reference to the Pretty Things)
Now, album two, Give ‘Em Enough Rope, sounds AMAZING. The guitars roar and glow and twinkle and hum like well-built, well-tuned punk rock machines; they are recorded and assembled with a Boston-like precision though not with a precise Boston-like result; producer Sandy Pearlman never gets enough credit for making one of the most explosive yet sensible rock records ever recorded. But once again,with some too-few exceptions (“All the Young Punks,” “Stay Free”), on Give ‘Em Enough Rope the Clash seem to think coming up with a good tag line and a good riff is enough. I mean, I can play “Guns on the Roof” or “Tommy Gun” over and over again because they sound so good, but really, they are barely songs.
Then we have London Calling. London Calling is, well, everything: it sounds old and new and rough and polished and poppy and intimate and British and American, and for a brief moment in time, every aspect of the Clash’s potential is harnessed into a rail car rolling over the landscape of rock history. There’s never been an album quite like it – it combines the raw, literate wit and reflection of Mott the Hoople with the low-ceilinged pub-rattle of the Feelgoods with the cinematic big-picture glow of the Who and the roots sensibility of the Stones or Pretty Things. Although it doesn’t touch on any Beatles’ studio or song forms, with that one exception it is perhaps the most 360-degree picture of rock history ever recorded in one place. London Calling is so good that we tend to overlook the fact that (with the exception of a few moments on Combat Rock, a couple of songs from the pre-London Calling Cost of Living EP, and the pile of first-rate singles that fell between the first and second albums), there’s almost nothing else like it in the Clash catalog.

I acknowledge that there’s a certain cult around Sandinista!, but can I just state that I don’t get it? I mean, at all? The album sounds under-rehearsed (to the point of being spontaneous), over-recorded (i.e., many of the songs are as “written” as demos you hum into a tape recorder on the subway, but given full studio treatment), and so suffused with a pea-soup like fog of weed haze as to make the music virtually indecipherable to anyone who wasn’t in the studio at that time of recording. “Lightning Strikes,” “Charlie Don’t Surf,” and “Ivan Meets G.I. Joe” are literally just titles, stretched out in unsatisfying ways into full songs; although some of the dub experiments threaten to work, they are ultimately pale failures; and the quasi-pop stuff – like “Hitsville U.K.,” “The Call Up,” and “The Magnificent 7” – are minor zirconia, at best, made shiny by their stupefying surroundings. Which isn’t to say it’s all bad: there’s slightly over one side of grade-A-ish material here (“The Street Parade,” “Something About England,” “Lose This Skin,” “Somebody Got Murdered,” “Police On My Back” – and please note that two of those aren’t even written by the Clash), but even this is dulled by the hazy production, which is simultaneously overwrought yet incomplete.
Finally, there’s Combat Rock. A pretty good record, but not a great one, and I could easily name a dozen punk-ish albums from the same era that are as good or better (for instance, every one of the four studio albums Stiff Little Fingers released between 1979 and 1983 are notably better). It does, however, pick up on some of the same musical and lyrical memes explored on London Calling (i.e., America, cars, and cities), and there’s a pretty strong indication that the band were finding their way back home again; which is to say, another London Calling was probably in them, if they hadn’t defenestrated (nevertheless, when is the last time you even thought of songs like “Red Angel Dragnet” or “Atom Tan”?).
And let’s not even discuss Cut The Crap, other than to say “file alongside Squeeze by the Velvet Underground.”
So…we have an interesting situation here. The Clash made one album of shattering beauty, completeness, power, passion, and conceptual originality. They were also a devastating live band, and consistently so: Strummer’s strained-vein passion, spitting out the news with his eyes screwed tight, really did honor his initial mission to re-cast Woody Guthrie for the punk era; this was complimented, rather brilliantly, by Mick Jones’ trad-rock stadium theatrics, leaps, kicks, and slashes, and Paul Simonon’s earnest, Dee Dee Ramone as handsome-simian passion. I never saw the Clash play a bad show, and I saw about a dozen of them; each one of these contained the kernel of legend, each was full of color and acrobatics and sweat and joy; they were also one of those bands that was just as fierce and hot in soundcheck (I saw two or three of those), which is to say, they just loved being the Clash.
And ultimately, these two staggeringly important elements – the almost incomparable live performances, and one album of such energy, purity and creativity that it deserves a place in the collection of every person who has ever listened to rock music, regardless of whether they are an expert, faddist, snob, or novice – makes it not only possible but essential to overlook a very flawed catalog.

Sonic Youth, Tim Sommer, and Kill Yr Idols

Tim Sommer — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 05:08:47 +0000

Kill your idols is a potent phrase. It is also extremely reasonable and important spiritual and artistic (though not literal) advice. In the 1980s, ’90s, and beyond, in its’ truncated “Kill Yr Idols” form, it also became a powerful pop meme, to be seen on lunchboxes, t-shirts, bathroom walls, record sleeves, and as many etceteras as there as ets in the cet. I don’t recall “Kill Yr Idols” being a commonly repeated phrase, until it appeared as the title of a Sonic Youth song in 1983.
That Sonic Youth song was about me.
So I take a little credit for the expansion of this meme, a story I shall share imminently.

But first, some words from The Diamond Sutra, in which the Buddha offers advice about the perfection of emptiness to his elder student, Subhuti:
“Subhuti, that mind is everywhere equally. Because it is neither high nor low, it is called the highest, most fulfilled, awakened mind. The fruit of the highest, most fulfilled, awakened mind is realized through the practice of all wholesome actions in the spirit of nonself, non-person, non-living being, and non-life span. Subhuti, what are called wholesome actions are in fact not wholesome actions. That is why they are called wholesome actions…”
Which is another way of saying Kill Yr Idols. Because, to paraphrase another line from the Diamond Sutra, 1) the Beatles are, 2) the Beatles are not all that and a bag of chips, and therefore 3) the Beatles are. But anyway:
In 1982, I was living in a peculiar studio duplex on Thompson Street with my great friend, Kevin Hogan. Kevin was (and is) a beautiful actor. He is suitable for all parts calling for a middle-aged man of almost feline handsomeness. I was also writing, avidly and aggressively, about avid and aggressive rock music for a number of national and international music publications. I had been doing that since I was 16 (in 1982 I was 20).
Robert Christgau, mentor of the author, nemesis of Thurston Moore
One of the publications I wrote for was the Village Voice. Robert Christgau, who ran the pop/rock section of the paper, was not only a legendary music journalist but also a brilliant, astute, and patient editor who took great time to mentor me. Then, as now, I have nothing but really positive things to say about Christgau.
Simultaneously, I was forming a close relationship with Thurston Moore. I had taken a fierce and early interest in Thurston’s then-new band, Sonic Youth; I thought their feral, foaming, spiky, joyous, raucous, abrupt, grinning, slashing performances, usually in front of a dozen or so people in cellars in the far East Village, were amongst the most visceral and honest manifestation of pure rock’n’roll I had ever seen. I wrote about them every chance I got. Thurston and I were also playing together in (one of the many incarnations of) Even Worse, Jack Rabid’s quasi-legendary and/or pseudo-legendary New York punk rock band. My time in Even Worse (I was in the band from June ’82 to January ’84, Thurston for about ten months or so beginning in June ’82) is an entirely separate yarn, and although it is a wonderful and tragic-comic tale, it would only serve to unnecessarily complicate the story I am trying to tell here, so let’s pretend I never even mentioned it, okay?
I will, however, add that I was hanging out with Thurston a lot: going to shows with him, occasionally hiring him to transcribe interview tapes for me, and visiting him at Rockefeller Center, where he was selling Dove Bars off of a cart.
Anyway, Thurston had some kind of issue with Christgau; to be frank, I don’t quite recall where or how this began, but it led to Thurston being quite agitated that I had a good relationship with Christgau (not that we discussed this a lot; however, I do recall long conversations about a band Thurston and I wanted to start that was to be called Glue, dedicated solely to playing the riff to SSD’s “Glue” over and over for forty minutes).

(This is “Glue” by SS Decontrol; pretty great riff, huh?)
In mid-1983, Sonic Youth recorded and released a song called “Kill Yr Idols,” first issued as a 12-inch single, not too long after their (honestly) incendiary and essential album, Confusion Is Sex. The first thing I noticed about “Kill Yr Idols” was that it had something you could call a concrete riff; in fact, the riff was such a sharp, chopped, and slashing object that it immediately announced that Sonic Youth’s future was going to be something distinct from its’ past. The beautiful, hoarse, woozy bursts of bristles and wonks that filled Confusion, sounding like a sharp-nailed ferret attacking a box of Brillo steel wool pads, contained virtually nothing to prepare us for the almost AC/DC-ish old-school riff that inaugurated “Kill Yr Idols.”
The second thing I noticed – in fact, I think it had to be pointed out to me, because I was so swept away by the magnificently rockist riff that had announced the song and the “new” Sonic Youth – was the opening lyric:
I don’t know why
You wanna impress Christgau
Ahhhh Let that shit die
And find out the new goal
And that was unmistakably about me. And I am goddamn proud of that.
Regardless of Thurston’s somewhat purposeless attack on one of the most supportive, literate, and intelligently provocative music journalists I’ve ever met, 30-plus years later, Kill Yr Idols remains exquisitely sharp advice. By lovingly investigating the fact that not one of our favorite artists’ achieves perfection, by demolishing the myth of infallibility (even amongst our most sacred cows), we can truly appreciate the native and acquired genius of these artists; for instance, the Beatles are an amalgamation of imperfections, rendered with invention and sweat; no person seeking perfection would have the courage to create something as startling as The White Album, or London Calling, or White Light White Heat, or Pet Sounds, or Pink Flag, or Soused. These works are all acts of extreme courage, which is to say each of these masterpieces, full of distortion and majesty, are about human and artistic flaws, rendered with energy, passion, and creativity; in fact, the very definition of creativity is seeking perfection by taking imperfect roads. When you believe in the god-like infallibility of the artists you love, you virtually demand that they deny the human qualities and the potential for exploration (brilliance is often the result of error) that leads to groundbreaking events and “genius.”
Kill Yr Idols. Or at the very least, recognize that not only is no one infallible, everything in life is suffused with impermanence; and impermanence not only makes all life possible (imagine a river that does not run, a blade of grass that does not grow, a sun that neither rises nor sets), impermanence, which is to say the quality of variation of influence and skill and the willingness to err, makes all great art possible.
“Then the World-Honored One spoke this verse:
Someone who looks for me in form
or seeks me in sound
is on a mistaken path
and cannot see the Tathagata.”

Pink Floyd End their Story in a Wondrous Way (Especially if you like Umma Gumma)

Tim Sommer — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 09:44:18 +0000

What a beautiful way to end a legendary lifespan.
These days, fewer and fewer bands – and virtually no legacy acts – are willing to say “This is where the story ends.” Even fewer can end their lifespan with a ringing valediction and validation, something that simultaneously underlines an act’s most distinct gifts yet adds something of true and lasting value to the catalog.
(I mean, did anyone even care that something calling itself The Who released a new song eight weeks ago? Did Binky even care?!?)
The Endless River, the fifteenth and final studio album from Pink Floyd, is a classic Pink Floyd album – especially if your idea of Pink Floyd is David Gilmour’s Benadryl slides and cough-syrup glides, and the empty-museum instrumental explorations of Umma Gumma and Meddle – while adding something new and even challenging to the catalog. The album also asks the question: what if Floyd had gone straight from 1972 to 2014, quickly stopping in 1976 to pick up some of the hash-lump musical memes that made the post-Syd Floyd so, well, luscious?
The Endless River exists, quite positively, on a number of different levels: it is, without a doubt, a beautiful monument to Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright, who died 6 years ago; most of the tracks on The Endless River are based around sketches and performances Wright recorded in the early/mid 1990s, around the time of the sessions for The Division Bell. It is also an affirmation that the best-remembered Floyd – which is to say the shifting, sighing, sliding, soaring, shimmering, spacious sound of Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here — belonged to Gilmour and Wright, who effortlessly evoke that sound here. Next, the new Floyd album firmly asserts that the wholly progressive and adamantly non-commercial head-band that Floyd became after Syd left but before the mega-sales of Dark Side — that is, the group that produced deeply personal and artful soundtracks for both the neurotic and peaceful mind — was still very much alive a generation later, and could be summoned at will. Finally but perhaps most significantly, it is a graceful, elegiac monument to Pink Floyd, space rockers, head-rockers, and masters of plaintive and compelling shifting-sands-under-a-pale-moon rock.

With only one song featuring a complete and traditional vocal (that’s the track immediately above, and you’ll see/hear it’s very goddamn good), The Endless River is loaded with canyon-deep/borealis-high instrumentals, flowing seamlessly and gorgeously in and out of each other. Vibrating and sighing, trembling and lifting, the album occasionally slips into great pronouncements of almost Elgar-like melodicism and adamant late-night FM rhythms; but it mostly lives in the land of slow-shifting sands of mood, tone, and texture. The Endless River is almost certainly the most FIRM and avid statement from the post-Waters Floyd that Gilmour/Wright/Mason had a RIGHT to have a Floyd without Waters. This album is beautifully, adamantly, and firmly Pink Floyd.
Gilmour, Mason, and Wright (with help from producers Phil Manzanera and Youth) do this by sitting themselves firmly in the headspace Floyd created in the late 1960s and early 1970s. If you love the Floyd that made Meddle – an album that sounds brilliant shuffled with this one – Umma Gumma, and Atom Heart Mother, you will probably dig this very much.   It’s the same band, clearly. If you can imagine that band – the Floyd that existed, say, between ’69’s Umma Gumma and ‘72’s Obscured By Clouds – re-emerging forty years later and applying some of wind-swept sonics and gentle slides from Floyd’s later, more commercial work, The Endless River would be the result.
The very best thing Pink Floyd have had to offer in the 45 years since Syd left was the idea of texture. The elegiac, sighing, spacious, looping, and continuous landscape of The Endless River, full of nods to earth and science and even pop, is Pink Floyd, far more than the bitter, snapping polemics of Roger Waters was ever Pink Floyd.
(May I also add that when I used the word “polemics” in the last paragraph, it was just a Hail Mary? I mean, it looked and sounded and felt like it would be the right word to use there, but to be frank, I wasn’t entirely on solid ground in terms of the definition. But then I looked it up, and BOOM goes the dynamite! Jon Matlack strikes out the side! It was the perfect word. )
Roger Waters. The word “polemics” is to him what peanut butter is to chocolate.
The Endless River not only asserts the idea that this drive on the Lunar Coast Highway was the Floyd sound, but also that it belonged to Wright and Gilmour. Ohhhh, the listener thinks, this is Pink Floyd…Bells…chimes…12-string guitars crisp and heavenly…enough space in the landscape that you could drive a car through the mix, but a thousand and eight star-like elements shimmering below, around, and above, insuring that the compass still points to true north and no one is getting too lost in the desert… Stately, patient, at times adamant and processional, full of the peculiar texture of ebow’d acoustic guitar and the warm, familiar tones of church organs and rising and falling synth pads… radio noise and whirring, breathing choppers and harmonics (now is a good time to mention that fans of Porcupine Tree, Album Leaf, and Radio Massacre International, not to mention old beards who listen to Tangerine Dream or Vangelis, are going to love love love this album)…guitars sligh and slide and almost threaten to bite, but just hand you a shoulder pillow….
1970’s left-hander Jon Matlack. For some reason, he has worked his way into a column about Pink Floyd. The World of Words is a vibrant and surprising land.
And it not all a trip to an acid-and-merlot laced day spa; the album contains at least one near-classic Floyd track – “Allons-y,” which sounds like “Run Like Hell” played by a group of monks on opium while listening to Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, which is to say it sounds a lot like “Echoes” from Pink Floyd’s 1971 album, Meddle.
The Endless River is a lovely, strong album, distinctive but as wonderfully familiar as a favorite old over-sized sweater found in the back of a drawer.
It reminds us that once upon a time, headphones were worn, and as the early evening of a late fall afternoon wrapped around our suburban bedrooms, we retreated into a land of rich strange highways; and a lifetime later, Pink Floyd are still reminding us that they were, are, and always will be the Kings of that road.

Eff You, Beatles: Or Why You Need To Know About “Rockin’ Rochester USA”

Tim Sommer — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 05:08:09 +0000

It is a strange, beautiful, brutal, and bittersweet song.
It is not just a window into the past, but a glimpse at a lost future.
It is two and one-quarter minutes of true, original, and primitive American rock’n’roll. It integrates the most feral forms of rockabilly, a vague scent of vocal-group dynamics, the unstoppable downhill wagon-ride of New Orleans rock, and the simple chords shaped by fingers blistered from all-night dances at the VFW hall. The song is “Rockin’ Rochester U.S.A.,” released in 1960 by a cranky, cranking, roaring, and rasping gang of geeky upstate New York proto-punks called The Tempests.
It is one of many gar(b)age punk rock classics that this ecstatic, elegiac, and loopy land whelped before the Beatles Bach’d-up beautiful American music; and although “Rockin’ Rochester U.S.A.” is only one of many, due to its deeply sincere and powerful simplicity and greaseball overdrive, it seems like a perfect example of all that we lost.
Bob Giordano, who thirty-four years ago insisted I listen to Pet Sounds, insisted I listen to it.

The entire American century had been leading to a sound like this, the sound of “Rockin’ Rochester USA,” 134 totally true seconds of bar chords and trucker speed that assimilate the grinning, aggressive absurdities of the Minstrel Show and the Medicine Show, the sinewy snarls of Midwestern steel-town blues, the sneering drone of Appalachia and Acadia, the reverby sex snarl of Memphis, and the post-“Louie Louie” dumb-assing of beery dances in High School gyms into one hopped-up drag-race of American Music.
This amazing American music would be the bone buried by the dog of the British invasion.
The almost hysterical absorption of Beatles-memes into vocabulary of young American bands virtually killed this pure and beautiful form of American rock’n’roll; and although they were plenty of British bands who were similarly goosed by the desire to bash and burp and fly downhill (Them, the miraculous Troggs, the Kinks, the Undertakers, the Dave Clark 5, and many more), Americans were not just seduced by the cheesy charms and Brill Building aspirations of the Beatles, but absolutely subsumed and brainwashed by them; the Beatles, brilliant but only ONE side of the story, virtually took over the American music business, in turn strangling the growing child that was a distinct and original form of American rock’n’roll.
And I don’t hate the Beatles, those brilliant masters of craft, technique, power, emotion, and innovation; I just hate the pogrom of American music that happened in their name. Due to the ubiquity of the Beatles charms, the development of a true indigenous American rock’n’roll was stopped. It wasn’t the Beatles fault, but what was lost because of them was incalculable.
Try this one, too. The unspeakably brilliant and AMERICAN Collins Kids, grinning candy-eaters with a hot dildo of pure Wynonie/Treniers/Sister Rosetta/Roy Brown up their ass. Jack White couldn’t rock this hard if he sold his soul to Dexter Romweber and recorded an album of early Fall songs.

Now, IMAGINE what American pop/rock would have sounded like IF it grew from THIS POINT FORWARD, without the intervention of wedding cake-sweet Beatles fey fuckery, establishment pleasing, and politesse? The mighty branch of American rock’n’roll that was developing quite healthily and happily prior to 1963 from so many miraculous American roots, got cut off, fell to the ground with barely a sound, and we will never know what it would have grown into.
I suppose there are hints, some considerable ones, i.e., what American music would have sounded like without the universal spread of the Beatles virus; those hints lie in “Wooly Bully,” The Sir Douglas Quintet and the Bobby Fuller Four, most certainly Paul Revere & the Raiders or even the Meters, maybe even early Parliament; the Velvets came very close, when they were at their most Cale-flavored pure, or perhaps Pet Sounds, with its echo of folk song and Bernstein, hinted at it, too; but what if all of American rock’n’roll had been able to evolve from the place where the evolution was halted in late 1963?

Later, there was a gorgeous revival — the Groovies, Stooges, MC5, et al in the late ‘60s, then the Ramones, the Cramps, the Lyres, and so very, very many more half a decade later — but that was all a re-creation of Eden; we will never, ever know what Eden sounded like after the apple but without Apple Records.
You’ve all been had, deceived, by this idea that the Beatles defined rock’n’roll (likewise, if you were taught the Rolling Stone version that rock’n’roll died when Elvis went into the army and was reborn when the Fabs landed on Ed Sullivan, you have been lied to). The Beatles were freaking geniuses, but thanks to the ubiquity they achieved in the mid-1960s, we will never know what a pure American rock’n’roll would have evolved into; we will never know what musicians, progressive or simple, would have come up with when they picked up on the sound of Aaron Copeland or D.J. Menard or La Monte Young or Eddie Cochran or the Sonics or Ike Turner and made something that was originally American, free from the la-la pop dynasty of the Beatles.
We will never know that story. It’s another lost vein of history.
So, as much as I worship at the Magick Tempel of Beatledom, and as much as I treasure every moment of aural and conceptual joy squeezed from the time I spent in the echoing, cavernous halls of the Church of Beatle, because of all that was lost, because we will never know what phenomenal joys would have resulted from the NATURAL growth of the American child of Puget Sound raunch and Bakersfield twang and Appalachia sigh and Lafayette cry and Memphis tic-tock and Rush Street squeal and Rust Belt bamalam and Clarksdale poetics and Rochester three-chord dumbangelics, because we will never know what the pure-bred American rock children of Copeland and Ornette Coleman and Ledbelly and Morton Feldman and Hank Williams and Sonics would have looked like and sounded like, because it never happened because of Beatles ubiquity, because of all that, and despite everything they gave us, I STILL have to say:
Fuck You Beatles. Forever.

Kim Kardashian, The Mother of Fame, Versus Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, the Mothers of Freedom

Tim Sommer — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 05:08:45 +0000

Yesterday, the media/interweb obsession with Kim Kardashian reached a kind of panic-like fury that could only have been equaled if a 168-foot tall Kim had appeared in Columbus Circle and blown the rampaging Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Also this week in The United States of America: It was announced that the Presidential Medal of Freedom is going to be presented, posthumously, to James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.
First, here’s what I think of the whole Kardashian Kerfuffle:
50 years ago, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner went to the American South to protect African Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed right to vote. They were 21, 20, and 24 years old. Although the American Civil War had technically ended 100 years earlier, in 1964, most descendants of slaves living in the American South were still prevented, by law, by intimidation, and by force, from voting; and virtually all descendants of slaves living in the American South did not have anything remotely like equal access to education or jobs. In one of the final, most important, and most violent battles of the American Civil War, Cheney, Schwerner, and Goodman, ages 21, 20, and 24, were tortured and murdered by people who wanted to continue to deny African Americans the right to vote and equal access to jobs and education, and who resented these brave young men’s efforts to peacefully address this equality.
Unless Kim Kardashian is photographed digging up the corpses of the men who committed these crimes and pissing on their bones, I do not want to hear her freaking name.
Unless Kim Kardashian makes it her personal mission to find the surviving men involved in this crime and personally accompany them to Washington to see a black President present the Medal of Freedom to the survivors of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, I do not want to hear her freaking name.
Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman.
We know no heroes like James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who died, without touching fame, at age 21, 20, and 24. Fame was a foreign country to them, and they had no desire for a passport; they only wanted to peacefully address a savage inequality that existed in America far, far longer than it should have. They did not want to sacrifice their lives to re-address this abomination, but they were willing to. Ask yourself, who do you know who would be willing to sacrifice their lives to change something that did not necessarily effect them personally? Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman could have stayed in college, listened to music and drank cheap beer and had clumsy sex with supple college girls and gone on to live rich, productive, and rewarding lives without choosing to risk their lives to protect the constitutional rights of millions of Americans. But they did. And they were tortured and died doing so.
What would Bono die for? What would Kim Kardashian die for? What would Dave Grohl or Michael Bloomberg or Joni Ernst die for?
Do you know what groups of people are generally willing to die for someone else? Mothers. Mothers are almost always willing to put the lives of their children before their own lives. Mothers will, most frequently, be willing to die for their children.
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner are the Mothers of American Freedom. And we Americans should honor Mothers, and that kind of sacrifice, not fame.
Another grinning, gigantic-assed abomination
It is a grotesque myth that the American Civil War ended at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. At the end of the War, no system was set in place to establish anything remotely resembling equal rights or equal opportunities for the former slaves and their descendents; Reconstruction, which was (very) partially supposed to address those issues, was extremely flawed to begin with, and completely abandoned after the extraordinary Presidential election of 1876. In that election, the Democrat Samuel Tilden defeated the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes; but the Democrats – remember, please, the Democrats were the Party of the South and the financial and political interests of the Southern white powerbase – agreed to “throw” the election to the Republicans and Hayes in exchange for the end of Reconstruction, and any attempt by the Republicans and the North to re-address the economic and social inequality of Southern African Americans. It was one of the most stunning and important moments in American history, and insured that the Southern status quo established prior to the Civil War would continue for nearly another century.
Lyndon Johnson, the President who ended the Civil War, no matter what your schoolbooks said
The Civil War effectively and realistically ended in 1964 and 1965, when Lyndon Johnson, responding to the better angels of his nature, the weight of history, and the highly public murders of people like Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voters Rights Act, thereby announcing that, for the first time in the Nation’s history, there would be genuine Federal accountability for anyone or any system that prevented an American from voting; these actions also initiated the still-brewing battle to provide disenfranchised Americans, especially the descendants of slaves, with an equal shot at decent education, housing, employment opportunities, and the American dream. Johnson did what Lincoln, and every President since him, had been unable to do: End the Civil War and announce that the Federal government had a responsibility to honor its’ constitution and provide African Americans with the chance to partake in the American dream. It really sucks about Vietnam, because without it, Lyndon Johnson would have gone down as one of the greatest Presidents on American history, and even with the deeply troubling and murderous error that was America’s involvement in South East Asia, the steps Johnson took to finally end the Civil War probably merit him that honor.
The last and fiercest battles of the Civil Wars were fought in the early and mid 1960s by Americans who loved peace, who didn’t fight back, and were willing to die so that other Americans could vote, go to college, and have equal opportunity in the workplace. Americans like James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. They died for the constitution, as if they were the mothers of the constitution.
Kim Kardashian, what battle did you fight today? What battle will fight tomorrow? Kim Kardashian, how did you honor the Mothers of Freedom today?

The Way We Hear Music Has Changed. Now Change it Some More.

Tim Sommer — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 09:46:39 +0000

A lot of buzz out there about Taylor Swift abandoning Spotify (what a very odd name – Taylor Swift ¬– vaguely reminiscent of a late 19th century fop, or the last “bachelor” son of a 1830s Southern Plantation Family, or some Goyim Law firm in Columbia, South Carolina) Now, even if she (or her handlers) are doing it for the wrong reason – there’s fairly credible chatter that it’s a move to boost her hard-CD sales in preparation for some kind of sell-off of her record company – it’s the right move. It also brings to mind the much-chatted about notion that existing streaming and sales-download models may (somewhat) work for the listener, but they ain’t working for the musician, at least not in terms of reasonable renumeration for services. Is renumeration a word? It isn’t, is it? So what am I thinking of? AH, it’s REMUNERATION I’m after. So there.
Have you slipped in a supermarket lately? Rear-ended by someone who didn’t have insurance? Been abused or insulted in the workplace? Call Taylor, Swift, & Harmon, serving the Capitol since 1979! Go ‘Cocks!
And it’s true. There’s not a single independent musician out there who has any real hope that they are going to get paid for their music. As I have written earlier, if you’re giving it away for free, at LEAST fuck some shit up and make it mean something…and I don’t see a LOT of that, either. So there’s a lot not working here. Time to change. Time to figure out a way where music either a) isn’t free or b) if it’s free, have it MEAN something.
Virtually every musician wants to change the streaming/download-sales model, but is anyone actually doing anything about it? Probably Bandcamp, right? But there’s room for more, no doubt. So…here’s an idea. An idea for change. Perhaps it’s filled with beautiful ignorance, but why not? Many people will tell me why this can’t happen, but possibly someone out there will tell me why it can.
Musicians: You don’t like the current stream/download/sales model? ABANDON IT. Here’s a suggestion:
Working in union with artists of every level and with people who have the skill to get projects like this online, I want to create an interface for selling downloads/streaming music. I mean THAT’S Step Bloody One. Don’t like the way Spotify etcetera handle it (and, unlike the Swiftian Taylor we spoke of earlier, you can’t count on selling a zillion CD’s)? THERE’S SOMEONE OUT THERE, probably a friend of yours, who can figure out a way you can put up a site to stream and sell downloads. TRUE, if it’s just YOU it won’t make much of a difference. BUT THERE’S POWER IN NUMBERS. So let’s put together United New Streamers or something (god knows what) to join together to sell exclusive download/streams on a NEW site. God knows I don’t know how to do this, but I am quite damn sure there are plenty of people out there who do.
Next, I want to find artists willing to commit themselves to selling downloads/streams EXCLUSIVELY on this site – i.e., these songs/albums/projects will NOT be available on any other download sales/stream site. That’s key, I think.
WHAT WOULD BE THE BIG DEAL IF EVERYONE JUST PULLED THEIR SHIT OFF OF SPOTIFY etcetera, and put it up on their own page, OR BETTER YET, A PAGE THEY SET UP WITH LIKE-MINDED MUSICIANS? The EXISTING model is NOT working. It’s like continuing to eat at a segregated diner because it’s the only diner in town. Set up a NEW lunch wagon that serves EVERYONE. I mean, Spotify etcetera works fine IF you’re looking for an old Hollies or Stranglers track, but it doesn’t work if YOU’RE THE ONE MAKING THE MUSIC. In the old days, when we saw one of our CD’s (or albums or tapes) in a store, we had some genuine belief that AT SOME POINT AT THE END OF THE CONSUMER-RETAILER TRANSACTION we would see a CERTAIN AMOUNT of money if someone actually bought our work. But that belief is now gone.
Next idea: Everyone who is part of this thing (I’m going with the United New Streamers because I can’t think of anything else, but I’m sure something better/more clever will emerge) should agree to give a certain amount – say, one-fourth – of EVERY download sale to a “cause” or charity of the artists’ own designation. ASPCA, voter registration, Planned Parenthood, whatever. Frankly, it could even be the NRA, I just want artists to commit to the idea of using a minority portion of their sales for activism.
What we need: Artists willing to GO OUTSIDE THE SYSTEM and commit one song, or many songs, to the idea of creating a NEW interface for download sales/streaming that both CORRECTS the economic inequality of the existing models, not ONE of which was created from an “artists” perspective, AND a model that commits to the idea of marrying music to activism.
What we need: Computer geek-types and folks with some music business awareness willing to commit their expertise to setting up the infrastructure for this kind of project.
What we need: an army of musicians and computer-geek types and a few organizational sorts to commit to doing this sort of thing.
Alternative: Find your favorite cause, charity, independent bookstore, independent record store. OFFER THEM YOUR MUSIC TO SELL or give away ON THEIR SITE. Or let’s set up a formal organization that acts as an interface between musicians and causes, matches songs with sites that would think that the sales or attention was actually meaningful, as opposed to meaningless. As stated, if you’re going to give it away for free, anyway, GIVE IT AWAY IN A MANNER THAT HAS SOME MEANING.
Bob’s your uncle.