Hippies vs. Punks: Bullet LaVolta's Swandive (1991)

While the end might not be clearly visible, I can sense that it is coming.

When I was young, at least for a period of a few years, between the time my wife divorced me and I moved in with a new girlfriend, I was fascinated by the alchemical idea that you could think yourself back to the moment of conception. The alchemists believed human cognition was this powerful, which they captured in the motto VITRIOL, Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem  -- "Visit the interior of the Earth and rectifying (i.e., purifying) you will find the hidden/secret stone." What was accomplished by this, I assumed, was some sort of omniscience -- the Philosopher's Stone. By thinking oneself back to the womb one was able to perceive the moment nothing becomes something.

In my mid-20s I despised working, whether at an office job or as a laborer. I was a drinker. I liked to read, scribble notes and listen to music. My marriage was failing. So I decided to leave my wife and New York City and head back to the West Coast and work for a drywall contractor located in Seattle. I had worked for him a few summers while I was still enrolled at the university in the Bay Area. At the time he was working rat jobs in Oakland and San Francisco,

I arrived in Seattle, late spring 1990, the day after Randy Johnson had thrown a no hitter, right when Grunge was blasting off.  Soundgarden. Skin Yard. Nirvana, Screaming Trees. But other than reading SPIN I had no idea what was going on because I never went out. I worked and came home to a sublet studio apartment in a house on 23rd Avenue East and drank 40-ounce bottles of Midnight Dragon malt liquor and typed on a Brother manual typewriter. I had some sense something was percolating because when I got a day off I would head to the local coffee house and it was chock full of hipsters and rockers.

My personal motto at the time, not dissimilar from the alchemists' VITRIOL, was RECLAMATION EVERYTHING. (It probably had something to do with my collapsing marriage.) On my way to the Emerald City I had stopped off in The Haight and picked up a used copy of Quentin Lauer's book on Husserlian Phenomenology. The idea that there was a pre-linguistic or meta-linguistic way to approach the world that might free us from error, confusion and loss was very compelling to me. It seemed a road to redemption.

The hubris of a motto like RECLAMATION EVERYTHING was perfectly in sync with the Grunge Age. It takes a lot of chutzpah to attempt to re-energize, re-new, re-vivify the old, decades-dead form of the classic rock cock rocker. But that was the conceit of my generation. I think it came about organically from young men and women listening simultaneously to Punk bands as well as Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Rolling Stones, Richard Thompson et al. without the filter of a dialectical understanding.

An excellent example of a Grunge band, now largely buried by the sands of time (even in our digital age), is Bullet LaVolta. While it might be a stretch to argue that Bullet LaVolta was ubiquitous during the Grunge Age, the band was certainly a fixture on my stereo. Listen to Bullet LaVolta's Taang! Records/RCA album, The Gift (1989), and I think you will agree that rock is reanimated. My buddies and I would regularly celebrate the zenith of our evening's intoxication by blasting at high volume and jumping along to "Trapdoor." (For a visual sample of Bullet LaVolta at the band's apex, look at the video from a 1990 show in Dusseldorf.)

The followup to The Gift was Swandive (1991) released on RCA the same day as Nirvana's Nevermind. (There is a good article about this temporal Ground Zero of Grunge -- late summer/early fall 1991 -- by Bullet LaVolta drummer Todd Philips, "The night before Nevermind: Bullet LaVolta's drummer on opening for Nirvana in Boston on September 23, 1991.")

That fall and winter I probably listened to Swandive more than any other record. Immersed in it this week 25 years later I didn't feel the same empathy. One track, "Before I Fall," my favorite from back in the day, still holds up. I used to think that the chorus was "What I want to do before I am born" rather than "What I want to do before I fall." I took this as proof that there was a generational intuition about the importance of alchemical VITRIOL and the idea that everything can be reclaimed.

I think Bullet LaVolta achieved a measure of perfection for a brief time. The band broke up in 1992 and never got to wallow in the corporate trough. Hopefully The Gift and Swandive will be reclaimed. Those two albums document the essence of Grunge.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #91

This weekend was devoted to filing of federal income taxes. Saturday and Sunday were burned in front of the laptop entering a lot of data from brokerage statements.

The letter below, like the one posted last week, is to my buddy Niall. I confide to him my love of reading philosophy and Jacques Derrida.

Autumn 1989

A fist full of fortune cookies. I just tossed a fist full of fortune cookies into the trash. They came individually wrapped in plastic and they looked fresh. But I tossed them unopened into the trash anyway. I figured that any future they could let me in on wasn't worth the trouble involved in prying the plastic wrapper apart with my fingertips and then spilling the shattered cookie crust onto the kitchen floor. I'll be honest with you though, it didn't feel good tossing them into the trash like that; it felt like spitting in the aisles of a church; it felt like driving a pickup truck off an ocean cliff. I don't know why. I wish I did.

I started a letter to you but I was too drunk to get past the second sentence. I had been drinking with the boys at work. I had had about six bourbons and who knows how many beers. But I made it home to Washington Heights safe and sound (sound enough to careen into the corner deli for a three-quart pick-me-up). The first thing I thought of when I sat myself down was that I owed you a letter. I don't why since I'm still waiting on your recapitulation of the quake drama. But like I said, I only made it to the second sentence (too much bourbon).

I'm starting to read a lot of philosophy again. I had never given up on reading the shit, I just diminished the importance of it in my life. It's a big responsibility. It takes a lot of energy to read; and even after you've done a nice thorough and clean job of underlining and making notations in the margins, there's no guarantee that you're going to remember anything 24 hours hence. It's not like reading a story -- as you know, having read your Plato and Nietzsche and Weber -- everything's conceptual; there's not a whole lot for your brain to sink its teeth into. Your best bet is to try to make it into mantra -- rehearse and talk to yourself of what you know of what you've read, and then keep on reading.

Right now I've got several pokers in the fire. I'm reading this compilation recently published by University of Minnesota Press called REDRAWING THE LINES. It's a bunch of essays talking about deconstruction's relationship to analytic philosophy during the recent (in the last ten years) prioritization of theory in literature departments. I'm about a third of the way through, and it seems good enough, though I did read a really excruciatingly piece on the superiority of Cavell's writings on the later Wittgenstein as a model for the reading and interpretation of literature as opposed to a deconstruction-based model. The motherfucker's 20 or so pages boil down to the idea that reading requires "commonsensicalness," and that since deconstruction is just skepticism made textually fastidious (hence not bald and unrigorous enough) Derrida should be left on the shelf. What a bunch of facile shit, huh? It's crap like that that makes you wonder why philosophy should be read at all; it makes you think that it's all just so much academic jigsaw puzzling chalked up to fear and avoidance of the 9-to-5.

I'm also reading Derrida's introduction to Edmund Husserl's ORIGIN OF GEOMETRY. It was the first thing Derrida published in book form (the introduction plus Derrida's translation of Husserl's little piece of some 30 pages runs 128 pages; so it definitely qualifies as book length). It first appeared in 1962. I bought it because it just came out softbound for the first time, published by University of Nebraska press, a Bison Book (which is a mighty fine book). I read a few pages of it in the Philosophy Library at UC Berkeley not more than two years ago. It was important for me at the time because I was working almost feverishly on my Kant/Frege/Derrida magnum oh. ORIGIN OF GEOMETRY is significant for Husserl because of Frege's criticism of Husserl's first published work, which had to do with the foundations of arithmetic. Anyway, there were other reasons besides the confluence of first works and mentorships that made Derrida's vestal publishing sublime and profound for the purpose of my magnum oh, but I won't confuse and bore by going into them here. Pushing all that muck to the side, Derrida's introduction to the ORIGIN OF GEOMETRY and his SPEECH AND PHENOMENA, which is also about Husserl, are the two best and easiest ways to figure out exactly where he's coming from and exactly what deconstruction is all about. It's all based on a true reading of phenomenology, which, in turn, owes itself to a true reading of Kant. Cut the cloth however you like, for me Derrida is always the right length, someone you know who will always be on the money. And, goddamnit, you can't say that about hardly anyone, short of your conception of the deity. So old brainiac Jacques is pretty special to me.

Even if I'm just pissing in the wind wasting my non-9-to-5 time reading writing philosophicus at least I'll be concentrating hard, and, happy, thinking about the future because I'm so locked up in the present -- a cogitating about the future that's free of constricting simple messages. I don't know, but I guess philosophy . . . at least it'll get me as far as fortune cookies in the trash.

Ta Da!