Hippies vs Punks: Childbirth's Women's Rights (2015)

If you want to know what the new West Coast tech hub feminist dispensation sounds like, it sounds like Childbirth's 2015 release, Women's Rights. Part early Black Flag, part Sonic Youth, the album clocks in at just under 26 minutes. The songs are irreverent -- tales of cocaine at baby showers, broken condoms, refulgent fertility, tech bros, etc.

I work with and for women who are all younger than I by at least a decade. The Childbirth vibe is their vibe. If, as James Brown sang in the 1960s "It's a Man's Man's Man's World," then now I would say it is something different. It is still a man's world. No doubt. The old bald white guy is still calling the shots from his sky box atop the pyramid. But women are playing an increasingly important role in late stage Western capitalism.

Women are definitely on the ascent. And let me tell you, they are not particularly gracious to a brother on his way down. Women feel a lot of pent up disdain and resentment, if not outright hatred and anger, towards men. "Loathing" might be the best term. I can bear witness as the only man at many a behind-closed-doors staff meeting.

Cry no tears for men though. We deserve every bit of bad news coming our way. There will be no Donald Trump helicopter rescue touching down in a green field to lift us off to safety as the boreal forest burns all around. No, it is all hellfire and sinks of sulfurous acid for us.

Hippies vs. Punks: Black Flag's My War

My War was a big deal when it came out in early 1984 because it represented a U-turn. Black Flag, more than any other band, created the sound that by the early 1980s had become synonymous with Punk, and that sound was California Hardcore. With My War, Black Flag moved away from the short, fast songs of the seminal Damaged (1981) debut LP, an album that most of my fellow undergraduate friends at Berkeley seemed to own, to longer, slower, brooding compositions punctuated by Greg Ginn guitar solos. The principal members of the band, guitarist Ginn and vocalist Henry Rollins, grew their hair out long while most of us were buzzing our locks off with electric shears for the first time.

The impression created was one of surrender, of retreat to old, spent Hippie forms. This was confusing to fans, like myself, who were just beginning to embrace Hardcore Punk.

I had dutifully made a trip to the record store and purchased a copy of My War when it first appeared, and had -- along with my wife (who was then my live-in girlfriend), cousin and a couple of friends -- gone to see Black Flag promote the album when they performed at the Stone in San Francisco. This wasn't the show captured on the Live '84 album, or maybe it was; I can't rightly remember. The one we saw, as I recall it, was in the early spring or might have even been in February, just prior to the release of the record. I remember it was a cold, dark evening. And I remember that Bob Dylan's Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) was being pumped through the PA. (I don't think I caught the pun, though I appreciated hearing the album. I too was in the habit at the time of marrying on mix tapes Hardcore music with pre-electric Dylan.)

When the Black Flag came on stage, the presence of a petite girl bass player, Kira Roessler, and the shaggy Hippie heads of Ginn and Rollins, along with the shirtless, beefy, hirsute Bill Stevenson was jarring. I don't know why but it seemed self-indulgent to me. I guess I thought of Hardcore as part of a movement, and here were the founders getting way out ahead of or doing an end-around the faithful.

There were a lot of dewy, downy high school Nazi Punks from the suburbs ready to slam to "Spray Paint" and "TV Party." And things started well enough, with a fast-moving pit circulating to "My War" and some of the other tracks featured on the first side of the album, before hitting the sand with the side-two material (which Christgau dismissed as the "Three dirges that waste side two").

I remember being offended by Rollins' "Rock God" preening. During one of those  "dirges" he pulled down around his thighs the tight black running shorts he wore and displayed his genitals and gyrated his hips in front of the face of a milk-fed, flannel-clad Punk who was jammed against the lip of the stage.

I don't know if we left early or if we stuck it out for the whole show. But I do remember in the subsequent months making an effort to couple with My War and try to get my head around what Ginn was up to. Usually, depending on what my course schedule was for the semester, I would have an early afternoon hole in the school day. I would return to an empty apartment -- the girlfriend, still on campus in class or at work -- and eat lunch, drink coffee and listen to music. It was then, free of the distractions of the evening and cohabitation, that I could really figure music out.

And I did try with My War at least a few times. There was one sunny afternoon that I almost got there, almost "achieved climax." It was with one the "Three dirges that waste side two." But in the end, I never went back to My War. I never bought another Black Flag album.

Nineteen-Eighty-Four was the year that Black Flag would be toppled from its Hardcore pinnacle by three other SST Records bands -- Meat Puppets, Minutemen and Hüsker Dü. Basically, My War was the beginning of the end for Black Flag, even though the band would amazingly release four LPs in 1984.

What makes my immersion in My War this past week so interesting is that immediately upon hearing the album for the first time in many years -- if not three decades -- I knew it was good. Gone was any resistance to the material or difficulty in comprehension. The record makes perfect sense, particularly compelling is Greg Ginn's guitar sound. Something has happened in thirty years. What I tried to accept and could not at the age of 19 is now "music to my ears" at 50.

And what is that?

It has something to do with time itself. What psychedelic ballroom bands like Quicksilver Messenger Service achieved was a sonic mirror of time -- how it meanders and eddies, how there are concentrated pockets and empty gaps; what the athlete knows as "time within time." The second side of My War brings this home beautifully, and that is why I'm sure it will be played for a very long time.

Hippies vs. Punks: Let's Take a Time Out with Black, Brown and Beige

Last Saturday I ran a race, a 15K, longer than I usually do. The weather was beautiful, and I took it slow. After the first loop around the course, after the 5K runners had finished, congestion diminished and it became possible to plod along with nary a competitor in sight; at points, it was as if I were running alone on a country lane with a large lake nearby.

About halfway through the run, with the Saturday-morning sun shining, a cut from Duke Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige (1958) album shuffled on my iPod. The big band jazz orchestra and the voice of Mahalia Jackson were, for some reason, the perfect accompaniment.

I ended the race feeling fine. After a longer-than-usual wait for the bus back to my neighborhood, and then stopping on the sidewalk to sign a signature-gatherer's petition to place Kshama Sawant's name on the ballot for reelection, I ended up back at my apartment a little before 1:30 in the afternoon. By happenstance, because I had recently imported several Duke Ellington records to my iTunes library, I listened to the great jazz composer for the rest of the day.

I mention all this as a prelude to what happened the weekend before, two-weeks ago now. On a Sunday I listened to all the Yes studio albums from The Yes Album (1971) to Going for the One (1975). The idea was to listen to the records from Yes's breakthrough in the early 1970s to the widely disparaged Tormato (1978), when the band lost its compass as the Hippies gave way to the Punks.

Though I downloaded the 2004 remaster of Tormato, I didn't get to listen to it. I jumped instead to the first two Black Flag EPs, Nervous Breakdown (1978) and Jealous Again (1980), followed by the indispensable compilation of early recordings, Everything Went Black (1982).

By the end of the day Sunday it felt like my ears were bleeding. They say digital recording is hard and flat. I would have to agree. (I have pretty good speakers on my laptop too.) In any event, since then, nearly two weeks ago, I have been reticent to dive into my weekly immersions of Hippies vs. Punks because my ears have not felt up to it.

Hence the diversion to the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Big band jazz is a deeper and broader and for the most part temporally more complex music than that produced by the Hippies and the Punks. More horizontal than vertical, more aerobic than anaerobic, big band jazz speaks of a time when there was more space. Both the Hippies (some very articulate, like the "present-at-creation" San Francisco psychedelic ballroom music) and the Punks are a reeling reaction to the vertiginous rise of electronic technology and its effect on everyday consciousness.

The question we need to ask ourselves, as we enjoy this interlude of Black, Brown and Beige, is this -- "If the Hippies and the Punks both failed to provide an answer to the riddle of electronic technology, what hope is there for us?"

Hippies vs. Punks: Yes vs. Black Flag, Round 1, "Mood for a Day" vs. "Wasted"

On a recent Saturday, while out for a run, a Yes song shuffled on my iPod, something off one of the three seminal studio albums of the early 1970s -- The Yes Album (1971), Fragile (1971), Close to the Edge (1972) -- and it sounded good. Lush, sweeping, soothing, harmonic -- whatever you want to call it -- "big ticket" rock 'n' roll.

Then, up next or shortly thereafter, came a Black Flag song, "Wasted," off the band's first record, the Nervous Breakdown EP (1978), and it pretty much said it all in terms of Hippies vs. Punks:

I was so wasted I was a hippie I was a burnout I was a dropout I was out of my head I was a surfer I had a skateboard I was so heavy man, I lived on the strand I was so wasted I was so fucked up I was so messed up I was so screwed up I was out of my head I was so jacked up I was so drugged up I was so knocked out, I was out of my head I was so wasted I was wasted

The contrast between these two songs, Yes's "Mood for a Day" and Black Flag's "Wasted" couldn't be greater. Yet there it is -- Hippies vs. Punks. It is almost as if there is no reason to continue on with these Hippies vs. Punks posts because aurally the matter has been settled. But who won?

One thing that leapt to my attention out of the happenstance iPod shuffle was the realization that Black Flag's first record, Nervous Breakdown, an EP that clocked in at all of 5 minutes 13 seconds, was recorded as early as January 1978, the month that Punk is supposed to have died when the Sex Pistols broke up after their show at Winterland. This qualifies Black Flag as a first-wave Punk band.

Nervous Breakdown didn't appear until the fall when foot-dragging by Bomp Records! motivated Black Flag founder and guitarist Greg Ginn to use funds from his ham radio business, Solid State Transmitters, to establish, along with Black Flag bass player Chuck Dukowski, a new record label, SST Records. Nervous Breakdown is the first SST Records disk, 001.

Black Flag was formed in 1976. Originally the band's name was Panic. But just as Joy Division had to change from Warsaw to Joy Division because there was another band going by Warsaw, Panic changed its name to Black Flag because there was another band called Panic.

In 1976 Yes was at the top of the heap along with Peter Frampton. This is what the kids were listening to when Greg Ginn put his band together. Skateboarding was very big. Skateboards with wheels of polyurethane instead of clay. Puka-shell necklaces and rugby shirts, long hair and Ocean Pacific drawstring cotton pants. Hippies, without a war to protest or a president to impeach, decided to let the good times roll. They might not necessarily have absconded to the discotheque but they had certainly found their way to AstroTurfed sports stadiums, where, along with tens of thousands of other shaggy-headed boys and girls, drunk and stoned, they, in the words of Crass, stared "up a superstar's arse."

This is the milieu that created Punk. The summer of 1976. The American Bicentennial. The summer that the boys from Joy Division see the Sex Pistols in Manchester and decide to start a band; the same summer that Mari Elliot, a.k.a., Poly Styrene, sees the Sex Pistols in Hastings and decides to start a band. The Yes-Frampton-Gary Wright sold-out stadium tour is happening simultaneously. The sonic womb that begets Punk is the no-longer-Hippie corporate sounds of Hippies like Yes, Peter Frampton and Gary Wright.

We'll have to tarry here a bit longer.

Hippies vs. Punks: The Last Waltz, Pt. 2, Rick Danko 1977

There are two great tracks -- The Last Waltz-level great -- on Rick Danko (1977), "New Mexicoe" (a live version of which appears above) and "Sip the Wine" (below):

Almost all the songs on the 10-song debut solo album by the bass player and vocalist for The Band are good if not excellent. Four of the tracks Danko co-writes with Hippie founding father Emmett Grogan ("Brainwash" is particularly good). Every day last week at work I listened to the album on YouTube. I never tired of it (which is more than I can say for my Oi! immersion of Cock Sparrer and Sham 69's Tell Us the Truth, both from 1978). And that's what makes the poor sales of Rick Danko, followed by his label (Arista) promptly dropping him, so hard to explain. I've come to the conclusion that the album, like Levon Helm's first post-Last Waltz album, Levon Helm and RCO All-Stars (1977), was ahead of its time.

To give Robbie Robertson some credit, as the guy responsible for the break up of The Band and making of The Last Waltz, he saw the end of the Hippies coming, and he got out on his own terms. This is from Robbie Robertson's introduction to the 2002 re-mixed re-released The Last Waltz concert album.

Many of the artists who performed in The Last Waltz have gone on to make great music through the years, and some are still doing brilliant work today, but the spirit of those times turned a corner and never came back. It's been said that the inspiration of those times came out of the war in Vietnam and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. It was, for sure, a powerful time. There was so much creative electricity, and everybody kept raising the bar higher. Nobody knew it then, but it would be a long time before we'd see that kind of passion in music, movies, and the arts again. 

If the '50s were about rebels without a cause, then the '60s and the '70s were about rebels with a cause. But by the time The Last Waltz came out [the spring of 1978], that revolution was over. It had served its purpose, and everybody was moving on.

This is the fundamental Hippie mistake. It's the belief -- to crib part of the title of a Jimmy Breslin book about the Congressional effort to impeach Nixon -- that the "Good Guys Finally Won." This is slothful thinking. Nothing of the sort happened. Nixon skirted justice. Yes, he resigned in infamy to avoid impeachment, but his handpicked successor pardoned him the next month.

But by Thanksgiving 1976 it's water under the bridge. The peanut farmer who campaigned as a purifier, a national redeemer, is headed to the White House. The Hippies, as drug-addled as ever, are licking their chops in anticipation of continued commercial success and some guilt-free corporate cock sucking. You can see this in The Last Waltz when Scorsese interviews Danko at The Band's Shangri-La Studios in Malibu. Danko plays Scorsese a sample of "Sip the Wine," and you can tell he's ready for solo stardom:

At least this is what I thought when I was enamored with the film back in the early '90s. Now it's not so clear to me. But back then, from the summer 1990 to the end of 1992, I was suffering too much from being dumped by my wife -- my sweetheart, my missing half -- to be curious about tracking down the solo work Danko did after The Last Waltz. I had everything I needed in a song that The Band performs, with Danko on lead vocals, early on in the documentary:

"It Makes No Difference," written by Robbie Robertson, was my separation anthem; I drank and brawled and typed my way clear of my wife while listening to it. I owe a lot to that song. Its great sadness was my life at the time. It helped get me through, which is what art is supposed to do.

And I realize now that The Last Waltz documents a time which corresponds to the collapse of my parents' marriage and the dissolution of our nuclear family. Between the autumn of 1976 (when The Last Waltz is performed) and the spring of 1978 (when The Last Waltz is released) my parents went through a nasty divorce.

My father, who is the coach in the team photo above, showed up drunk to the soccer game at which this picture was taken. He reeked of alcohol. He had been fighting with my mother. Their days as a couple were finished, and he was rebelling against the knowledge. When he got to the field he put everyone in different positions. I was the star, a midfielder, and he stuck me back on defense. -- I'm the kid, middle row, far right, sporting the longest hair, a Prince Valiant cut not unlike Rick Danko's. Everyone on the team was pissed, which you can tell by the large number of frowns. I can't remember if we won or lost. I think we must have lost. One thing about the game I do remember is dribbling the ball from in front of our own goal up to midfield where, to spite my father, I launched a shot. The goalkeeper for the opposing squad misjudged the ball's flight, ran out too late to catch it; and instead, it bounced over his head and into the net for a score. A couple months later and an hour north up Highway 101 The Last Waltz takes place.

By immersing myself in the film and soundtrack during my own divorce it's clear to me that I was unconsciously tapping into the heart of darkness, looking for a cure in the poison. And that cure for me was Rick Danko.

Imagine my shock, my horror, when, in 1991, at the end of my period of marriage mourning, I took my new girlfriend, a woman with whom I would spend the next decade, to see The Band at the Lonestar Roadhouse in Midtown Manhattan and it turns out Rick Danko is an obese grinning buffoon plucking clownish riffs on his bass as Yuppies, hopping up on tables, wriggle ass and cheer him on. I don't know what was more shocking, the sight of Danko or Helm. Danko could have been an impostor. He looked nothing like his younger slender self. His face appeared completely different, and his bloated trunk bore no resemblance to the lithe herky-jerky roots rocker memorialized in the Scorsese picture. Helms looked like a mummified version of The Last Waltz Levon. A wizened gnomish frail old man with raisins for eyes, I saw him exiting a tour bus that was parked in front of the bar on West 52nd St. He was being led by a young woman who I assumed was his daughter.

Before the second song was finished I told my girlfriend that we should go. So we walked out. My heroes had not lived up to expectations. And, like a petulant child, I was upset.

It causes me some pain to relate this. Our heroes should not be disposable. And it caused me pain these last two weeks studying Rick Danko. Not because the music is bad; no, the music is excellent. What caused me pain is that at first I dismissed it, jotting down on a legal pad "boozy, coked-out" and "Hippie TV Party." Then the sound kept getting better and stronger until I fell in love with every song. I had judged too soon, just as Arista had. The album was a legitimate path forward for the Hippies, one that was not followed; it needs to be re-issued.

Look at the Soundstage from early 1978 where Danko performs the material on his album. There's something monstrous about the shaggy full-on Prince Valiant combined with disco duds. (Hippies couldn't figure how to package themselves once they arrived in the mainstream.) Nonetheless, this is how the world looked in 1977-1978. I remember sitting in a junior high school classroom in Southern Oregon the last day of school, and what I remember -- the vibe -- is exactly what appears on this Soundstage video. Whatever it is -- whatever Zeitgeist moved on the face of deep when the Hippies started to go extinct -- it can be found here: