Hippies vs. Punks: The Leaving Trains' Fuck (1987)

There is a moment when everything is clear. Ideas are fully revealed. Bright, solid, bold. Then it's back to befuddlement.

What happened to the wide-open horizon of my youth? --Work happened.

One loses track. The job takes over. Sometimes it's a woman. Sometimes it's drugs and alcohol. Sometimes it's poor health. Mine is the job.

When I was 23 I owned this album. I couldn't figure it out. Now that I am 53, I was able to figure it out.

What I remember about The Leaving Trains is that they were fronted by a guy, a super-hipster, a crossdresser junkie a la the New York Dolls, by the name of "Falling James" Moreland.

If you Google The Leaving Trains today, or Falling James, you won't find much: A Wikipedia entry. A Discogs page. A relatively recent blog post about Moreland's failed marriage to Courtney Love (he preceded Kurt Cobain to the altar). Then some links which allude to his work as a writer for the L.A. Weekly. That's basically it.

What I seem to recall about The Leaving Trains and Fuck is that SST Records actively promoted the band -- and this particular album -- as the immediate "shape of things to come." So as a young devotee of SST I took note.

But, as I mentioned in a previous post, I threw in the towel after a few listens. The aesthetic was too hard, resistant, slick; too junkie cool. I was a heart-on-your-sleeve guy, not a hipster.

Over the years I continued to carry a torch for this record though because it is associated in my mind with the spring of 1988, my girlfriend Stacey and her railroad apartment on the Oakland-Berkeley border near the Alcatel Bottle Shop. At the time, my horizon was unblinkered; the future seemed infinite.

When I heard Fuck again in February, as I mentioned before, I thought I was listening to a Fleshtones album. Lenny Kaye's "Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968" influenced underground rock'n'roll throughout the 1980s, as did the Velvet Underground.

A breakdown of the 14 songs of Fuck reveal a Punk-heavy album:

1. "Temporal Slut" -- SST Slam Dance Weltanschauung
2. "How Can I Explode" -- Fleshtones
3. "What Cissy Said" -- Lou Reed VU vibe, could be the best song
4. "The Horse Song" -- Iggy Pop cover from the early '80s
5. "Disasters" -- Rockabilly number
6. "Walking With You" -- Punk number
7. "Sleep" -- Another Punk number
8. "With Dr. A.W.O.L." -- Another Lou Reed number
9. "27 Days" -- Another Punk number
10. "So Fucked Up" -- Album cover; reminds me of Stacey's railroad apartment
11. "I Don't Know What I'm Doing Here" -- Lenny Kaye's Nuggets
12. "Violent Sex" -- Black Flag number
13. "Welcome to New York" -- Another Punk number, West Coast critique of NYC
14. "What the President Meant to Say" -- Negativlandesque take on Iran-Contra hearings

It is a moving between styles in a limited style alphabet of the underground rock'n'roll avant-garde of the 1980s -- with an emphasis on L.A. Punk. When I say I "got" Fuck after 30 years, this is what I got. It is an accomplished -- one might even say breathtaking -- encapsulation of the West Coast rock'n'roll underground of the 1980s: predominantly Hardcore, a little Rockabilly, a fair amount of Velvet Underground, a respectful embrace of Garage Rock, dexterously tied together at the end by an ambitious sonic sculpture political commentary.

All in all an amazing document.

Futures come and go. The present is dominated by the promise of futures that never arrive. The Leaving Trains' Fuck was pretty much obsolete before the end of 1988. Its slick, hip, fast, Nuggety sound was replaced by a Hardcore reinterpretation of Classic Rock. Time moves on and we forget the futures that once existed for us. I rediscovered the future of 1987 this February past.

Hippies vs. Punks: A Promise of What's to Come

The last Hippies vs. Punks post was back at the end of August, nearly eight months ago. It is not as if I have stopped listening to or thinking about music. It's that a series of crises erupted at work. By the time things settled down in February I had figured out what I wanted to say, but a couple of things changed since last Summer that so far have prevented me from dipping back into the exploration of why, how, when the Hippies die off in the mid- to late-70s, to be replaced by the Punks.

First, my physical conditioning cratered. Week after week of 60-hour work-weeks prevented me from exercising. I was in survival mode for months. After a while when you don't exercise, you get weak. And when you get weak, your ability to produce diminishes; your discipline disappears; basically, you become another species.

Second, the demands placed upon me by my job, though no longer necessitating six-day work-weeks, are significantly more substantial than pre-crisis. Subsequently, I've had to slowly improve my physical conditioning before I can start sitting for hours in front of the computer on the weekend or get up early on a Friday morning (4:00 AM), which is how I used to do Hippies vs. Punks.

At the beginning of February, as the sunlight started to creep back from its winter recess, I happened to hear The Leaving Trains' Fuck (1987). I was in my kitchen preparing dinner when James Moreland's "Temporal Slut" shuffled on my iPod docking station. I couldn't place it. I thought it might be one of the later Fleshtones albums I purchased when I posted on Hexbreaker last April.

A couple more songs played and I still couldn't place it. Finally, I went and looked at the iPod. I saw that it was The Leaving Trains' Fuck which I had downloaded several months ago after I saw that the band's oeuvre was finally available for purchase and digital download. I think the last time I looked, 2014 or 2015, the only recordings available online were YouTube cuts.

At one time I owned Fuck. I had purchased it either in late 1987 or early 1988, but I never managed to get a handle on its hard, slick LA thrash sound. Much like my unsuccessful attempts at mastering Back Flag's My War and Hüsker Dü's Land Speed Record, I tossed in the sponge after several attempts, never really to listen to it again.

And while I apparently didn't remember much of the record's sound, I do remember the cover art:

A cloudy firmament conjuring up heaven's pearly gates juxtaposed with the basic building block of profanity. A kind of perfection, a marriage of the sacred and the profane whose semiotic economy one would be hard pressed to equal.

And when I think about Fuck, I think about Stacey. Stacey was my girlfriend right before I married my ex-wife. This was a time -- 1988 -- that SST Records seemed to significantly increase the number of bands signed to the label and the records which those bands produced. The horizon seemed wide open, free, robust and filled with rock'n'roll.

I must have listened to Fuck more than 25 times in February. I figured it out. I got it, which is something of an achievement given that it was three decades in coming. I am even prepared to do a song-by-song breakdown of the record.

But what it really got me thinking about was the period from 1987 to 1994, and how in this time frame I was alive, my horizon was truly open, and how everything since then has been of a diminished nature.

Rock'n'roll begins its death march in 1994. There are some bright spots along the way, including some manifest perfection in the form of Post-Rock and Alt-Country. But its descent to cultural marginality is clear; Kendrick Lamar's Pulitzer for music should make that obvious. As NYT rock critique Jon Pareles says in today's paper ("Kendrick Lamar Shakes Up the Pulitzer Game: Let’s Discuss"):

To me, it looks like some of the squawks are complaints about exclusivity being breached. And if you ask me, it should have happened sooner. I hereby nominate, for a retrospective Pulitzer, Public Enemy’s 1988 album “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back”: an experimental sonic bombshell, a verbal torrent, a mind expander. For that matter, the Pulitzers were late on Kendrick Lamar, too: “To Pimp a Butterfly,” from 2015, has even more musical breadth than “DAMN.” (which has plenty).

All of March I re-explored 1987 and 1988 in popular music. It's an amazing period. I saw Public Enemy perform at Nassau Coliseum in 1988.

What we shall do in the weeks ahead is back-burner 1975-1979 in favor of 1987-1994. Big-ticket culturally-unifying rock'n'roll dies with Kurt Cobain. There was an off-ramping period with Oasis and Radiohead, but 25 years later Hip Hop is the cultural king. No doubt about it.

The Hippie and the Punk are both cliches. Yes, they still resonate in the right audience. But for how much longer?