Hippies vs. Punks: The Lemonheads' Lovey (1990)

In all of Robert Christgau's vast trove of criticism on his excellent web site, www.robertchristgau.com, I could find only one review of a Lemonheads record:

Come On Feel [Atlantic, 1993]
Evan Dando is a good-looking guy with more luck than talent and more talent than brains who conceals his narcissism beneath an unassuming suburban drawl. Twenty years ago he would have affected an acoustic guitar and acted sincere; now he affects a slacker-pop band and acts vulnerable. His songs don't bite, they sidle over and nibble your ear when you're not looking, and if you throw him a withering glance, no problem--he'll just move on to someone else. Exception: the one about drugs. C+

Brutally dismissive as it is, and applied to an album that most of us who were Lemonheads fans at the time would freely admit as proof that the band had lost its purpose (the dividing line for Taang!-era Lemonheads devotees like myself was Dando's cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" on the album that preceded Come on Feel the Lemonheads, 1992's It's a Shame About Ray), it is pretty much how I felt about Lovey (1990), The Lemonheads major-label debut on Atlantic Records, when I started listening to it again this week.

But after only a couple of days, I changed my opinion. There is no indication that Christgau had anything more than a superficial familiarity with Taang! bands such as The Lemonheads, Bullet LaVolta and Moving Targets, bands that were powering the Grunge revolution before it turned into a Grand Barbecue the summer of 1990 when Sonic Youth released Goo on Geffen Records.

What is not readily recalled is that Lovey was released in July shortly after Goo. Considering that it would be another year before major-label honchos would bring Nirvana to market, not to mention Hardcore founding fathers fIREHOSE and Meat Puppets, we have to ask ourselves the question, What did the corporate recording industry power brokers see in The Lemonheads to put them in the same bracket as Sonic Youth?

And here is what I concluded: The Lemonheads were not signed by Atlantic to be the equivalent of a Grunge Bobby Sherman act; if that were the case, the label would not have allowed Dando to make "Ballarat," an homage to Charles Manson's Helter Skelter eschatology, the first cut on Lovey. And while "Ballarat" might not be the equal of Sonic Youth's "Tunic (Song for Karen)," I would argue that it is of a piece (and that is not pretty boy Grunge).

The next clue is that of all the Taang! back catalog songs selected to appear on Lovey it was "Left for Dead," a re-titled "Clang Bang Clang" from Creator (1988), that made the cut; it is a truly great song that points clearly to what Atlantic had planned for The Lemonheads -- a chick-friendly Hüsker Dü.

The fact is that Lovey is loaded with grand gesture Grunge statements like "Li'l Seed" and "(The) Door," both of which are powered by the superb "guitar hero" playing of Corey Loog Brennan, filled out with an uptempo number like "Stove" and a Grunger, "Year of the Cat." As Brennan says in an interview that appears on the English fan web site devoted to Dando and The Lemonheads, "I thought that Lovey was going to sell a million copies. Then I was devastated when it semi-flopped."

But what Lovey did do is turn Dando into a Grunge heartthrob (see the video for "Half the Time" at the top of the post). I can bear witness. In last week's post I described seeing The Lemonheads at CBGBs the summer of 1989 and the only women there were the dates of the record industry guys at the back by the bar. I saw the band again at CBGBs the winter of 1991, seven or eight months after Lovey's release, and rather than being deserted, as it was the time before, the place was packed. So packed that it was difficult to move about. And most of the people at the front near the stage when Dando appeared in a 1960s-era red nylon windbreaker with racing stripes, his beautiful long blonde tresses catching the spotlights, were young middle-class women. The only explanation, given Brennan's assessment that the album semi-flopped, is that video for "Half the Time" found a passionate audience on MTV.

Hence, The Lemonheads coming pop flame-out, casually derided by Christgau as narcissistic, is set in motion by Lovey. Which is too bad because Lovey is an excellent album, one that was important to me and that I played a lot. Hearing it again repeatedly this week -- that and the fact that light is already starting to return at the end of January -- I started to feel not so bad about myself. I realized that at 26 years of age I was a solid householder, but one who nonetheless was hounded by the troika that has felled many a man -- work, women and alcohol. Maybe to become who we are we need to go back and figure out who we were.

Flyin' the Flannel

Good short interview with Mike Watt. He roams quickly and freely over many topics -- the story behind the cover photo of Double Nickels on the Dime (1984), Punk and the origin of the flannel shirt look, Richard Hell, etc. But what struck me is the importance of Flyin' the Flannel (1991). Watt's father was dying of cancer while fIREHOSE was in the studio recording the album, the band's major-label debut; the Gulf War was raging.

That was an important time for me as well. I was back in New York City, abandoned by my wife, street fighting, drinking. Then, at the time Flyin' in the Flannel is released in April, I met my girlfriend Mary and I stabilized.

I have to get me a copy of Flyin' the Flannel. I had it on cassette tape, which was played repeatedly back in the day. "Losers, Boozers and Heroes." What a song!

"He's second in line/But he don't try no harder."

Hippies vs. Punks: A Digression on the Avant-Garde

Every Friday evening we've been exploring that short period of time in the 1970's -- 1975 to 1979 -- when the Hippies were wiped out as the avant-garde in the West by the Punks. The hope is that by understanding why it happened -- and happened so quickly -- we might gain insight into how it is that the larger paradigm, what we have named neoliberalism, has us in a chokehold today. What's the connection you ask? Because neoliberalism was launched at the same time that the Hippies were wiped out by the Punks.

Tonight a digression; we're going to jump a decade forward to the late 1980's, the last hurrah of the Punks. I say Punk but what I'm really talking about here is underground rock'n'roll, and in particular hardcore as practiced by those bands featured on SST Records. If ever I considered myself belonging to an avant-garde it was when I was a young man in the late 1980's listening to hardcore.

I forgot how passionately I felt about guys like Mike Watt and George Hurley until I posted a letter that described seeing them play at Columbia in the spring of 1990. D. Boon had died at the end of 1985, but Watt and Hurley carried on as fIREHOSE with ed fROMOHIO handling the lead guitar and most of the singing. I considered them true artists, pure and above reproach. They were blazing the trail, and I was dutifully trying to follow along.

When I had a record player I owned a copy of If'n. It came out while I still lived in Berkeley, but I didn't get into it until I moved to New York City in 1988. The album cover represents everything about that time for me. I look at the album cover and I remember what it feels like to be of the avant-garde.

The kachina dolls, the flannel shirts, the pictorial homage to Hüsker -- add Surfer Rosa, drunken devotion to Neil Young's Ditch Trilogy and Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation and you get an idea of where I and a lot of other people were at; the same place that provided the last rock'n'roll "Great Barbeque" for the corporate Leviathan; the place that created Grunge.

It's painful to contemplate.

But before Grunge, and its corporate excess and crass commercialism, there was a hardcore vanguard in this country. Yes, it was predominantly white. Yes, it was urban and university-oriented. But it was a vanguard nonetheless. To hear what it sounded like listen to the last track off If'n, "Thunder Child," sung by Watt:

The Colt 45 Chronicle #11

I find it hard to believe that I mailed this letter, number 11 from a collection of New York City epistles that are arranged in no order (I'm taking them straight off the top). Addressed to my college friend Shale, who I doubt appreciated it, I was obviously very drunk. The first story referred to was a going-away night-on-the-town thrown for me by my supervisor at Deloitte Touche, which was then located on one of the top floors of the north tower of the World Trade Center (this was before the basement 1993 truck bombing). What I remember about that going-away night (I was leaving for the Emerald City) is that we stayed until the strip club shut down, and at that point all the men who were in there, besides a large bouncer, started wrestling with each other (hence, the "stupid homoerotic men").

Story number two refers to a Saturday morning that fIREHOUSE oddly played on the grass at the center of Columbia University's campus. Ed fROMOHIO, Watt and Hurley sounded great. I talked to both Watt and Hurley; I gave Hurley a sheet of paper for the set list. I ended up drinking three quarts of beer quickly. This impeded me in story three, going to see a Peter Greenaway film with my buddy Gary's wife, Eleni. The movie was so intense and I was so drunk I excused myself and hung out in the Men's Room for about 15 minutes.

Story four is an ancient complaint that a son has against his father. We watched Super Bowl XXIII together (Joe Montana to John Taylor with 34 seconds to go!) and had a great time. No drinking, no hostility. I was very relaxed, nursing wounds from a Saturday night fight on Haight Street. I don't know why I'm beefing about my father here in the context of Super Bowl XXIII. Maybe I'm figuring out that there's a familial connection to drunkenness and insanity.

Spring 1990

Shale, as they say in the sports page, here's the skinny.

I'm flying out of here the 1st. Ashley's got an apartment down at 116th and Morningside right next door to Columbia University (we're subletting our apartment through September).

Friday April 20th was my last day at the accounting firm. I celebrated by heading to a strip joint with my boss and this gay word processor from the Report Department where I work.

We dropped down 21 stories to the 78th floor, what's called the SKYLOBBY. Here's an explanation of drinking and writing: ecstasy is too easy; you've got to make a profession of it; and the key is to do it over and over again until you get used to it so you can capture the pith of it, the fiber of it; drinking and writing is done out of complete respect for the ecstatic -- the excrement of joy.

Four stories: 1) strip joint on the corner of Rector Street and Trinity Place (ink wet black hyperbolic young stupid men old streets drizzling like a plague; the great visitation like an atom bomb nuclear nightmare; Hobbes' man as errant wolf bubonic leviathan, when push comes to shove, the soiled and skinned-ness and hate of stupid homoerotic men); 2) fIREHOUSE and the magic of time and the beauty of greatness, of heroism, and the simplicity and wholesomeness of the world, and the perfection of rain green grass and mud wrapped in clear thick plastic in the paradise of academy's pasture (and me, with a quart of Miller, the only one drinking), but more than anything, the greatness goodness the strength the magnanimity and wealth of decency that makes Mike Watt and George Hurley who they were and still abide to be to me and you (heroism can't be beat; it can beat time; that's the key ----- after all that's been said and done, that I should shake hands (me with bloodied cat-scratched palm) and talk with tongue to men that to me are my hope for life, brings philosophy to a standstill); 3) movie: THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER -- total and complete indulgence in violence and gratuity and excessiveness of life, that light is bound to shit and the black (they make the archangel gynecologist eat his transcendence and lightness (the feminine principle is in between, having to reconcile both forces, light and dark)) -- anyway, the perfectness of man and wife seeing this film together, not my wife, but another man's, and this my philosophy, my point of view, thoroughly represented, Bataille's world on screen without the obligatory optimism that always accompanies philosophical writing/representation, but the full-bellied nausea that is synonymous with overeating and the too much of life, the dark dream, the dark forces that you will always have to encounter no matter what; 4) my Dad is crazy and disrespectful (but that's what happens when you're a drunk and don't have anything else going on -- you look to enliven people at all costs -- interaction no holds barred), but  what does it mean to have a crazy father, a crazy castrator? It means you have total freedom to do whatever you want to do (and at the same time a complete burden), and that's rare. So I should really make the best of it, and do everything that's in my power to follow hardship's course, which means buying truck and working, writing and working labor, and when you're staid and sober -- read and read and read and write down your thoughts about the reading.

I started this story before I ever thought of it. Superbowl Sunday and I went into my father's bedroom in my grandmother's house and grabbed down out of the bookshelf one of my old books, Lucretius, and I kept it by me the whole game on a stand with a lamp (high five with my Dad's crippled hand) and it was a bad game until the 4th quarter (oh my god, the synchronicity, during the Christmas game Gary and I coming back uptown to this place and smoking our homegrown dope and watching the last game of the regular season, the Cincinnati Begals and Minnesota Vikings, Rick Fenney) and the 49ers came back and won thanks to the all-ness of Joe Montana (and once again I'm right) -- anyway, it's all wrapped up in ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE, -- and what happened from there?