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

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.

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:

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.

Do you think cultural change just emerges, whole and ripe, on the Bowery or London Soho?

The grim, groaning years of childhood, formed in towns colored maple rust and tudor brown, create revolution; wide middle school hallways, full of unloving chants and spit and tears, form rebels; lunchrooms loud with the taunting echoes of social insults and the hiss of hopeless love, this is the womb of cultural change; in the too-tall clack-clack echoing consumer cages of malls, full of unreturned glances from dead-eyed princesses, the princes of punks are born.

We are all the Ramones in Forest Hills, we are all Allen Ginsberg in Patterson, we are all Siouxsie Sioux in Bromley, we are all Kurt Cobain in Aberdeen, we all see the shaded silhouette of the glittering kingdom of the City from our bedroom windows, we dream we belong there; then the dream transmigrates into the only excepted reality: we soon say that the real unreality is our life in the railroad towns under the roofs of the parents we idiotically swear we will never be; our reality, we are sure, lies, awake until dawn, in the city that awaits us, needs us, will embrace us.  We are all Bob Dylan in Hibbing, Louise Brooks in Cherryvale, Kansas, Lou Reed in Freeport, Long Island, Bruce Springsteen in Long Branch, New Jersey…

And Jack Rabid and Dave Stein in Summit, New Jersey.

Jack Rabid.

I knew of Summit before I ever knew of Jack Rabid, who would grow to love punk rock as no other man I ever knew.  I had read somewhere that the Velvet Underground played their very first show there, before some very confused high school students on November 11, 1965.  But mostly I knew Summit as the place that formed Jack, and from which he fled while still in High School (as I ran from Great Neck when I was also “only” a High School student).  Jack, like me, followed a compass that only pointed in one direction, towards The City, the only conceivable city.  Jack, like me, loved the city as he had loved no other, no creature of flesh, no baby-faced ball player, no shadow-making pile of non-city brick.  Jack, like I, learned that the streets of the city (especially its’ feral and dark downtown, bruised and sibilant with sirens in those bashed, dime-bag hollering Beame times, where smoke piped from Garbage Cans and thumping cars cruised slow down lettered-streets and the darkness of the late ‘70s bought the chill of fear and the warmth of hope), were ALIVE with the roar of music and the clumpy-thumps of blue suede creepers, and the naked streetlights spit sparks off of hair dyed lipstick red, and the vodka in the Holiday tasted sharp and cheap but provided courage to talk to perfect girls wearing long-white shirts over tights, provided courage to walk back to the slanting radiator-hissing horror-towers we called home, provided courage to get up on stage and make noise, like we were born to do in the city. 

Dave Stein.

I write these words in tribute to a King of The Suburb-Abandoned City Dream:  His name was Dave Stein, and he was my friend Jack Rabid’s best friend, and he and Jack invented each other in the cruel schools of Summit and found a city where they would be Kings and discovered a music, the rapid and cool collapsing and rising roar of Anglo-American punk rock, to be the soundtrack of their rise from the dull overlands of the suburbs to the magical mole-lands of Manhattan.  Jack was a huge part of helping me find and define who I am, and Dave Stein played an enormous part in helping Jack uncover the true identity he suspected while still a rat in a rat-hating suburb, and that he confirmed when he came to the Kingdom of Outsiders.  And even if I only knew Dave just a little – he was a brilliant guitarist and had a smile sharp enough to crack cocoanuts – he meant a great deal of me, because he meant a great deal to Jack, and the two of them, together, created a wondrous magazine 35 years ago that still lives today, The Big Takeover, a journal that loves music and the people who make it.

I hope Dave finds peace.  He was loved.  He left this incarnation, into adventures unknown or no adventures at all, this past Thursday.