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Dave Grohl is Killing Rock ‘n’ Roll, Long Live Rock ‘n’ Roll: Prologue to a Manifesto

October 20, 2014

It is time, friends.

We need a true form of musical activism. We need artists willing to risk everything to expose the cultural atrocities and mammon-driven careerist lies spread by the wheezing rock’n’roll machine.

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We, we Americans, need our Crass, our Mekons, our Billy Childish, our Billy Bragg, our Chumbawumba. We need artists that filter every action through a desire to expose lies and create positive cultural models; and we need our musical Duchamp, Tzara, Dali, Arp, artists willing to make art extreme and art gorgeous and art that makes a statement about all the wrong turns music has made because of commerce and so-called common sense. And we need it now, more than ever; and such a movement has more potential to thrive, now more than ever, because of the virus of plurality and ubiquity that is the Interstream.

Jon Langford: Role Model

I am inspired to type this (not yet a manifesto but perhaps a prologue to a manifesto) because I have heard the new track by the Foo Fighters. It is the most vapid, despicable, corrupt and unentertaining piece of crap I have ever heard (with the possible exception of ELP’s “Karn Evil 9”). The new Foo Fighters track sounds like late-period Blue Oyster Cult attempting to write a Tom Petty song but changing their mind midway and settling for any overly-macho and ham-fisted imitation of MTV-era Aerosmith, I swear to you it’s that bad; and if this is what claims to uphold the flag of rock’n’roll these days, let’s fucking kill this animal and start again. Let’s use all our energy and all our connections to find a Steve Ignorant or Jon Langford or punk rock Steve Earle to climb on the cardboard Golgotha sitting on the John Varvatos cash-pile consumerist rock has become and tell this rock’n’roll Herod that his time is over. And let’s find some hacker genius to make sure that every time someone tries to download this rotten piece of Classic MTV fuckery masquerading as punk statement they get “Rowche Rumble” by the Fall instead.

Foo Fighters were harmless enough when they were just churning out reasonable Husker Du imitations, but somehow they got it in their head that they were the God-appointed Czars of rock’n’roll and keepers of the punk rock flame; so now they have to make this really big dramatic music with lots of quiet parts and loud parts and even SWEAR words in it because THEY ARE SO FUCKING PUNK ROCK, though really it all just sounds like a track leftover from BÖC’s Imaginos plus a hefty dose of Hagar-era Van Halen bombast filtered through one of those frightening Billy Steinberg songs Cheap Trick recorded when they were desperate for a hit EXCEPT THE DIRTY WORDS IN THE SONG MAKE US IMPORTANT AND MAKE US REBELS, MAN, BECAUSE WE ARE SO PUNK ROCK.

Billy Childish. Role Model.

Generally, us old people want nothing more than to be back inside, back in the game, which makes us afraid to make enemies; but fuck it, I have lived and breathed through some of the best times this old beast rock’n’roll had to its name, and I owe it to these pleasures, these extremes of energy and emotion, I owe it to every great band I ever saw, to do everything I can to call this piece of sad decay exactly what it is: a sign of the absolute rotten corruption of this genre. And I recognize that all the pieces are in place to use the new-model music industry for POSITIVE CHANGE, and to combat this kind of over-fucked fucked-out old corpse.

Let this fax of the xerox of the shadow of the chalk outline of punk be combated, not with violence but with an alternative, with a new folk that sounds like howls of hillbilly cats and punk green and lean and honest. Let’s remember that the line between crispy Crass fan and crusty Burning Man daze dog is small indeed, and should be smaller; and lets unite to celebrate free music, and instead of condemning the cheapness and ubiquity of the resource, let’s celebrate this reality and utilize that ease of distribution to preach something truly meaningful. Let every song have a message, let every song have the courage to send shivers or be repulsive or even be absolute sugar. More than ever music can be rude or dumb-angel beautiful, and more than ever music can be courageous and make courageous statements and stand for something.

Steve Earle. Role Model.

Listen, if it’s all going to be given away for free now, anyway, let’s just fucking run with that concept: give it away and make it mean something. Make strange and beautiful music about important things (or make your music and your sites doorways for valuable information!) and give it away to the people

Maaaaaaaan.

Seriously, this country is a total fucking mess yet full of the potential of every genius, lover, and dreamer who lives in it, so make music (or create portals alongside your music) to reach these genius, lovers, and dreamers; spread art and information, information, information, information; combat ignorance; and since you’re giving it away, give away knowledge, too. And take it away from the people who use it to pump even more fart-filled air into this ugly monster, yes, Dave Grohl, I am looking at you, because you are spewing out your ugly sub-Soul Asylum-meets-Desmond Child belch-fuel masquerading, cruelly, as PUNK ROCK… I prefer the flagrant, blatant, numbskull fakes to the vile subtle ones; any Adam Levine, proud of his Douche Fiefdom, is preferable to some half-assed watered down version of REAL.

Paul Krassner. Role Model.

Now…I am sure Dave Grohl is a perfectly nice guy (and, in fact, people I trust confirm this). But we have all put up with his punk rocker-as-Ken Berry-on-1970s-variety-show persona long enough, his goofy and precious and almost ludicrously self-important self-anointed role as the good will ambassador of rock’n’roll. With this horrific release, NOT a well-meaning song but a carefully constructed attempt to make a “classic rock” song with “a dose of attitude,” he pushes it over the edge, and he needs to be stopped. His kind of vapidity in the guise of punk rock envoy needs to be combated by a new-model army of people willing to use music to instruct and enforce change. We need millennial Tom Hayden or Jerry Rubin or Paul Krassner to cover his constant public coronation with planeloads of dogshit, and to offer real alternatives in unique ways. Rock’n’roll doesn’t need a goofy ol’ Merv Griffin guest like Dave Grohl to make punk safe for all those rock’n’roll hall of fame voters, fuck that shit, fuck that shit, shit on that fuck; rock’n’roll was fucking hillbilly pillheads and London speed dealers and princes and princesses in the Kingdom of Outsiders and people courageous enough to give up a living because they wouldn’t appear on lying network TV shows, and it was about Wynonie Fucking Harris and the fucking Treniers (who I saw playing for tips in the bars of low-end Vegas casinos when they were almost 80 years old and playing as if they had just invented rock’n’roll that afternoon), and it was about the sloppy-ass Kinks in the 1970s and shrieking Sonics in the 1960s and shuddering Suicide daring the audience to hate them and Eddie Cochran slurring and slapping and Gene Vincent and Lemmy and Vince Taylor holding on to the rock crazy train and refusing to let go; it’s not about Dave Fucking Grohl’s Pat Sajak in a Mohawk act, it’s about hearing something that makes you shiver and shout, it’s not about hearing something calculated to be the perfect air freshener to brighten up your shit-stained classic radio doormat.

Phil Ochs. Role Model.

Listen to The Fall Listen to Huey Piano Smith Listen to Hawkwind Listen to Hanoi Rocks Listen to the Stooges Listen to the Mekons Listen to Pete Seeger listen to Pink Flag by Wire listen to Goatwhore Listen to Bo Diddley better yet.

NOISE THE COLUMN ARCHIVES

Make it yourself, drawing from the bruised and tic-tock ticking and thundering hollers at the root of the beast Dave Grohl ruined, listen to Ledbelly and listen to Joe Ely and listen to Billy Joe Shaver listen to Paul Sanchez listen to Fred Neil listen to Sister Rosetta listen to Phil Ochs Phil Ochs Phil Ochs Phil Ochs and Sun Ra and all these people who played with love and anger and because they had to. And

Dave Fucking Grohl read about Victor Jara who DIED for the right to make music that made a difference.

(Dave Grohl dies for the right to guest host Chelsea Lately and play drums at the CMA Awards.)

Victor Jara. The Anti-Grohl. And Role Model.

And it’s time to change, no period here, but an ELLIPSES, an ellipses that YOU have to fill in, that powerful people have to fill in by deciding to take the freedom and promise of FREE music and using it for POSITIVE CHANGE. Listen, I’m going to write a lot more about this in the future, because it’s really important. Start again. Make it means something. Rock’n’roll is dead, long live rock’n’roll.

More on this subject here.

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Arts and Entertainment, Brooklyn Bugle, Existential Stuff, Music, Sports

October, 1969: The New York Mets Invent Me

October 17, 2014

Before we believed in Beatles, before we believed in Kinks, before girls made us damp with tears or uselessly electric with desire, before we even dreamed of The City and its’ promise of midnight diners and the perfect glamour of sun-gleamed Pan Am buildings, we had baseball.

Before we were swept away by every passion that would occasionally or eternally define us, we were defined by our passion for baseball.

Still years away from double digits and a squeak too old for dinosaurs and certainly too young for dinosaur rock, barely waist-high to the World of Fathers, pre-political and pre-sexual and only having eyes for Quisp, we made it our mission to learn and love baseball. We sat in front of Motorolas and shrieked like the children we were and encoded events and numbers just like the adults did.

And nothing had ever made us feel like adults before, I mean nothing, even the summer’s Apollo Dreams Come True left us feeling awed and small; but baseball was beautiful and sensible and ripe to be shared with the adult world.

Baseball also gave us our first sense that there was a loyalty to a locale. We had a team, that team belonged to us, all because of an accident of residence, we were suddenly aware that we were from New York, or we were from Boston or Baltimore, or we were from Los Angeles or St. Louis. We knew America through the geography of team loyalty.

And baseball came with a story, too, and not just a story, it came with a history, a timeline, and a sequence of events to be learned and memorized. Before I knew all the tragic and fascinating legends of America, before I knew who John Wilkes Booth was or who Judah P. Benjamin was or who Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were, I knew of the rich history of baseball, full of wartime deprivations and sepia’d heroics and racism and the died young and the aged and honored. I could barely ride a bike but I knew of Kenesaw Mountain Landis and William Shea and Horace Stoneham and Curt Flood. And it was entertainment, too, on Channel 9 and on WHN and even in Life Magazine, before I was swept away by accounts of the great Hollywood/Vaudeville diorama, when I knew not of Welles or Jolson or Jerry or Dean, I knew of the amazing characters and actors and comedians who made baseball an enthralling show, Dizzy Dean and Lindsey Nelson and Casey Stengel and Yogi Berra and other beautiful names that did not seem improbable to a child.

And baseball was news before I could even comprehend the power of news, when Spiro Agnew was just a rumor, baseball caused me to care deeply about the actions of adults who were strangers to me, and inspired me to carefully read the names of these men in newspapers and listened closely to hear their names on the nightly news.

Which is all to say: when I had only just stopped believing in Santa Claus, when I barely understood death and still made my parents swear they would never die, when sex was a curiosity to be inspected in the bath and not an ugly or spectacular obsession, when the rules of life were simply to be fed and evade the wrath of teachers and parents and to avoid skinning a chin or knee, I had baseball, my first complicated lover, the first non-self object of interior obsession and first non-fantasy facilitator of social interaction.

I had my first point of entry into anything that could reasonably be termed an adult or social world.

And my team was the Mets. Any child could identify with their underdog story, any child could feel pride in those bright blue and orange colors and the post-mod stadium they played in: all these heroes on a field in the shadows of the space age and sky-high small-world World’s Fair towers! It was a time of perfection, cheap beauty and triumph and tragedy were provided every day, the Mets taught us about winners and losers and characters and even taught us numbers and compelled us memorize a TV schedule and made us wonder what kingly men drank Rheingold, and before we had turned 8 we could tell you who Jane Jarvis was and who Joan Whitney Payson was and we could point to a map and know this is where the Seattle Pilots played, and they spoke French at Le Parc Jarry and they stood for another strange anthem there, we knew this, too, and we could identify the handsome young mayor who threw out first pitches, and Hanoi was far, far away but we knew where Wrigley Field was and where the miraculous Astrodome was and where Metropolitan Stadium was and who was this Pear Bailey and Louis Armstrong sitting in the box seats with smiles and hats? And thanks to baseball

In 1969 when I was 7

My world exploded with thoughts and facts and memories in Living Color (cue NBC Peacock) and all the vague mist of earlier recall becomes just an occasional snapshot or snatch of dialogue. 1969 was my first year as a person who interacted with an outside world of events, and the New York Mets were my ladder, my frame, my guide, my dictionary, my calendar, and thanks to the Frame of Baseball the homunculus that lay dormant within my child body arose and found a voice.

And 45 years ago yesterday the New York Mets won the World Series

And it was a weekday, and the news spread across the dark-olive yellow seats of the school bus with more electricity than the revelation of a snow day, and we hoisted our bodies out of windows to carry the news, and we cheered because all children are underdogs and we identified with this unlikely triumph. Finally, after early childhood mumbles and toys that seemed like baby toys alongside the new baseball mitts and clean crisp baseball cards of our 1969 world, we had found an adult voice, with which we burped eternal cheers and the confident shale of statistics. Let me say again that in that beautiful year, age 7 and informally exempt from understanding the joys of Woodstock and formally immune from the darkness of Vietnam and completely susceptible to the extreme high of the moon shot, my homunculus, my sense of self as a fully formed adult inside a small-persons body, is born in Shea Stadium’s deep bowl, and forever Shea’s smell of stale beer and air-borne cigarette smoke would be the smell of adulthood; and every detail of Baseball ’69 gave me new language and assigned thoughts to words and emotions to thoughts.

I was alive prior to 1969, I just don’t remember it. The New York Mets were the agent of my memory; before that everything is just scraps. But New York Mets, you were my first Kinks, my first Beatles, my first kiss in a Spring Street doorway, my first time I heard the Ramones or the Velvet Underground, my first first that I can attach language too, that I can assign an adult feeling to, my first sequence of events fully bronzed into memory where there is a before and an after and, thanks to the New York Mets, an always.

Q&A: Heather Quinlan Talks About Her ’86 Mets Documentary and the Kickstarter Campaign to Get it Made

From the Web

News

Timbits! Billy Idol! The Stranglers! EBOLA!

October 15, 2014

U.S. NEWS MEDIA:  Ebola!
HODOR:  Hodor!
U.S. NEWS MEDIA:  Ebola!
HODOR:  Hodor!
U.S. NEWS MEDIA:  Ebola!
U.S. NEWS MEDIA:  Ebola!
HODOR:  Hodor!
U.S. NEWS MEDIA:  Ebola!
HODOR:  Hodor!
U.S. NEWS MEDIA:  Ebola!
HODOR:  Hodor!
U.S. NEWS MEDIA:  Ebola!
HODOR:  Hodor!
U.S. NEWS MEDIA:  Ebola!
HODOR:  Hodor!
TIMMY:  Scott Walker and Sunn O)))!

The author interviewing Billy Idol at last week’s CBGB’s festival. Photo by Jennifer Jo Brout. Although it looks like I am making a point about how the siege of Vienna in 1683 by the Ottoman armies under the command of Grand Vizier Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha was a major turning point in Western History, I am probably just saying something about punk rock.

NEXT.  My Breakfast With Billy.  Only it wasn’t a breakfast; I am presuming I have some readers (STOP RIGHT THERE, TIMBAUD, THAT’S YOUR FIRST MISTAKE) who will understand the Blasie/Kaufman reference (mistake number two; not every one of your readers has the precise mixture of sophomoric and obscure that all your friends at the Weinstein Dorm had).  In any event, a week ago tonight I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to do an on-stage interview with Billy Idol, as part of his keynote appearance/performance at the CBGB Festival.  I would be wholly remiss if I didn’t mention how grateful I was for this gig, and what a pleasure it was dealing with Billy Idol.  Billy is smart and down to earth and has the deep heart of a music fan; I remember being impressed by his intelligence and depth when I had an Indian meal with him thirty years ago, and last week’s interaction with Billy only underlined this.  I met with Billy for a little while a few hours before the interview; I explained to him that this would give me an opportunity to totally geek out, i.e. talk about all the wonderful ephemera of his career that might be a little too obscure for the public event later than evening.  We talked a great deal about Valley of the Dolls, the extraordinary second Generation X album that I frequently shout the praises of; Valley of the Dolls was a successful attempt to apply the depth, grace, and skill of classic British rock to the punk model, resulting in a deeply personal, musically diverse album that recalls the song-stories of Mott the Hoople or David Bowie and the charging but challenging music of the Move (and even Bad Company), but with a spray of punk’s brittle aggression and energy.  Valley of the Dolls is one of the true overlooked classics of the punk era, and Billy explained that it’s failure to reach both fans and critics contributed to the end of the first Generation X line-up.  Download Valley of the Dolls, it is a deeply rewarding album.

Now, during the “public” interview in the evening, Billy did drop one very significant piece of news:  he stated he would be very willing and happy to reunite Generation X.  Unlike most well known – and even lesser known – first-gen punk bands, Generation X has never reunited, except for a single concert in London in 1993.

Billy Idol’s fascinating new autobiography, DANCING WITH MYSELF.

Billy, by the way, is promoting an extraordinary and totally compelling new autobiography called Dancing With Myself, and a solid new album, Kings and Queens of the Underground.  The book is a must for anyone interested in the evolution of a troubled suburban soul into a troubled rock’n’roll star, and it provides extraordinary background on the emergence of punk rock in the U.K. in 1976.

Speaking of “overlooked classics of the punk era, ” since I opened the door by mentioning Generation X’s Valley of the Dolls, I am going to take a second to briefly plug some other overlooked treasures from that era (the years when punk rock’s adamancy and arrogance was sluicing into the open-spaces and emotional investigations of post-punk). It’s not quite fair to call these works “lost” classics, because thanks to the utter ubiquity of the interstream, there are truly very few “lost” albums these days.  Let’s just say these deserve more attention.  As long as we’re mentioning Generation X, you have to mention Empire; this was the moody yet driving band formed by Generation X’s Bob Andrews and Mark Laff.  Their lone album, Expensive Sound, is full of great spaces and power, marrying darkness and cave-echoey punk and pop, at times reminding one of the Go Betweens if the Go Betweens had listened to a lot of Joy Division.

Another overlooked classic:  The Gospel According to The Meninblack, the fifth album by the Stranglers, released in 1981.  Meninblack is a riveting, unique, and surprisingly cohesive concept album that utilizes all sorts of blips, clicking, charging bass, scraps of extreme melody, and almost Resident-esque synth treatments to tell the story of a secret and powerful alien presence on earth (in fact, the story is so similar to the later Men In Black blockbuster films that I have often wondered why the Stranglers didn’t sue; they probably would have won).  I don’t rant and rave enough about the extraordinary Stranglers; their line of albums from 1978 to 1981 (their masterpiece Black and White in 1978, The Raven in 1979, and Meninblack) is a remarkable three-album streak, and showcases an incredible prog-punk band who should have gotten far, far more attention in the states.

And speaking of the Stranglers, any recap of late ‘70s over-looked treasures is absolutely incomplete without Euroman Cometh, the 1979 solo album from Stranglers’ bassist J.J. Burnel.  Like Scott Walker or Neu!, I’m not sure that the genre that pertains to this album has been invented yet, and every lover of the odder and more minimal side of post-punk must have this album in their collections.  An absolutely original piece of work that still sounds striking 35 years later, Euroman Cometh is an exceptional and very distinct bass and drum-machine workout that owes serious debts to krautrock and Suicide (via Serge Gainsbourg and Jacque Dutronc) with a serious dose of European political lecturing/hectoring.  I’ll be honest, it is such a deeply original album that I have difficulty finding any relevant comparisons:  Imagine Holger Cuzkay trying to do Giorgio Moroder with the cheapest possible drum machine.  Yeah…I think that’s about right.

Finally,

Tim was thinking about Timbits, for no particular reason other than I was reflecting on my great old friend Steve Waxman, a famous Canadian, and I asked myself this:  We think of the Timbit (and other confections like it) as “donut holes,” and to a certain degree they are marketed to conform to this notion; yet a donut without a hole isn’t properly a donut, is it?  So, something extracted – even by implication – from said “hole-less” faux-donut couldn’t actually be donut holes, can they?  I mean, I suppose there are Jelly Donuts, which indeed are generally sans holes, but if you tried to extract a hole from the center of a Jelly Donut, you would come out with a formless mass of sticky goo which would certainly violate any common sense idea of an object that could be offered for sale.  So let’s eliminate the idea that these “donut holes” could be removed from a Jelly Donut, that’s just not plausible.  In other words, the word (or concept) “donut holes” implies something that has been removed from something, but if the object had enough space in the center to have a Timbit-sized object removed, then it wasn’t a donut in the first, place, therefore the object removed from it (even purely ceremonially) can’t be a donut hole.  This is like one of Nagarjuna’s double negations, you see.  How can something be evidence of the absence of something that did not in fact exist in the first place?

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SOME POSITIVE THINGS ABOUT STING, JAM BANDS, AND THE YANKEES!

October 12, 2014

In the last few weeks, I have expressed some negative opinions about some very beloved institutions, like Sting, Jam Bands, and the New York Yankees.

Emperor Claudius, who died of poisoning, 1960 years ago today.

Now, since today is the 1960th anniversary of the poisoning death of the Emperor Claudius, I find myself in a reflective mood, and I’d like to revisit these topics from a “sunnier” angle.  Also, today would have been the 88th Birthday of Ed Yost, who prowled the 3rd-base Coaching Box for the New York Mets with Claudius-like wisdom; my fond memories of this shrewd and astute fireplug of a man has further underlined my inclination to accentuate the positive!

Sting lookalike Tin Tin.

First, a few nice words about the almost compulsively superior Sting, who as he ages resembles an unholy cross between Malcolm McDowell and the cartoon character Tin Tin:

* In the early 1990s, it looked like Sting might be trying to distract us from his hair loss in increasingly noxious ways.  Now, he appears to have embraced it.

* His real last name is a little bit like mine, and his real first name is the same as my best friend when I was a kid (Hi, Gordon Platt!).

Wayne County. Sting was his/her bassist. Remind him of this if he gets all high and mighty about that insult to theology and geometry that is The Last Ship.

* At the dawn of the Police, Sting (and drummer Stewart Copeland and then-Police guitarist Henry Padovani) backed pioneering transgender singer Wayne/Jayne County.  That’s cool!

* Sting has not, in any organized way, condemned the Jews for killing Christ.

* Sting had no involvement whatsoever with Glitter, which is “The Capeman” of rock movie musicals.  

* He has a small part in Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and Terry Gilliam is basically freaking incredible and pretty much the most influential director alive.  Seriously, weren’t all the Harry Potter films and all the Lord of the Rings movies just basically homages to the style created by Terry Gilliam?

Actor Kevin Hogan, who claims to be related to Sting.

* My friend Kevin Hogan has a theory, fairly convincing and supported by research, that he’s related to Sting.  Like Sting, Kevin arches his eyebrows with an English accent.

* Police drummer Stewart Copeland played on the first solo single by Damned guitarist Brian James, an exceptionally fine recording called “Ain’t That A Shame.” Now, that’s not actually something about Sting, but Sting probably could have put a stop to it if he wanted to, and he didn’t.

Now, Jam Bands!  Let’s say you once watched a documentary about the ‘60s while high, and you once watched a documentary about Be Bop while really high, and you once watched documentary about bluegrass while really, really, really high, and then you based a musical genre on profoundly misunderstanding all three things.  You’re probably playing in a Jam Band!  Now, if you only watched half of the bluegrass documentary before falling asleep (because you were so high), you probably are just a fan of Jam Bands.  Still, I can say something really, really nice about Jam Bands!

* Jam bands have not, in any organized way, condemned the Jews for killing Christ. 

Now, how about those New York Yankees!

* Mickey Rivers was a New York Yankee.  After Oil Can Boyd, he may likely be the most entertaining baseball player of all time.

* Elston Howard was a New York Yankee.  If there was any justice in this freakishly grim Bardo stage between birth and death, EVERY TRIBUTE TO DEREK JETER IN ANY FORMAT SHOULD HAVE JETER’S NAME SCRATCHED OUT AND THE NAME “ELSTON FREAKING HOWARD’ WRITTEN IN.

* Right now, somewhere in Hell, George Steinbrenner is shoveling feces into Mengele’s mouth.  

From the Web

Arts and Entertainment, Existential Stuff, Music, Obits, Opinion

We are from the Suburbs. We are Born in the City. DAVE STEIN 1962 – 2014

October 10, 2014

All good revolutions start in the suburbs, everyone knows that.

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.

From the Web

Arts and Entertainment, Brooklyn Bugle, Existential Stuff, Music

Hawkwind and the Hadacol Space-Age Buddy Bolden Dream

October 9, 2014

Joe Meek’s thumping balls + the Kinks Sacred Riffing + Eddie Cochran’s slippery soul + Krautrock’s endless highway + drugs = the inside of Buddy Bolden’s 21st Century Head cracked open and spilling Bodhisattva blood = Hawkwind ’71 – ’75 = The Greatest Rock Band of All Time.

See…

Roughly

115 years ago, fueled by the hazy dynamite of cough syrup, rye whiskey, humidity, and the rhythms of a stolen continent baptized by the Christ-calls and sadhappy vaudevillia of the new world, Buddy Bolden invented rock’n’roll

(roughly)

but with an eye on the funky butts, hourglass shapes and cat eyes of the shifty shaking girls

who manlust and liquor sales insisted be made to swing and shimmy even if the music was pounding nails and hollering hoarse and hysterical in your head. After all, you had to make the bi-poles meet

roughly

and sweetly and harmonically, and you had to make the Eagle Saloon walls sweat (and later Roundhouse and Dingwalls walls and Hope and Anchor and Kaiserkeller and Commodore and Barrowlands bricks too), you had to beat the demons to death and lay the corpses on the altar of

rock’n’roll

forever Janus-faced, seeking to please (and get sucked off) and seeking to irritate (and get sucked off). Rock’n’roll made us many promises, but only one band kept all the promises, only one band lived up to the Highway Star refrigerator drone dream of endless four-to-the-floor bompalomp and guitar-slinging sensitive serial killers looking perfect behind puffy lips and puffed pompadours pounding nails into the stage and the brain, only one band sat in the front car of the perfect rock’n’roll roller coaster and rode the rails again and again and never lost the drugs, only one band was the Beatles in Hamburg and the Floyd at the UFO and Stooges at the Grande and the Velvets at the Dom fed into a woodchipper and thrown in front of the sci-fi bullet train that ran right through the center of Sun Studios leaving Elvis with blood dripping down his ears; and that band kept that promise

NOT for one song or one album but for FIVE STRAIGHT YEARS

Of pure rock’n’roll perfection, just as Buddy Bolden dreamed when the sun beat hot on his hazy, hurting head and he mistook the beat of his carotid artery for the bleat of Gabriel’s horn and the migraine for the madness at the end of the world.

And THAT WAS HAWKWIND 1971 – 1975.

If you don’t know the animal
Or if you only know them as a rumor
Let this be simple:
This is Rock’n’Roll,
Between 1971 and 1975 Hawkwind very likely made the very greatest electric rock’n’roll that will ever be produced, beating the century over the head with a sledgehammer.

Hawkwind is history with its finger in the electric socket, it is Vince Taylor and Huey Piano Smith and the Treniers and Sister Rosetta and Little Richard and Eddie Cochran and precious, beautiful, eternal Neu!, and everyone who forever and always knew that rock’n’roll was a race run against time and was a beatdown of self and soul to make thumping dancers and coffee achievers smile and sway with a mouthful of mushrooms and thighs full of sex, Hawkwind, perfect Hawkwind.

Through four studio albums

(In Search of Space, Doremi Fasol Latido, Hall of the Mountain Grill, Warrior on the Edge of Time), one astounding live album (Space Ritual), and to complete the picture, one side of live tracks recorded in 1972 and released as part of the Greasy Truckers’ Comp that are nearly as speederiffic and acidxquisite as the Space Ritual tracks, and one ’72 BBC session very nearly as good.

And as for that live album

Space Ritual is an album that is literally a miracle, a gift, an Abbey Road, a Pet Sounds, a pure expression of the marvelous wonder that is rock’n’roll narrowcasted and blown wide apart. Space Ritual is Rocket 88 pure and Astronomy Domine mindblown all at once, Space Ritual is the sound of Q from Star Trek TNG and The Master from Doctor Who beating on the door of the Ark of the Covenant with Bo Diddley’s skull, that’s how good Space Ritual is. Repeat:

Space Ritual is the sound of Q from Star Trek TNG and The Master from Doctor Who beating on the door of the Ark of the Covenant with Bo Diddley’s skull.

Ahem

Between 1971 and 1975 Hawkwind delivered on any promise rock’n’roll ever made to us as children when we just imagined it was a pure and beautiful and frantic noise as organized as a 16-car freight train rumbling down Route 66 and barreling through London’s Soho, remember when you believed in rock’n’roll, remember when you just imagined what rock’n’roll was, when it was just a rumor? The sound you heard in your head when rock’n’roll was just a rumor in your child-brain was Hawkwind. Hawkwind ’71 – ’75 are an utter repudiation of Beatleism and all of their melody burlesque, I mean even more than Hendrix was, Hendrix and Sabbath and all those happy grinders were just apologists, pretenders, Hawkwind is the real thing, Hawkwind is rock’n’roll, rock’n’roll beyond riffs and above and around melody and too frenzied to begin or end in any clear way, like a feverish rapid heart beat at war with the universe yet remaining true on course and splitting the sky, that is fucking Hawkwind.

Now…journalistic integrity compels me to issue a buyer beware alert: We are specifically shrieking of the achievements, likely never to be equaled, of Hawkwind ’71 – ’75, what anthologists refer to as the “United Artists era” (i.e., that’s the label the band were on during this time); now, Hawkwind continued after 1975 – shit, they’re still going (and there’s even an album and a handful of tracks before 1971), but the Miracle Years, the years when Hawkwind wore the halo of invincibility, the years when they were the Greatest Rock’n’Roll band that ever walked this planet, were 1971 to 1975. Why those years? Most simply put, the band were never quite the same without bassist Lemmy Kilmister and drummer Simon King; both never let up, both put on Frankenstein boots and stepped on the gas and never lifted their feet, thereby propelling the usually excellent Hawkwind space machine – which contained elements of a prog and ambient and pure acid-sugar ridiculousness – into continual, half-decade long overdrive. There is certainly good Hawkwind music after 1976, some of it first-rate, but the perfect cocaine-covered acid fastball of Jerry Lee Lewis-jamming-with-Tony Iommi inventing the Sex Pistols on Skylab that was Hawkwind ’71 – ’75 was never equaled.

YES, I said Jerry Lee Lewis jamming with Tony Iommi inventing the Sex Pistols on Skylab.

And when I say Hawkwind ’71 – ’75 were the pinnacle of Rock’n’Roll I’m not saying all the other forms of post-minstrel, post-Stephen Foster, post-Crosby pop aren’t valid and powerful and full of beautiful disturbances, I mean for god’s sakes Nick Drake and Syd and Scott and Mike Nesmith and Brian Wilson and Big Star and Association and the Go Betweens and the list is most literally endless,

but the Eagle Saloon Reeberbahn beat-down scream
(underneath an aurora borealis
full of tension and darkness of the most deep blue,
on a floor bouncing from the bass, as all the best old ballrooms must,
and plaster shaking from the ceiling,
the ramalama-maelstrom taking a breath every now and then to watch the mushroom cloud bloom and blow west)
is found most pure most full of caveman stomp and widescreen depth
in the work of Hawkwind 1971 – 1975.

Godfather of Slocore OUT

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Paul Revere, Punk Rock Godfather

October 8, 2014

Don’t let the ridiculous costumes fool you:  Paul Revere & the Raiders were a proto-punk rock act, plain and simple, and should be spoken of with the same awe and admiration we attach to the Troggs, the Monks, the Sonics, the Remains, et fucking al.

See, someone had to build the road between Eddie Cochran and the MC5.  The Beatles certainly weren’t doing it.  I mean, the Fabs were doing their own thing, and I come not to bury the Beatles, but to praise the custodians of the flame of Huey Piano Smith and Bo Diddley and Johnny Burnette and all those who insisted on keeping things trashy and simple throughout the 1960s, in the face of multiple assaults by oboe and sitar-wielding Donovanistas.

So when you make that list and carefully mark off all your gorgeously obscure garage-rock favorites, please do not forget Paul Revere & the Raiders, who stomped on the seeds sown by the flower children pretty much as well as anyone (except maybe the Troggs and the almost Crass-simple Sonics).

To my mind, the best Raiders material sounds like Joe Meek producing the Kinks – there is a distinctly freaky-beaty Meek-ish thump attached to their caveman-simple Northwestern party rock, and let’s face it, “Just Like Me” features one of the best Kinks’ riffs never written, and so much else the Raiders’ did – “Hungry,” “Kicks,” “Stepping Out” — were leering, lunging, lurching garage classics, salvaged from future-collector obscurity by the sheen of the Los Angeles session musicians who must have loaded up on the cough-syrup and Lucky Strikes in order to perfect these beautiful slugs of trash.

Yes, there is some distinctly accomplished 12-string work, though it’s applied to some pretty sinister ends (the Raiders use it to forebode, as oppose to the Byrds, who used it to uplift), and there are presages of the Doors (“20th Century Fox” is, at heart, just an extremely pretentious Raiders song), and (more applicably) a lot of sideways glances at the exquisite Mexi-trash of Sam the Sham and Sir Douglas Quintet and Question Mark And the Mysterians; but like the Wailers and the Sonics alongside them, the Young Fresh Fellows a decade and a half later, and Mudhoney about five years after that, the Raiders were pure Washington State dance-hall riff’n’grind, music to sip grain alcohol and Kool-Aid and dry-hump a stranger to. These trashmen just happened to make it the mainstream. It is no bloody accident that the Raiders came this close to beating the Kingsmen to “Louie Louie” – the Raiders recorded their version (essentially a cover of the cover cut by Rockin’ Robin Roberts and the Wailers in 1961, not actually a cover of the original ’57 Richard Berry doo-wop greasy stomp) on April 13, 1963, exactly one week after the Kingsmen recorded theirs (oh, and the Raiders were the first, lest we forget, to record the punk-embraced slimy slab of pre-Sabbath riffery, “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone,” beating the Monkees to it by about half a year).

Like the Dave Clark 5, who also get severely neglected when one discusses ‘60s punk, the Raiders get a raw deal because of all those smiles and all those gimmicks; but both bands – the grinning, prepped-out DC5 and the ridiculously costumed Raiders – are essential in clearing and building the path that led from the joyous slap’n’slop of Chicago and New Orleans rock’n’roll straight to the advance-men of punk, like the MC5, the Flaming Groovies, and the Stooges. In fact, both bands – the DC5 and the Raiders – both need to be avidly viewed as garage punks gone good, and they should not be punished because of their success.

And it is ZERO accident that both the Raiders and the DC5 covered raucous, bar-top beating Hadacol-hyper New Orleans rock/r’n’b songs, a genre the Beatles studiously and consciously avoided like the freaking plague; the Beatles, despite their Hamburg hearts and Hamburg hype, hated primitivism; virtually alone of the Brit invasion bands, they avoided covering Bo Diddley or New Orleans r’n’b, and do not think for ONE SECOND that this was an accidental oversight.

The DC5 (intentionally) took Joe Meek’s stomp and cleaned off the edges but not the delivery, and those classic DC5 thumpers, sounding like an r’n’b band providing the entertainment at Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, are some of the most ridiculous (in a good way) records of the decade, with a air of aural destruction that still has not been equaled (made even more remarkable, lest we forget, by the fact that the DC5 are virtually the first self-produced band).  And both bands sound nothing like the Fruity Beatles, and both provide a beautiful illustration of how full of glory, power, and raunchy rock’n’roll spit-soiled-gravy the world of ‘60s rock was outside of the Beatlesphere, and that the potential existed to have a whole, very goddamn complete story of rock written without the Beatles scribbling their name in the margins of every page and paragraph.

Paul Revere Dick, 1938 - 2014 (Yes, that's his real name)

Paul Revere Dick, 1938 – 2014
(Yes, that’s his real name)

But I have come not to demolish Beatles Infallibility (as much fun as that is) as much as I have come to honor and memorialize Paul Revere Dick, aka Paul Revere, who left this incarnation a few days ago.  He leaves a lot more than a silly hat, you see.

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What Happened to Sid’s Ashes? Let’s Ask John Lydon

October 7, 2014

A long time ago, I sat behind penny-colored pints of too-cool lager at a reasonable pub in Los Angeles called the Cat & Fiddle. I have never found a truly effective faux-British pub in this country, and the Cat & Fiddle was no exception.

The pleasant and entirely un-British interior garden of the Cat & Fiddle Pub in Los Angeles, where today’s story takes place.

(I have a theory about that: you can’t find Bitter anywhere in this country, and without bitter, how can you have an authentically inauthentic British pub? Bitter, as you may know, is the beautifully bittersweet, gently yeasty low-carbonated beer-like beverage served at room temperature in British pubs. Bitter is one of the three foodstuffs that make me re-consider the existence of God: the other two are the Dairy Queen Blizzard and the Mussels Fra Diavolo at Peppones Restaurant in Brentwood.)

A foamy, creamy, pint of bitter. Yum.

Even without Bitter (or the Abba songs seemingly always playing on British pub jukeboxes), the Cat & Fiddle was a very decent place to meet a friend and have a drink or a pile of fries. Their attempt at imitating a British pub resulted in a not un-amiable cross between a suburban basement/game-room and a theme restaurant in a casino. In any event, it was brighter and more spacious than most bars, and had a very pleasant outdoor area.

The sun sat low and bored in the sky, causing the very early evening light to slant into the room at an angle that challenged the drinker to consider whether it was time to order some bar food or seek out Sushi. I was sitting across from John Lydon, who was an occasional drinking partner at that time. John was a dear, sweet man, devoted to family and full of a fan-boy’s eagerness to rave about obscure music; he once showed up at my house in the Hollywood Hills unannounced, waving CDs by the Third Ear Band and Jacob Miller and insisting that I had to listen to these right now.

John Lydon, the star of today’s story. as he appeared at the time he told the author this sad and remarkable tale.

On this day at the Cat & Fiddle, we were talking about death. I think we may have been discussing the extraordinary power of a song off the first PIL album called “Annalisa,” during which Lydon delivers one of the most harrowing and desperate vocals ever committed to tape while telling the true tale of a teenage girl tortured and starved to death by her parents. I’ll put the power, honesty, and passion of the vocal on “Annalisa” alongside anything any white man has ever recorded, from Lennon’s “Twist & Shout” to “Pyscho” by the Sonics.

(By the way, why does everyone always use Lennon’s vocal on “Twist and Shout” as the example of the greatest rock vocal ever? Gerry Roslie of the Sonics basically did that kind of thing on every song. Seriously.)

John, who was (and I am sure remains) a remarkably sensitive and sentimental person, began to cry when recalling the girls’ plight. From there, I think our conversation moved to Kurt Cobain, who had only recently died. Not too long before Cobain’s death, attempts had been made to arrange a meeting between these two cultural giants – a potential Lydon/Cobain collaboration was very tentatively being discussed — but John had repeatedly balked at Cobain’s condition that the meeting take place at the zoo.

With these topics in the air, I decided to touch on another iconic death, closer to home.

“Where is Sid buried?” I asked. “Why isn’t Sid’s gravesite a shrine? How come I don’t hear anything about that? You’d think punk rockers would always go there and get drunk or something.”

John began to tear up. “That’s a very sad story,” he said. He then proceeded to explain.

He started by reminding me that Sid’s mother, Anne Beverly, was a junkie. In fact, John explained, she was responsible for scoring the dose that killed Sid, and may have even injected Sid with the fatal shot. I got the distinct impression that John was not particularly fond of Anne Beverly, who died in 1996 (after this conversation took place).

Sid Vicious and his mother, Anne Beverly, photographed prior to the events recounted in this story.

Ms. Beverley had her son cremated, John explained, and mom wanted to bring the ashes from New York City, where Sid died, back to England. So, urn in tow (according to John), she heads to JFK and boards a plane to Heathrow. No problems there; I am quite sure grieving parents or spouses transport their loved ones’ ashes internationally all the time.

Oh, DID I MENTION THAT ANNE BEVERLY HAD HIDDEN HER OWN PERSONAL HEROIN STASH IN SID’S ASHES?

At least that’s what John Lydon told me. And I suppose, all things considered, it wasn’t the worst place to hide your drugs.

Once Anne Beverly deplanes at Heathrow, John told me, she got a little nervous about going through security. There was a lot more security around than she had anticipated, and she was starting to get uncomfortable. She had been counting on the idea that airport security was unlikely to sift through a cremation urn carried by a grieving mother…but she nonetheless found herself getting really, really nervous. In fact, as she edges closer to the security checkpoint, Mrs. Sid’s Mother becomes convinced that they are on to her, and that the urn is going to get searched and she is going to be in a stack of trouble.

So, Anne Beverly did the only logical thing that a mother carrying her heroin stash in the urn containing her son’s dead ashes could possibly do: She eyed the nearest well-concealed air conditioning vent, and dumped the entire contents of the urn down the vent, where they disappeared forever.

By this time, John is BAWLING. “So,” he sobs, “to this day Sid is floating around somewhere in Heathrow.”

Mussels Fra Diavolo. Yum.

(The Author states that although the above tale is a true account of an actual encounter with Mr. Lydon, he can in no way confirm the veracity of Mr. Lydon’s story, and it is not stated as fact by either him nor the Brooklyn Bugle. Further, he acknowledges that Mussels Fra Diavolo may not actually be on the menu at Peppones, but was possibly a dish specially requested by the author.)

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Sting Inspires Me!

October 5, 2014

Recently, I was flipping around the TV, searching for a good documentary (perhaps one on Hitler’s relationship with Albert Speer, or Hitler’s down-time at Berchtesgaden, or what happened to the girls on Facts of Life, or the Third Reich’s fascination with Tibetan Buddhism).

But suddenly my attention was grabbed by a commercial which appeared to be an Old Spice ad featuring songs by the Dropkick Murphys performed by the San Francisco Gay Men’s Choir. Startled, dislocated, and addlepated, I wondered “What is this strange apparition befouling and befuddling my eyes and ears, distracting me from the briny, snappy pleasures of the tall glass of Clamato and horseradish I have in front of me?”

Soon, I realized I was watching an ad for Sting’s new musical, The Last Ship, which is set to open shortly, hopefully before either the Mammoth Lakes Caldera or the Yellowstone Caldera blows.

And I thought to myself, “My, this Sting fellow has certainly come a long way for someone who used to play bass with Wayne County. Now…I once played bass for Jack Rabid, so like Sting, my musical life began in some very humble crevices. Perhaps I, too, can aspire to the grand heights of musical theatre!”

Sting, a long time before he even dreamt of writing musicals that might be disrupted by the blowing of the Mammoth Lakes Caldera.

Now, I’ve met Sting, and he is a person, that’s for sure. He was endlessly pretentious and pretentious towards no end; which is to say, his pretension was neither charming nor impressive, and merely served to be offensive. He appeared to have a virtually Papa Doc-esque contempt for the common man, and he seemed like the kind of person who, if you were hit by a taxi, would say hissed “Good! He mis-pronounced ‘Borges’!” (As in Luis, not Victor). But nevertheless, he has inspired me take a stab at creating my own lasting monument to the great tradition of musical theatre.

Under the name Lucia Grande, I have composed a musical called You Can Put Skim Milk In Your Coffee…But You Can’t Put Half & Half on Your Cereal!

Polish people of varying happiness dancing the Zbójnicki. You thought I was making the “Zbójnicki” up, didn’t you? Nuh-uh.

You Can Put Skim Milk In Your Coffee…But You Can’t Put Half & Half on Your Cereal! takes place in a Northern English mining town located in the Polish countryside about 45 minutes outside of Gdansk. Lay-offs at the local shipyards have forced the school to fire their only dancing instructor, who hangs himself while listening to “The Logical Song” by Supertramp. The suicide greatly distresses a young boy who dreams of perfecting the difficult Polish folk dance the Zbójnicki; with the death of the dancing teacher, the Boy feels his hopes are smashed. Resigned to having to sell rags, light bulbs, and used Aglets (the little plastic bits at the end of shoelaces) on a street corner in Gdansk, the boy enters a local pub and begins to thrown back shots of Żołądkowa Gorzka, chased with a pint of Newcastle Brown Ale. A crippled, broken drunk dressed in newspapers hobbles in, sits next to the Boy, and explains to the lad that he has not worked since Charlotte Rae was a young girl, and that the local economy “smells worse than Tim Tebow and Jamie Shupak making love in an abattoir.” But it is soon revealed that when he was young, the drunk was renown throughout the North of England as the world’s greatest Zbójnicki dancer! The drunk, whose name is Desmond Child And Rouge, resolves to teach the young lad everything he knows about the Zbójnicki!

Jamie Shupak, a miniature traffic reporter who is going to wonder why the hell she is mentioned here.

Over the next six acts (an entire two acts will be devoted to the boy’s mother attempting to musically explain the plot of Tarkovsky’s version of Solaris, which she will keeps on confusing with an particularly uninteresting episode of Battlestar Galactica), the Boy attempts to master the Zbójnicki, with the hope that his courage and resolve will raise the spirits of the depressed, cucumber-eating townspeople.

Of course it all goes horribly wrong. A heartless industrialist from Birmingham, Poland decides to round up all the local puppies and sell them to Cruel Russians to be used as Dumpling Fodder. But a local internet hacker foils the plan by stealing the credit card info of the industrialist, using the money to hire the old drunk cripple as the town’s new dancing instructor! The hacker also finds a legendary surgeon, a charming female named Dr. A’tlanta R’hyhtm S’ection, to operate on the crippled dancing instructor and restore him to health. However, the surgery fails, and the dancing instructor dies a gruesome and painful death on the operating table cursing God and claiming that singer Gerry Rafferty and ventriloquists’ dummy Jerry Mahoney are fighting each other for his eternal soul. The Boy swears to honor his memory by teaching the whole town to dance! His pluck makes even the grumpy old people in the town laugh and dance, including Grzegorz the old Concentration Camp Guard (humorously played by Pat Harrington Jr.). The boy is resolved to lead his town into brighter times! He will revive the tradition of the Zbójnicki, and as the curtain falls on the penultimate act, the boy and the entire town is happily dancing the Zbójnicki, and the boy’s mother is explaining the plot of the entire series arc of Clarissa Explains It All, though she is confusing it with the film version of Graham Greene’s Our Man In Havana.

Christopher Eccleston. He has nothing to do with this story, but he was a GREAT Doctor.

But the Boy doesn’t care anymore! In Act 6, his new dream is to rename “Friday” “Frifftay” and in order to support this endeavor and bribe the necessary powers-that-be at the Oxford English Dictionary, he writes a “jukebox” musical based on the music of the Atlanta Rhythm Section; he then stages this in a small English seaside town outside of Gdansk called Morecambe. However, he falls in love with the musical’s star, Polish Jamie Shupak, and together, they move to “The Big City” (Warsaw) and start a dance studio. Polish Jamie and the Boy commemorate the opening of the studio by staging a production of Paul Simon’s musical The Capeman. The production fails miserably and the show ends with the Boy and Polish Jamie Shupak committing suicide by driving their Mopeds off of Brighton Pier and into the muddy Vistula River snaking through Gdansk. They survive the suicide attempt and vow to triumph over adversity via pragmatism and pluck, as exemplified by the stirring title song “You can put skim milk in your coffee, but you can’t put Half & Half in your cereal.”

Alternately, Jack and I can start another band. That will show Sting!

(This column is dedicated to one of the kindest and wittiest men I’ve ever known, Patrick Lee, a theatre critic who would not have tolerated, not for one nano-second, the kind of fuckery I suspect Sting is preparing to foist on Broadway.)

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May 4, 1970 and Chris Butler

September 30, 2014

Before college rock was a lifestyle, before it was even a cult, before it was even a rumor, there were people like Chris Butler.

Chris Butler

Throughout the country in the early to mid 1970s, these people comprised an invisible minority shaping the future. They were long-hairs and short-hairs, huddled in university pubs or music and art high schools, lone-gunmen selling fanzines outside of old vaudeville houses, rabid fans of music that was barely on the radar being inspired to make music even further below detection. These pioneers absorbed all the more eccentric, exquisite and gorgeously culty musical traits of the 1960s – from Beefheart to the Byrds, from Gram Parson to the Grateful Dead, from Gong to the Move – and used the fertile Petri dishes of American college towns and cheap-rent dead cities to create the foundation of American independent music.

For Chris Butler, Ohio – specifically Akron, Cleveland, and Kent State – was where (far away from the dope sparks of the high-heeled boys in New York) Butler and his band, Tin Huey, began to invent American college rock (in collaboration with friends, compatriots, and fellow travelers like Pere Ubu, Devo, the Rubber City Rebels, the Bizarros, Rocket from the Tombs, and many etceteras). Like a similar scene being developed just a little bit later in Winston, Salem North Carolina, the music made by these bands would directly lead to some of the most high-profile college rock and punk rock of the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. Seriously, if you want to see where the sound of Our Generation came from, don’t look at the Bowery or the Sunset Strip: look at North Carolina and Ohio in the early and mid-1970s.

The Waitresses. Chris Butler, second from right.

Chris Butler of Tin Huey went on to significant commercial success with the Waitresses (for whom he was the prime songwriter), but I have come not to rattle off Butler’s credits or bona fides, but to talk about his extraordinary new record, Easy Life.

Easy Life is vastly original, profoundly moving, deeply personally yet extraordinarily universal; it concerns itself with the most intimate, common, and human experiences and the most rare, historic, and tragic occurrences. Simply put, Easy Life is a concept album – actually, perhaps more of a biography in music, maybe even a (dreaded/dreadful word!) rock opera – about a young man coming to college at the end of the 1960s; his experiences are deliciously familiar, as he discovers freedom, sleeping late, girls, responsibility, evading responsibility, drugs, drink, and sex; but then the young man is centrally and integrally caught up in one of the signal events of the era: on May 4, 1970, the National Guard fired 67 rounds in 13 seconds on a group of unarmed students protesting the Vietnam War, killing four and profoundly wounding nine others. Butler was an eyewitness and a participant in the demonstration that was attacked. After the assault on the unarmed protesters, one of Butler’s best friends, Jeffery Miller, lay among the dead.

The United States of America, May 4, 1970, Kent, Ohio.

With grace, compellingly original music, and moving but deliberately ordinary words that underline how some young people who were a great deal like you and I ended up being pawns in tragic-history, Butler places that extraordinary event within the context of everyday college and artistic experience.  This is so fucking important, because before anyone is a martyr, before anyone is a witness, before anyone is an unwilling participant in history, they were drunks, and clumsy artists, and dancers, and people cheating on their girlfriends and boyfriends, and people being cheated on, and people angry at the noisy neighbors, and excited about new movies and your friends’ sister, and people who owned crappy cars, and people who loved the Grateful Dead, and people who borrowed your drums.

Before I go further, here’s where to buy it/hear samples. http://www.futurefossilmusic.com/easylife.htm

Butler’s musical palette on Easy Life is dramatic, stark, varied, and entirely appropriate; it features archival acoustic recordings, full band recordings, home demos, all astutely sewn together (and linked by effective spoken word and expository material) to tell the story of how the profound tragedy of Kent State interjected itself into the normally abnormal lives of college students.

Much of the album’s music has the effect of being faux clumsy, which is to say the music is precise but spontaneous and affecting, exact but tumbling, occasionally evoking the idea of the Raspberries produced by Zappa or some weird dB’s/Oingo Boingo cross; likewise, there is definitely a hovering haze of the same Ohio smoggy pop machine that bred Tin Huey, Pere Ubu, and Devo. Often, it sounds like the work of an expert folk musician just beginning to discover progressive rock and proto-punk pop, which might accurately reflect Butler’s real-life musical perspective at the time of the events he recounts in Easy Life. Over all, this mix of audio sources implies a race against time, a race against memory, a perfect musical vocabulary for an album about memory that wants to be alive in that memory.

Chris Butler’s EASY LIFE, an important fucking album.

At one point, Butler sings “We knew one shining truth — we were immune,” and that underlines the profound depth of this album, and how this historical atrocity forever defined its’ witnesses.

The God-like Phil Ochs, who also made important fucking records.

At times, conceptually and lyrically the album reminds me of Phil Ochs’ striking Rehearsals for Retirement, his 1969 masterpiece (largely) about how a generation’s hope and optimism died on the streets during the riots the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. In fact, these two albums should be sold together. I am also going to cite one (vastly different) point of comparison: Easy Life is the easily the best original concept album/rock opera I’ve heard since the extremely different Bandage: The Rock Opera. Bandage is the deeply accomplished and entertaining piece from about the rise and fall of a Sunset Strip rock star, composed and performed by Los Angeles’s Pi Gamma band about fifteen years ago (I don’t want to take away space from Easy Life, but WHY has NO ONE picked up Bandage for staging/performances outside of Los Angeles? The thing never achieved the national audience it so richly deserved, and it is far more original than Rock of Ages, which clearly ripped it off, and the songs are fucking great).

But back to Chris Butler’s Easy Life. Get it. It is an important, original and moving album, and makes the events of that horrible day, May 4, 1970, more alive than anything I’m aware of. Shit, they should teach this thing in schools.

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