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

November 19, 2014

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.

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

November 13, 2014

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?

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

November 5, 2014

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.

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Acker Bilk and Instrumentals of Exquisite Melancholy

November 4, 2014

In his masterpiece The Tin Drum, author Gunther Grass writes of a character who is able to “turn feelings into soup.” The ability to summon an emotional response out of inanimate materials isn’t solely the province of Herr Grass’s fictional chef. Musicians can do this, too, though it is a rare and gifted musician who has the ability to use instruments, sans vocals or lyrics, to evoke deep emotion.

Mr. Acker Bilk.

Mr. Acker Bilk was one of those so gifted, and he passed this weekend. Bilk is (largely) recalled for one song, a swooning, evocative, tender piece of instrumental magic called “Stranger on the Shore” (1961). You hear its sighing, sepia-toned melody, with a faint tinge of friction implied by the ever-so-slightly hoarse and almost human tone of Bilk’s clarinet, and you feel something. I have always contended that a great instrumental has more ability to convey an emotion than a song with a lyric vocal, and “Stranger on the Shore” is an superb example of that.

In addition to it’s extraordinary musical character, the track is also notable for having stayed in the British singles charts for fifty weeks, and it was the first single by a British artist in the modern era to top the American charts (“Telstar” by the Tornados/Joe Meek came about a year later).

Now, there’s a lot more to say about Acker Bilk, but the primary reason I wanted to memorialize him is because “Stranger on the Shore” is a perfect example of a kind of recording that the British seem to do very, very well: Instrumentals of Exquisite Melancholy. See, British musicians seem to have a remarkable aptitude to produce instrumental tracks that evoke ones’ most tender and elegiac memories; simply hearing a song like “Stranger on the Shore,” Tony Hatch’s theme from the British soap “Crossroads,” or Fleetwood Mac’s “Albatross” captures the feeling of gray early-winter Sundays, rain drops snaking down a windowpane, and an old letter from a childhood lover in your hand. NO ONE DOES THIS SORT OF THING LIKE THE BRITISH DO, so I want to review some of the best of these, with some theories as to why our British friends do this sort of thing so well.

(None of this is to say that Americans can’t write splendid instrumentals, too – Jack Nitzsche’s “The Lonely Surfer” or Love Tractor’s “Fun to be Happy” are fantastic examples, and Percy Faith’s “Theme From A Summer Place” is basically the greatest recording of all time – I’m just saying there’s a particular type of instrumental that the British, with their grey skies and early pub-closing times and lingering stale-burp of wartime rationing, are masters of.)

Tony Hatch’s theme from “Crossroads” (1964) is an excellent example of an IEM, and it’s worth noting for a number of reasons: First, Tony Hatch is an effing genius, one of the great music producers of our time, and he belongs alongside Spector, George Martin, Jack Nitzsche, Shadow Morton, and all the great and near-great freaks who made the ‘60s an explosive and artful time for studio-based music. Just listen to any of his work for Petula Clark – much less any of the stuff he released under his own name, which mixes ‘60s state-of-the-high techniques with easy listening wide screen cinematics — and you will be sold that Hatch is one of the GREATS.

(Damn, if you’ve never heard this, you are in for a TREAT)

Also, the “Crossroads” theme underlines why I theorize the British are so freaking good at Instrumentals of Exquisite Melancholy. The British have a long and truly remarkable tradition of winsome, bittersweet television themes. American television favored upbeat, racing, peppy orchestral grins of forced merriment (think of The Adventures of Ozzy and Harriet or Leave It To Beaver) or mildly amusing numbers with lyrics that told the backstory of the show (Gilligan’s Island, Surfside 6).

But the British have a plethora of enchanting and evocative purely-instrumental TV themes that really dare the listener to feel something, be that excitement and anticipation with a hint of mystery (like the Doctor Who theme), sadness with an overlay of “our best time was a few decades ago” (like the Eastenders theme), or put-away-the-knives-and-stop-looking-at-the-pictures-of-old-girlfriends late-afternoon nostalgic gloom, like the theme to The Last of the Summer Wine. This created a tradition and inspiration for creating and appreciating IEM’s.

To our list of A-list IEMs, lets add one more TV theme: the theme to the long-running British nighttime soap, Coronation Street, written by Eric Spear, and first heard in 1960. It’s likely this influenced Bilk’s’ “Stranger on the Shore” (originally written as the theme to another short-lived soap of the same name). It’s impossible to listen to this without thinking of a gray day in the North of England; it sounds like what Morrissey is thinking when one of those ASPCA commercials comes on.

Next on our tour of IEMs, here’s Fleetwood Mac’s “Albatross.”

“Albatross,” recorded in 1968 by the quasi-original Mac line-up of guitarists Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer, and Danny Kirwan, bassist John McVie, and drummer Mick Fleetwood, is such a pure and original piece of majestic, evocative genius and simplicity that it almost defies description; it is a sigh set to music, the wrap of soft down comforter at the end of a long day. Sounding like a version of Santo & Johnny’s “Sleep Walk” on opium, it was significantly – hell, litigiously – lifted by the Beatles for their “Sun King” (though even if ISIS was threatening to behead Ringo Starr’s grandchildren, he could never play with half the subtlety and majestic simplicity that Mick Fleetwood employs on “Albatross”).

Finally…let’s end our visit to the World of IEM’s with Durutti Column’s “Otis” (which I have praised, almost without bounds, elsewhere). “Otis” appears to be a little sunnier than some of these other tracks, but I think that’s deceptive: something about this song instantly bespeaks of memory; and honestly, unless one is completely schooled and subsumed by the lessons of impermanence and non-existence the Buddhist masters teach us, is there such a thing as a “happy” memory? Because all memories, especially the happiest ones, make us recognize what is gone and never to be again.

Drive safely!

Sting: Still a Tool

Sting is still a tool!

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The Beastie Boys and Rick Rubin (second from left) around the time this story takes place. In 1985, Rick wanted me to temporary take his role as DJ in the band.

Arts and Entertainment, Brooklyn Bugle, Existential Stuff, Music

1985: I Turn Down My Chance to Become a (temporary) Beastie Boy

November 3, 2014

In the middle of 1985, the Beastie Boys were on the precipice of breaking big. The “Rock Hard” single was getting a lot of attention, License to Ill was soon to be released, and the band had just been invited by Madonna to be the opening act on her Like A Virgin tour, Madonna’s first tour as a national arena-act. By this point, I had known the Beasties for almost four years; I have detailed this elsewhere, but I had been integrally involved in the beginning of their career, given them their first radio airplay, gotten them their first gig, etcetera.

The Beastie Boys and Rick Rubin (second from left) around the time this story takes place. In 1985, Rick wanted me to temporary take his role as DJ in the band.

Also at this time, I was a close friend with Rick Rubin, and Rick and I frequently discussed Beasties strategy. In fact, around this time Rick, a TV writer named Mike Dugan, and I were tossing around ideas for a Beastie Boys movie (it was a variation on the standard guys-who-need-to-stay-in-haunted-house-to-inherit-money plot; it was going to be called The Beastie Boys are Scared Shitless, and that incredible title alone would have made it instantly superior to all other films of that milieu).

In 1985, I was working with MTV News, in their music news department. We generated music news copy that was read, with relative degrees of competence or indifference, by the original MTV VJ’s (Martha, Mark, JJ, Nina, and Alan). There were five or six of us newswriters in a medium-sized office/bullpen; we spent our days talking to managers and publicists and rapping out 60 word stories about upcoming Scorpion tours, occasionally slipping in items about Fela or Robyn Hitchcock to amuse ourselves. It was a delightful place to work. A fellow named Doug Herzog ran the Music News department. He was a truly spectacular boss who was extremely tolerant of my extracurricular interests. These involved not infrequent touring with the Glen Branca Ensemble (I was a permanent member of the group from late 1983 to mid 1986), nightly rehearsals and numerous gigs with my own band, Hugo Largo, and creating elaborate hoaxes that usually involved the office Xerox machine and near-criminal abuse of the concept of the inter-office memo.

Doug Herzog, my wonderful boss at MTV. Doug is the one on the right. Doug is thinking “This is kind of cool, but I’d much rather be standing next to The Mad Professor.”

One day, Rick Rubin asked me to meet him for dinner. Rick and I saw each other fairly often, so there was nothing remotely off about this invitation. We would usually discuss grandiose concepts to take over the music industry, sometimes involving an idea we had for a super-aggressive, super-political hardcore metal/punk band that was to be called The Jews. Rick was reading a lot of Meir Kahane in those days, and around this time he solemnly presented me with a copy of Kahane’s Time To Go Home. The idea of integrating that kind of philosophy into punk rock intrigued us.

We met at a Chinese place Rick favored on University Place, where he always ordered the General Tso’s chicken. Rick told me that the Beasties had definitely decided to do the Madonna tour, and that this was a huge break for them. He then patiently explained that the Beasties were still kids, and a little bit out of control; Rick added that he was too busy to go on the road with them, and that he needed someone he trusted to keep an eye on them.

It did make a little sense that Rick would ask me to be a tour manager; the Beasties liked me, and I had some experience with touring (both due to the time I had spent touring with Branca, and because I had spent a lot of time on the road with different bands when I was a journalist — I had worked actively as a journalist from 1978 to 1983). Rick was also well aware of my connection to MTV News, and I am sure he thought that it would help to have an MTV employee actively involved with the Beasties.

However, what Rick asked me next surprised me.

“The band also needs a DJ,” he explained. “So I want you to tour manage and be on stage with them as a DJ.”

Despite the fact that I had DJ’ed extensively at clubs in the early 1980s, I had never done any sort of rap/scratching DJ’ing before. I told him I didn’t think I could do it.

“Not a problem,” Rick cheerfully answered. “I can teach you everything you need to know in an afternoon.”

General Tso’s Chicken, a favorite dish of Rick Rubin in the mid-1980s.

I was definitely intrigued. Every 23-year-old has to dream, at some point, of going on a big rock’n’roll tour (Hugo Largo, at that point, were just playing small-ish clubs and performance art spaces). At rehearsal that evening, I told my band about it, and they seemed sufficiently amused by the whole idea, and didn’t think that the time away would hurt us too much. So I was inclined to take the gig, but didn’t know how it might affect my job. Somehow, because Doug had allowed me a week or ten days off here and there to tour with Branca, I though he might be amenable to working something out, especially because Madonna was involved.

The next day, I spoke to Doug. Doug’s office was attached, via glass wall, to the main newsroom.

Doug patiently listened to me. He then courteously but firmly explained that he didn’t think he could hold my job for the six or eight weeks I would be away. Now, I was making fairly decent money at MTV News — in fact, it seemed like a LOT of money for a musician who lived in a $475 railroad flat in Hoboken — and I also quite liked my job there. Doug, sensing my confusion, then told me “Look… it will almost certainly cost you your job here, and what will you get in return? Okay, maybe you’ll get to see Madonna’s tits, and you’ll probably have a good time, but Tim, remember…there are no Xerox machines on a tour bus.”

Then, with exquisite timing, Doug held up my most recent artfully honed piece of hoaxery: A picture of a baseball team, each face carefully replaced by the face of grotesque child star Mason Reese, along with an accompanying fake memo asking people to join the MTV softball team. This has appeared in the mailbox of every employee at the entire network.

I agreed to stay, and didn’t leave MTV news until I went full time with Hugo Largo about a year and a half later (I had a later stint with MTV after Hugo Largo’s defenestration in mid 1989, but that’s another story).

So, sadly, I didn’t become a temporary Beastie Boy.

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New York City and Taylor Swift (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Change)

October 30, 2014

I do not blame Taylor Swift for embracing her role as the new face of New York City. I really, truly don’t.

A long time ago, I learned that everyone has their own New York City, and everyone’s favorite New York City is their New York City.

If you are a young person arriving in Manhattan for the first time, those first weeks, months and years of awe and discovery will always define your Manhattan; that Manhattan will always be yours, and you will be convinced it is the only Manhattan worth knowing. Whether it was 1978 and you were 16, or it was 2007 and you were 22, or it was 1961 and you were 19, that New York City is forever frozen in your mind as the New York City. You will compare every city you have ever known or visited to your City. And you will, especially, compare other Manhattans, belonging to different ages and eras, to your Manhattan.

And your Manhattan will always be the best Manhattan.

But there was never one Manhattan.

And that’s not a problem. All cities change, and the cities that don’t wither and die. Any drive through the broken and boarded-up cities of upstate New York will boldly illustrate that cities were not meant to be static animals. Virtually all major North American cities are transmuting into radically altered versions of themselves (Vancouver and Las Vegas, to name two, would be literally unrecognizable to someone who hasn’t visited either place for 25 years).

East 5th Street between B and C, 1980

If we want Manhattan to remain a theme park to our nostalgic ideal of dive bars, dark Soho streets and an Alphabet City full of brick piles and smoking garbage cans, we are as offensive as the billionaires and elite young who we claim have “ruined” New York. We would be making the mistake of assuming “our” Manhattan was the “only” Manhattan; we would be making the catastrophic error of demanding permanence in a world that doesn’t just insist on impermanence, but functions only because of it.

We must resolve ourselves to the idea that it will never be “our” city again, the one you loved, the one you boasted you were from, the one whose angles and corners and alleys and bodegas and rooftops and pizza joints thrilled you and defined you.

It will be someone else’s city. And you can’t say, “They’re not a real New Yorker, their New York isn’t the real New York,” because it is the only New York they ever knew. It suits them. It is defined by their age, their income and their interests in much the same way “our” Manhattan was defined by our age, income, and interests.

My New York was: the humid, gassy smell inside of long, narrow, parchment-brown apartment stairways; Glass always crunching underfoot (crack-pipe glass the size of sea-salt crystals, the slightly more musical pop of syringes, green beer glass, thick, fractured streetlamp glass); door-less entryways of Eldridge Street tenements lined with smashed mailboxes; the ominous gray-blue chill and silence of Union Square long after midnight on the walk back from Max’s; the warm neon lights of Dave’s on Canal Street after a loud night at the Mudd Club; late-night shuttered Soho, lit golden and spare; West Village streets on a perfectly hot summer night, swarming with strong men, smiles, and sideways glances; the thrill-rush of terror you felt when you walked past the lot on the south east corner of 42nd street and 8th avenue, across from Port Authority, smelling of piss and weed and ammonia and shoeshine polish; a downtown full of narrow stores where we spent hours dirtying our fingernails as we flipped through used records; the perfectly centered image of the twin towers through the Washington Square arch as Winter gave up the fight and sighed into spring.

Taylor Swift is an easy target right now; personally, I am not particularly negatively or positively disposed to her – I simply don’t think about her much. But I do know she is probably sincere. She probably sincerely loves New York. And her New York is an utterly different city from the city I loved, which was a pretty different city from the town Patti Smith fell in love with, and that was a pretty different place from the city Alan Ginsberg loved, which was, I am sure, a very different island than the town Joseph Mitchell fell in love with, which in turn was an inconceivably different place than the city Walt Whitman or Herman Melville fell in love with. In fact, I would be willing to bet that Peter Stuyvesant once said “New York City isn’t what it used to be,” and I am quite goddamn sure that the Lenappe Indians just wouldn’t shut up about how much their Manhattan had changed.

The fact that Taylor Swift’s New York City is almost nothing like my New York City really doesn’t matter. Do I hate her? God, no. Do I hate “her” New York? Absolutely not. New York City is a work in progress, it will be until the day a comet or an extinction event eliminates the very idea of New York City and all trace of its’ memory. New York City is like an artist who makes some very good albums and some very bad ones. New York City is like the third Velvet Underground album and Lou Reed’s New Sensations.

Who knows, New York City could be like “my” New York City again. If that happens (and it’s certainly possible), it won’t be pretty: the Bloomberg-dream of populating Manhattan with Russian billionaires and Taylor Swifts and eliminating the middle and lower class could lead to the shuttering of all businesses due to high rent and no consumers, and the collapse of the city from the inside. Bloomberg’s dream was to turn Manhattan island into Bahrain, with the extremely wealthy zipping out of razor skyscrapers without any interaction with the underclass; that’s happening now, but all it takes is an economic downturn, a terrorist attack, an Ebola epidemic, the disappearance of any middle class to patronize shops and restaurants, for the whole thing to cave in. Any of these factors – or, more likely, the collapse of a tax base (many of Bloomberg’s super-rich don’t have New York as a primary residence, therefore they don’t pay taxes!) could lead to a ghost town, which, in turn, could see us back into the Beame-Times in no time!

But even if that happened, New York City would still be defined by it’s newest residents, be they the young who now populate the newly exclusive Manhattan, or the young who would populate a future hell-town. In either event (or any scenario in-between), Manhattan would become their Manhattan. It will never be ours again.

And that’s okay.

Every place you ever loved will close. It’s called impermanence.

You have your memories, and the friends you shared those memories with, and the people who weren’t there who you can regale with these unique impressions of your New York City. That’s all any of us ever have, because of impermanence, the gift that gives (a world that doesn’t turn is a world that cannot sustain life) and the gift that takes away (everything we ever loved will close, everyone we ever loved will die).

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Scott Walker and Sunn O))): The Future of Rock’n’Roll

October 28, 2014

Yesterday, we were talking about how we may be entering the Sunset Years of conventional Western Pop. I posited that it is virtually impossible for many Westerners to conceive of a form of popular music that is different from the one that we have been engaged with for the last century and a half (this also applies to niche/underground music forms, which are generally variations of the same theme – i.e., whether it’s “Anarchy in the U.K.,” “Captain of My Heart,” or “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music, you’re still dealing with the same tunings, the same basic song structures, and the same concept of what an instrument does). Yet there was plenty of music in the 150,000 years before Bing Crosby, Irving Berlin, Green Day and Lady Gaga, and I guarantee you that very, very little of it sounded a goddamn thing like what we arrogantly call pop music.

A long shot of our place in time will reveal that all these artists – and Abba, Suicide, and Tim McGraw, too — play pretty much by the same regimented rules of tuning, structure, scales, harmony, etcetera, and listeners in the year 1204 or 1428 (much less 44,000 years ago) would almost surely not have been able to tell any of them apart (if such an experiment were possible). Nor will non-academic listeners 1108 years from now be able to tell Husker Du from Willie Nelson; I know this may be difficult to imagine, but I can pretty much guarantee it.

And in yesterday’s column, I suggested not only that this age of tightly-regimented Western pop may be ending, but also that in the near future, pop may resemble the work of recent avant-garde and minimalist musicians who dealt largely with the kind of drones which surely powered music in earlier millennia and non-Western cultures.

Curiously, the far-left edge of heavy metal (encompassing elements from extreme metal, drone metal, death metal, and speed metal) are actually the forces leading the union between 20th Century avant-garde and Future Pop (and skipping over contemporary pop tropes almost entirely). Virtually no mainstream media shines any light on these bands – even hipster underground sources tend to ignore them – but they are both vastly popular and the front line of the new/next musical revolution. Sunn O))), Nortt, Om, Earth, and Boris — to name just five — are all doing remarkable work which steps away from commonly accepted Western song forms and tunings but retains the traditional energy and spirit of rock’n’roll.

In the context of anticipating the future of pop, Soused, the new collaborative album from Scott Walker and Sunn O))), is a landmark work.

There are artists who sometimes step away from their pop-based bread and butter to make deeply adventurous yet artistically and emotionally coherent work. Neil Young immediately comes to mind, and the work Paul McCartney does with Youth as The Firemen. But these artists always return to the mainstream; Scott Walker, who produced some of the most exquisite, bittersweet, and moving pop of his era, went to this “art place” about 30 years ago…and had the courage never to come back.

Scott Walker, a long time ago

Lest we forget, Scott Walker was the vocalist in the Walker Brothers, who in the 1960s combined Spector-like dramatics, Brian Wilson depth and moodiness, Jack Nitzsche cinematics, and Four Seasons radio-pimping to produce amazing slices of epic teen pop melodrama; and in the late 1960s and 1970s, Scott produced dark, precisely arranged work, deeply influenced by Brecht/Weill and Brel/Gainsbourg/Piaf. In the mid/late 1980s, Walker took a radical turn and literally set about inventing his own genre, seemingly connected only to a musical history he imagined in his head and heart. No one, and I mean no one, and I mean no one, and I mean not even Neil Young at his most obstinate and adventurous, has tried to go as far as Scott Walker did from his “mainstream” roots, and no one except for Scott Walker has actually stayed in that place.

Most of Scott Walker’s albums for the past few decades have been brilliant but challenging almost to the point of being theoretical; we were in awe of their concepts and their execution, but the work required the listener to remain aware and conscious of the experience itself – it was sort of like never being able to quite relax while watching a foreign film because you have to read the subtitles. Climate of the Hunter (1985), Tilt (1995), The Drift (2006), and Bisch Bosch (2012) are remarkable and almost singular examples of what happens when a major recording artist decides to respond only to the muse in their own head; full of hisses, thumps, melodies that don’t appear to correspond to the instrumental accompaniment, the sounds of agricultural and the sounds of industry, WalkerLand is a place that abandons anything we children of Western Pop generally consider rhythm, melody, and structure. How to describe this era of Scott, which virtually defies comparisons? Oh…Throbbing Gristle meets Flowers Of Romance-era PiL meets Einstürzende Neubauten meets Gene Pitney meets The Birthday Party on a variable-speed turntable meets an eccentric professor teaching the history of Eastern Europe inside a mosque, with the whole thing scrambled at the last minute to insure that anything readily identifiable as melody-corresponding-to-chord or rhythm-corresponding-to-melody is barely detectable. These works are an extraordinary example of an artist creating challenges in order to put the listener on high alert, all these scrapes and bangs and rumbles and drum rolls and fire extinguisher-hisses fashioning an event which makes the listener part of the experience, makes the presence of the listener the aspect that completes the experience.

In other words (and I say this as a HUGE fan and supporter of the magically adventurous work of Scott Walker), a lot of Scott Walker’s music for the last thirty years has sounded like, well, homework. Fantastic, fascinating homework, but listening to Tilt, The Drift, or Bisch Bosch was like reading Ulysses: you know that you’re hearing something incomparably brilliant, but boy do you have to pay close attention, and maybe it would be easier to just listen to Fu Manchu.

Soused is a different story.

Scott Walker (second from right) and Sunn O)))

Sunn O)))’s super-slow-motion mountainous slabs of dark starless-night guitars serve as the perfect frame and wrangler for Scott Walker’s moans, gasps, whip-cracks, threads of melody, and spurts of dogma; Walker’s usual instrumental vocabulary – which often sounds like a particular vicious trick-or-treater angrily hurling eggs at a warehouse full of cow carcasses, drums, and auto parts – is implied here, but instead of being in the forefront, these hisses, whacks, and machine-coughs serve to accent the incredible, almost word-defying work of Sunn O))). The GIANT guitars, the MASSIVE guitars, crawling so slowly that I swear they give the impression of time going backwards, compel dear, pleading, serpentine Scott Walker to work his way out of corners and stand on chairs to avoid the FLOOD of pure meat-chords. The result is that Scott makes more sense here than he has in decades and decades; his singing sounds far less random and more a logical compliment to the armageddon flood of Sunn O))) watery beef farts. Scott sounds like Noah calling out in some Muezzin howl for all the animals to get on the ark, and bloody quick, too.

(No video exists yet for any Soused track, but this preview gives a pretty good idea of the landscape)
True, Scott still favors that strange upper-register sharp/flat Lydon-meets-Gene Pitney keen that he has used consistently since removing himself from the world of mainstream pop; but whereas this odd register seemed to be anti-melodic before, there’s something about what Sunn O))) do that harnesses the bleak, child-mourning howl, and now it actually makes melodic sense.
(Wait…did I actually write “Armageddon flood of Sunn O))) watery beef farts” a paragraph ago? Huh.)
Not only that, but perhaps challenged by the fairly precise (albeit simple) melodicism inherent in Sunn O)))’s turtle-climbing-up-the-Space Needle-while-listening-to-Sabbath-at-8 RPM chords, Scott occasionally takes a few steps away from the Muezzin stuff, and spells out a precise melody line here and there; this is beautifully shocking when it happens, and proves something many of us have long suspected: Scott can still “sing,” can still come up with a coherent and moving “traditional” melody line, he just chooses not to.
Long story short, Soused is everything we had hoped a Scott Walker/Sunn O))) album could be. It is the end of rock’n’roll. It is the beginning of rock’n’roll. It is the future of rock’n’roll, where all the Lego parts that built the old music are scattered on the floor and re-assembled in a gorgeously new way. It will challenge everything you think you know about rock’n’roll, in much the same way Pet Sounds or “Pay to Cum” by the Bad Brains or “Hallogallo” by Neu! or the first Ramones album did; if you allow it, this album will change your life.
Album of the decade.
Sing, a tool.
P.S. Sting is a tool.
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The Myth of Western Pop Supremacy: Prologue to a Scott Walker/Sunn O))) Review
October 27, 2014
There is a gorgeous arrogance to the idea of Western Pop Music, a truly child-like presumption that our kind of music is pretty much the kind of music. We assume, with the hydrocephalic, grinning visage of a Family Circus character, that throughout the history of mankind all pop music has pretty much sounded like the stuff we’ve been performing/absorbing for the last century.
Call it the Ben Hur phenomenon: In movies like Ben Hur (or any big decadent drama that portrays another age or culture), we hear all these triumphant, heraldic trumpets and stirring, string-sawing marching songs that just happen to feature perfect western tuning, and the same kind of harmonic notions the Beatles used on Penny Freaking Lane. Um…has it occurred to anyone that perhaps the Egyptians or the Romans or, I don’t know, the freaking ORCS may have had DIFFERENT IDEAS about harmony and rhythm and song structure than Irving Berlin, Abba, and Paul McCartney did? Shit, that maybe people in Thailand or Nigeria or Cairo have different ideas about pop than we do?

RELATED: Is Dave Grohl Killing Rock ‘n’ Roll?

This is the Santa Claus myth that supports the entire infrastructure and implied megalomania of Western pop/rock, this idea that OUR GIFTED CULTURE has landed on THE perfect and final formula for musical harmony, melody, and structure.
Well, that’s total fucking bull guano.
Larry Storch: A Homosapien
Homo Sapiens – that is, men and women absolutely biologically and mentally compatible to you, me, miniature traffic reporter Jamie Shupak, legendary New York Mets infielder Ed “The Glider” Charles, Ottoman emperor Suleiman the Magnificent, Beastie Boy Mike Diamond, Larry Storch, Simon the brother of Jesus, Dick Cavett, Roman Emperor Elagabalus, Garrison Keillor, FDR Vice President John Nance Garner, Jimmy Pursey of Sham 69, etcetera – have been around for fifteen thousand centuries. Music has been around in some form for just as long; people all over the planet have been praying, working, fucking, and dancing to music that entire freaking time, 150,000 Years (and probably before then, too, because who is to say music was the exclusive province of Homo Sapiens?). Yet, many of us assume that it’s always sounded like “Please Please Me” or “Camptown Races” or “The Logical Song” or “Gonna Fly Now,” the theme to Rocky.
It hasn’t. Personally, I have very little idea what they danced to 2508 years ago in the palace of Siddhārtha Gautama before he became The Enlightened One, and nor do I have the slightest notion what music was played in the Court of Pepin the Short when he was crowned King of the Franks in 751; but I bet in both cases it was filled with all sorts of delicious and luxurious and revolting and enchanting moans and thumps and hisses and drones and briny, serpentine slurps and slabs of anti-melody and ethereal whisps of silky harmony; I mean, I have no idea what it sounded like (and neither do any movie producers), but I am very goddamn sure that a) it represented the most archetypal form of current music and b) it sounded nothing like what we would consider music.
Stephen Foster. “The Logical Song” by Supertramp is, in part, his fault.
I also believe that the current epoch of Western music is a blip on the cultural map, and we may be in the sunset years of said era (the West: North America, Western Europe, and English speaking areas of Australasia). This post-Stephen Foster period in music features an enormously diverse army of composers and performers absorbing aboriginal and ethnic musical forms (from the American south, the Scottish highlands, Acadian Canada and everywhere in between), sanding down the rough bits, and creating a song-form that was fairly tightly regimented in terms of structure, tuning, scale, and harmonic construction (I am short-handing wildly, because this is a long story; how else to explain how the chants and dances of Congo Square, where New Orleans’ slaves celebrated their state-mandated day-off, can still be heard in the music of Iggy Azalea or Led Zeppelin? Or how all conventional American pop, even fun., Justin Bieber, or Taylor Swift, owes a serious debt to Minstrelsy, the discredited art form in which mainstream American pop was first disseminated in any significant way?).
But the clock is ticking. I have long, long thought that the majestic, creative, and viscerally powerful minimalist and drone composers of the last fifty years – the heavenly Stuart Dempster, the insanely inventive and energizing Ellen Fullman, the deeply evocative Pauline Oliveros, even the extraordinary tics and blips and Escher-stairs and acid circles of Terry Riley – may very likely be forecasting the future of mainstream pop music.

I also feel that these afore-mentioned composers are playing music that refers, both theoretically and perhaps with some trace of the collective unconscious that Jung sung about, to the songs and sounds of the past; which is all to say that a) I suspect that the pop of Nefertiti or Charlemagne’s ’s time sounded a lot more like the music of Fullman or Dempster than it sounds like any contemporary pop, and b) I suspect the pop of the future – perhaps even a future as close as 25 years from now – may sound a lot more like Fullman or Dempster than it sounds like the Beatles .

Which brings us to Soused, the startling new album by Scott Walker and Sunn O))).
Which we shall discuss tomorrow.
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Tim’s Favorite Bassists (A GROHL-FREE COLUMN)
October 22, 2014
Inevitably, after you compose a Best-Of list you remember the one or three or eight names/albums/bands you’ve omitted.
But there’s one list that’s always been pretty goddamn stable for me, and that’s the list of my favorite bass players.
Now, some caveats: I’m pretty much just talking rock/pop here. God knows there are plenty of superlative jazz bassists out there, and probably even a pile of bluegrass, country, and even jammy-band bassists who are most certainly worthy of note; but it’s my list, see, so I am only drawing from the music that I am intensely familiar with. The bottom line here is that these are musicians who have moved me, inspired me, awed me, and made me shake and shiver when I put the headphones on.
So here are my five favorite bassists, in no real order, details to follow.
Paul McCartney
Jah Wobble.
Lemmy
J.J. Burnel
Holger Czukay
Okay. First, why no John Entwistle? Good question. Let’s call that the Pet Sounds exception. When we assemble lists of our ten favorite albums, often we omit Pet Sounds because it is so fucking obvious that Pet Sounds is the best album ever made; I mean, we just take that as a given, and we allow our list to blossom without re-stating the obvious. Entwistle’s style is so distinct – he thinks like a pianist, he attacks like a drummer, he has the attention of a court reporter, and blows through the speakers like rolling thunder – that he defies anything we normally think of as bass playing; in fact, his style is so distinctly unique to him that anyone who even vaguely imitates Entwistle sounds like fucking nonsense. I mean, as far as bassists go, he’s a genre to himself, a list to himself, and all the rules that apply to other bassists don’t apply to him; on paper, everything Entwistle does should make him one of the worst bassists of all time, but instead, in his magical hands and fingers, these same actions add up to the most truly gifted and original rock bassist of this or any other era. So let’s just throw him off the list but assume he hovers over us all, sort of like Q from Star Trek.
Back to my list.
Jah Wobble. See, bass is, first and foremost, bass, and Jah Wobble plays bass. Wobble takes the deep simplicity and low-end flub of reggae, adds a touch of Holger Czukay high-end balletic plies and twirls, integrates it into deeply catchy melodic parts, and then, most remarkably, finds bands/recordings that not only perfectly frame his very unique mindset, but actually put him at the center. Public Image Limited (especially – no, specifically – on their masterpiece, Second Edition) were likely the first non-jazz band I heard (apart from reggae groups and Can) where the bass was the dominant instrument; in PIL, the guitars scratched and whinnied, the drums were beautifully and almost childishly simple, and the band essentially focused on Wobbles’ deep, deeply infectious, completely hypnotic throb, perfectly complimented by Lydon’s come-to-Allah vocals. Like Dee Dee Ramone or Mondrian or Jasper Johns, it takes an utter fucking genius to know that less less less is more more more, and that sometimes the answer is so obvious only the most spectacular originator has the courage to reveal it.

Paul McCartney. The Beatles are so many other things that it’s bloody easy to forget that Paul McCartney not only defined rock/pop bass playing – no one played remotely like him until he came along – but also that his work is constantly rewarding and a continuously happy surprise, no matter how goddamn over-familiar those songs are. Honestly, I don’t know where McCartney’s style came from – he runs melodic scales around virtually every simple chord, occasionally dipping into gorgeously executed shortnin’ bread runs just to prove he’s listened to the left-hand of a lot of great rock’n’roll pianists. Almost literally nothing he does is obvious, and almost literally nothing he does draws attention to itself. I can’t think of a single other player – except perhaps session goddess Carol Kaye – who can pull that off. I do wonder where it came from, how he landed on this melodic invention and masterful awareness of the chord being underlined; the only thing I can think of is that when he was forced to take the bass role in the Fabs (following the departure of Stuart Sutcliffe and after Chaz Newby declined the job), McCartney decided to model himself after piano players, and not other bassists.
Lemmy. With Motorhead, Lemmy redefined the bass as a low-end AND high-end instrument that could do the work of three rhythm guitars, placing a Branca-esque multi-instrument GUWRRRROAR right in the middle of Motorhead’s Blue Cheer-meets-Ramones overdrive…and if he had only been in Motorhead, Lemmy would almost certainly belong in the top 5. But when you add his work in Hawkwind, not only have do you have someone who definitely belongs in the top 5, but you have a very credible candidate for the number one position (after Entwistle, of course). If you haven’t “studied” Lemmy’s work with Hawkwind, it is a revelation; he had a rhythm-guitarists approach to pulse and tempo, but to this he added a space-bassman’s head for melody and an extraordinarily inventive use of chords and major and minor two-note double time phrasing that makes him sound like Holger Czukay playing in the Stooges (in fact, based on his two-note upper-neck chord word, it sounds like Lemmy was listening to a lot of Can). Lemmy’s four-to-the-floor (and sometimes double-timed) drive, chordal support, and melodic sense is one of the elements that made Hawkwind during his ’71 – ’75 tenure one of the greatest rock bands of all time, and with Motorhead, he re-invented the bass as The Mother of All Rhythm Guitars.

In his work with the Stranglers (and his stunning 1979 bass-centric solo album, Euroman Cometh), J.J. Burnel applied some of Entwistle’s typewriter-attack dexterity and quasi-classical guitar technique to a punk rock agro-model; the result made Burnel of the most distinctive and immediately identifiable players of the last 40 years, and one of the only immediately recognizable master-class-level bassists of the punk era. Along with Lemmy, he has a brutal and delicious trademark – a gritty, treble-heavy new-string grunt that is a joy to listen to. Also, when called upon, he can deliver Moroder 16-note-to-the-bar pulse better than any flesh and blood bassist.

Speaking of Holger Czukay…years before PiL, Primus, or the loathsome ELP, Czukay announced that a rock band could essentially be centered around a bass that would simultaneously act as a lead and a rhythm instrument. Incalculably influential – Wobble and Les Claypool owe their very existence to Czukay, Flea is a bro’d-up imitation of him, and as stated in the last paragraph, it appears Lemmy was studying him pretty closely, too – with Can (beginning in 1968), Czukay threw away all the McCartney chord-based melodicism and blues-run-thumps that were the backbone of bass playing up until then – I mean he literally threw all that out the window, and approached the bass as an entirely new adventure in an utterly unprecedented way, attacking the electric bass with a bizarre and effective combination of jazz-thinking and Krautrock simplicity. He always seems to be playing more than one note at once, he often seems to be playing at double-time, and he generally sounds like a rubber-band ball bouncing up and down an Escher staircase. Literally no bassist has any excuse for not studying Czukay’s work with Can. JESUS, WATCH THIS FREAKING CLIP:

CAN YOU FREAKING BELIEVE THAT?!?
The Ruts (Segs Jennings, right)
Honorary Mentions? Sure, why not. Again, these reflect my own personal biases in a pretty significant way: Like Wobble and Czukay, Peter Hook (of New Order/Joy Division) played in such a way as to insist that the bass was the dominant instrument in his band(s), and created the melodic hooks (no pun intended) that remained in people’s consciousness. Also, with songs like “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and “Ceremony,” Hook played single note melodic lines as the primary bass part, molding the ear candy that resonated with the listener, perhaps even more than the vocal melody did. Segs Jennings of the Ruts/Ruts DC was one of those extraordinarily adept musicians who just happened to land in a punk band, and bought his own madly creative mixture of reggae and classic rock into the Ruts without making any compromises; he was (and is) also one of the sharpest looking bassists I’ve ever seen, and I will personally note that I probably took up bass because he looked so good playing it. Finally, no piece like this can be written without including Dee Dee Ramone; his truly revolutionary insistence on reducing bass-playing to tonic-note riding and nothing but tonic note riding makes him the Picasso of bassists (and it was most definitely a choice, not a limitation).
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Footnotes to the Prologue of a Manifesto
October 21, 2014
I have nothing against Dave Grohl. I’m serious. The Foo Fighters are an incendiary live band, Grohl has a genuine appreciation of the less-obvious edges of hardcore era that semi-spawned me, and even if he made a song that is worthy of G.E. Smith being hired by Toyota to write an Alarm imitation, I am quite goddamn sure that Grohl more or less means well.
Pete Seeger. Dave Grohl is not fit to weed his grave.
But just at the time when we needed our Johnny Rotten/Woody Guthrie cross, we got a rock’n’roll Pat Sajak. Assuming you are all familiar with Guthrie, let me define what I mean by “Johnny Rotten” (since here I am using this more as a generalized noun than an actual name): I mean someone intelligent, provocative, literate, musically adventurous, constructively obnoxious, witty to the point of being ridiculous, well-informed of current events, absolutely willing to piss people off regardless of the cost, and keenly aware of the social and political impact music can have. Honestly, I have a hard time thinking of an American equivalent, at least not since the days of Guthrie, Seeger and the Weavers, and Phil Ochs (and, for the record –and I know this will strike many of you as an odd statement — I honestly think Ochs is the closest thing to an American Johnny Rotten).

Now, America needs hypothetical Rotten/Guthrie for a lot of reasons, which I won’t detail here, because you are probably aware of many of them. I will note, however, that a young person (i.e., college age or soon-to-attend college) has far, far less chance of finding a decent job and affordable housing than age-equivalents in earlier generations, and that’s a problem that’s only going to get spectacularly worse; likewise, it’s going to become increasingly hard for these jobless young people to be supported by their parents, as the middle class vanishes and the United States becomes a place inhabited by the very rich and the poor with not a hell of a lot in between. Young people in America are going to need artists who shout loudly about issues other than legal weed.
All of Jim Morrison’s Dionysus crap didn’t stop his dad from starting the Vietnam war. Jimbo didn’t even BOTHER to tell anyone “Hey, my dad LIED about American ships being fired on in the Gulf of Tonkin, and all you kids out there who buy my records who are going to DIE in some freaking rice paddy in South East Asia, that was kind of my Dad’s fault, but peace and love y’all.”
Speaking of which, here’s an important note: Americans confuse sexual provocation and drug advocacy for political commentary. This is a long time problem of American activism. So, on one hand, artists like Iggy used their stage-pulpit to piss people off, but it meant nothing (though it was fun to watch). That’s performance activism, not political activism. Likewise, making a lot of noise for the freedom to take drugs is likely a semi-relevant issue, but it does not effect the course of events in any meaningful way; all the weed legalization in the fucking country isn’t going to keep Fox News or the Koch Brothers of the Tea Party from lying to you and wreaking economic and political Armageddon on this nation. Seriously, man, think about it: you have all been had. All the Free Love advocacy of the 1960s didn’t stop Vietnam, Nixon, Reagan, Bush; and all the legal weed advocacy in the world isn’t stopping Koch or the Tea Party. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, to name two very important American activists, actually sang about unions and jobs and voting rights and important shit like that. “’Scuse me while I kiss the sky” was a long way from “’Scuse me while I play this benefit to supporting workers fired for not making armaments.”
So, to cut a long story short, people with the kind of power Dave Grohl have should be trying to actually fucking say something; or if they don’t, don’t fucking pretend you’re all heavy and cool and righteous, just go ahead and say “I’m Adam Levine,” and there’s really no problem with that. Seriously, in no way, shape, or form am I condemning light or non-issue oriented entertainment. I’m just saying we should sometimes be using the medium of free music to spread meaningful messages and information.
A case of Genesee Cream Ale.
Oh, and it pisses me the fuck off that Dave Grohl, who was inarguably the third most important person in Nirvana and arguably the fifth most important, has laid claim to the Nirvana legacy and holds on to that sucker tighter than an Ithaca College freshman holding onto a case of Genesee Cream Ale.
All of which, curiously enough, isn’t what I actually meant to write about today. I really just wanted to supply some footnotes to the occasionally obscure references in yesterday’s column:
Steve Ignorant was the founder/singer of the Crass. The Crass were almost completely musically worthless, but had great lyric sheets, and their heart was totally in the right place.
A painting by the incredible Billy Childish.
Billy Childish, who in a hundred years will be as famous as Van Gogh, is a painter, poet, and musician. As a musician, he put out literally dozens of albums, most famously as a member/leader of the superb garage rock group Thee Milkshakes. Childish is one of the only musicians to have found a way to make punk and garage music that had the intimacy, immediacy, and shock value of classic issue-oriented folk.
Although most Americans are familiar with Chumbawumba only from their one wonderful mega-hit, “Tubthumbing,” the band began as a anarcho-punk collective in the model of Crass, and retained those values throughout their career; in fact, there’s evidence they conceptualized and created “Tubthumping” as a calculated means to increase their ability to spread their political and social advocacy. At the 1998 BRIT Awards (the equivalent of the Grammys), they dumped a jug of water of the deputy Prime Minister while singing “Tubthumping” with lyrics altered to reflect the government’s treatment of striking dockworkers. IMAGINE, FOR ONE SECOND, DAVE GROHL DOING THAT TO A MAJOR POLITICIAN WHEN HE APPEARS ON ANY OF THE 48 AWARDS SHOWS HE ATTENDS EVERY YEAR.
Imaginos is a 1988 concept album by Blue Öyster Cult. Originally intended to be a “solo” release by BÖC drummer Albert Bouchard and BÖC manager/lyricist Sandy Pearlman, it was shoe-horned into being a “proper” BÖC release by the band’s label. It is a beautifully ridiculous record, and the wiki entry devoted to it is so over-detailed and so close to self-parody that it is one of the more entertaining wiki entries out there.
Paul Krassner was a founding member of the yippies, but also an author, commentator, comedian, and general agent provocateur of incredible wit, wisdom, insight, absurdity, and intelligence.
Last but most certainly not least, Victor Jara was a Chilean poet, playwright, activist, and singer/songwriter who is roughly the equivalent of Chile’s Bob Dylan. When U.S. backed forces overthrew the left-leaning government of Salvador Allende in September of 1973, Jara was tortured and killed. He is a martyr for every singer who was willing to die for their message and their music, and likewise he personifies the hundreds of thousands of people in Latin and Central America who died because U.S. financial interests overthrew peaceful governments.
Do something, Dave Grohl. Mean something, Dave Grohl. Or if someone out there is tomorrow’s Dave Grohl, remember that we Americans have been lucky enough to have the kind of lives where we confuse the freedom to legally smoke weed with the kind of freedoms Victor Jara died for, or that Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Paul Robeson were blacklisted for. Use the power of free music to fight for the economic and political security of your future.
Godfather of Slocore out.
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