Hippies vs. Punks: The Interpol Oeuvre

I think I mentioned in a previous post that I've been listening to Interpol's El Pintor (2014). Recently on Fridays, after I've spent the week immersed in whatever record I am studying for the Hippies vs, Punks post, I find that hearing Interpol again is like slaking a great thirst. I don't know what exactly it is, but I suspect that it has something to do with disappearing testosterone.

When Interpol's debut full length, Turn on the Bright Lights, appeared in 2002 it had a great impact on me. Part of the millennial Post-Punk revival (think Franz Ferdinand), Turn on the Bright Lights was recommended to me by a buddy and coworker. I was going through a breakup with my girlfriend of 11 years while struggling with a return to alcoholism after six-plus years of teetotaling; at the same time, I was getting traction as a local politico, even quoted once in a while in the weekly city newspaper.

It was an intense time. Looking back now, I can clearly see it for what it was, a classic end-of-young-manhood overextension and freak out, some sort of ego-driven self-immolation. And there was no better soundtrack for such a production than Interpol's guitar-drenched derivative (of Joy Division and Sonic Youth) Turn on the Bright Lights.

El Pintor is Interpol's fifth studio album in 12 years. While succeeding records have not been able to match the instrumental power of the band's debut, all are remarkably consistent. Interpol has not monkeyed much with their sound. You don't get extreme creative pivots. There are stable components: the defensive restrained vocals of frontman Paul Banks; the pulsating, chiming guitar of Daniel Kessler; and the efficient score-keeping drums of Sam Fogarino.

The album prior to El Pintor, the eponymous Interpol (2010), I listened to a lot. Its release roughly coincided with my last lay off. The three months I was unemployed I did a lot of running, usually five days a week. I had Interpol loaded on my iPod. I bonded with Interpol, as I did with the follow-up to Turn on the Bright Lights, the commercially successful Antics (2004), which was also a time I was laid off.

The only Interpol record I never really meshed with is the band's one non-Matador album, 2007's Our Love to Admire, released on Capitol Records. It is a perfectly good album. It just happened to coincide with a time that I was fully employed and with a new girlfriend. So I guess I didn't need any lengthy testosterone-laden sonic sojourns.

Last night walking home from the train station listening to "PDA" from Turn on the Bright Lights, it hit me what I have been after, what holy grail I have been searching for in the years I have been listening to Interpol recordings.

One hot Friday in July I got stoned with a guy after work. He was a techie, a Photoshop guru who had been hired by the magazine where I worked as a production coordinator. He was an offensive guy who had been after me to get high with him for a while. On this particular day I relented.

Afterwards I walked over to 8th Avenue from 25th Street. My girlfriend, the one who I would break up with tens years later, the year of Interpol's debut album, worked at a magazine on 8th and 34th and I was going to meet her. We were to take the subway to Brooklyn where she lived in a spacious railroad apartment that occupied the entire top floor of a tenement building on 2nd Street near 4th Avenue.

It was hot, and I was stoned. The sun was scorching. When I got to 8th Avenue, which at that time, the early 1990s, was pretty dicey between 23rd and Madison Square Garden, populated by junkies, panhandlers, thieves, petty toughs -- the urban milieu that used to be commonplace in New York City before gentrification began in earnest during "Giulianitime." (It is surprising how many Whole Foods pop up as I Google Map some of these streets now.)

As I walked up 8th I noticed a young blond woman in modest professional attire pulling a suitcase behind her. I figured she was making her way up to the Garden for the Democratic National Convention. The denizens of the street had already started to prey on her, and it was apparent that she was unnerved.

So in the full flower of my street-fighter 27-year-old youth, clad in my red 501s, my Black Flag bars t-shirt, my Carolina boots, arms muscled from curling a barbell, waist narrow from running, I strolled up beside her. I was not close enough to exchange a greeting, but near to where the junkies and thieves thought we might be together.

Suddenly the gauntlet that she had been walking fell back. She looked around to see what had happened. She saw that it was me. And that look of recognition in her eyes -- she was young and attractive -- that I was the reason she was no longer being harassed, well, it is hard to describe how it made me feel because it is such a core male fantasy; but in my stoned state it felt for a moment there like I was Clint Eastwood swinging his arms up the avenue.

In four blocks we arrived at the edge of Madison Square Garden. She crossed the street toward the blue police sawhorse barricades and the many satellite television trucks. I walked up the steps of the U.S. Post Office across from the Garden and sat down in the high heat. And I remember I had two very clear realizations as I studied all the satellite trucks with their parabolic dishes pointed to the heavens in a religious fashion: 1) This -- meaning the Democratic National Convention -- was obviously too important to be free and spontaneous -- money clearly controlled the outcome; and 2) the planet was getting too hot.

Ten years later, as my relationship with the best girlfriend I ever had disintegrated and I looked forward to trading it in for some ego-addled male fantasy of being a "player," I connected with NYC's Interpol because -- as I realized last night walking home in the July sunshine -- Turn on the Bright Lights aurally captures how I felt when I escorted the young lady up 8th Avenue to the 1992 Democratic National Convention.

But, as I was to painfully learn, there is a big difference between 37 and 27. Alcohol doesn't get you as high; sex cannot be pursued with the same abandon. Now that I am 50 and have given up both for years I think Bob Dylan pretty much says it it all when he sings in "Highlands":

The sun is beginning to shine on me
But it’s not like the sun that used to be
The party’s over and there’s less and less to say
I got new eyes
Everything looks far away

Hippies vs. Punks: Balin (1981)

Something unusual happened on the way home from work last night. I was on the train reading; I had my earbuds in, and I was listening to the research subject for this week's Hippies vs. Punks post, Marty Balin's solo debut full-length record, Balin (1981), when suddenly I could take no more and thumbed my iPod over to Interpol's El Pintor (2014).

This is out of the ordinary because even taxing albums, like last week's Land Speed Record (1982), I am able to fully immerse myself in repeated non-stop listening for the duration of the work week. But Balin's slick commercial amalgamation of disco-pop-rock proved too much for me.

To get the sonic flavor of the album all one need do is sample the lead track, "Hearts" (see the YouTube above), which reached #8 on the singles pop charts, the highest position a song by Marty Balin ever achieved.

"Hearts" is a perfect example of the default sensibility of white middle-class America at the dawn of the Reagan Age. A ballad dominated by its "Cinderella's Ball" high school slow dance synthesized keyboards and its back beat, "Hearts" conjures up a time of suburban prosperity, stability and safety.

The other single from Balin to chart was "Atlanta Lady," another lite rock ballad with a discernible back beat:

Interestingly, Marty Balin didn't write any of the material on Balin besides sharing a credit for "Lydia!," my favorite track on the record, a disco rocker that has the Jefferson Airplane founder singing about subways and freeway overpasses:

Balin is a largely pristine commercial album. It reached #35 on the Billboard charts. (The only clunker is "Elvis and Marilyn," a song co-authored by Leon Russell, Kim Fowley and Dyan Diamond.) As Stephen Thomas Erlewine reports in his AllMusic review, Balin is a valuable aural document of the early 1980s rock-disco-soul steady state:

Marty Balin left Jefferson Starship in 1978, not long after "Miracles" gave the group a Top Ten soft rock hit in 1975, thereby providing a window into the world the singer inhabited when he went solo in 1981 with Balin. He largely abandoned songwriting -- he collaborated on one song on the record -- in the pursuit of being an AOR superstar. The 1981 eponymous album was indeed a hit thanks to the gorgeous soft rock staple "Hearts," written by longtime friend Jesse Barish, as was a good chunk of the rest of the album. Some of Balin follows the direction of "Hearts" -- "Atlanta Lady" and "Music Is the Light" both softly shimmer -- but the album overall plays like a sampler of the mainstream rock sounds of 1981. On "Spotlight" and "I Do Believe in You," guitars are cranked up to 11 so they can fill an arena, "Tell Me More" cops some of Michael McDonald's Doobie Brothers disco-soul, and "You Left Your Mark on Me" and "Elvis and Marilyn" flirt with new wave while "Lydia!" outright embraces it, sounding a bit like Donnie Iris. Maybe this hodgepodge didn't do much to establish Balin as a recording star at the time -- certainly it didn't please some Jefferson Starship fans -- but as an artifact of early-'80s rock, it's wildly fun and somewhat compelling.

I chose Balin for today's post because it was produced in 1981, and I thought it would be interesting to contrast the creative efforts of a Founding Father of the San Francisco Sound of the 1960s (the sound more than any other that defined the Hippie Zeitgeist) with a Hardcore Punk album like Land Speed Record or a New Wave Hip Hop/House Music record like Tom Tom Club, both also produced in 1981. Plus, having recently viewed Gimme Shelter, I was impressed by Marty Balin's display of personal physical courage when he jumped into the pit in front of the Altamont stage and mixed it up with the Hells Angels.

The takeaway is the obvious one. By 1981 all fight or even the ability to critique society was bleached out of the Hippies. They were integrated back into the mainstream capitalist paradigm as entrepreneurs, lawyers, tradesmen, accountants, what have you; they were looking for and sometimes achieving commercial comfort. Of course a society with a background sound of Balin, The Doobie Brothers and Earth Wind & Fire is long gone. It seems from this vantage point a society more orderly than anything we will ever again encounter. Maybe it was that orderliness, that saccharine commercial tidiness with the compact clean guitar solos set off in spotlight which proved too much for me.

Hippies vs. Punks: Joy Division's Closer (1980)

Mindful of the need to maintain symmetry between posts devoted to Hippies and those devoted to Punks, I cast about for a Punk album to spotlight this week. Initially, I thought I might do a Damaged (1981) or Golden Shower of Hits (1983) immersion. West Coast Hardcore Punk was the amniotic fluid of my young-man youth.

Then I struck upon the idea of Joy Division's Closer (1980) since I had just finished up an immersion in Joy of Cooking's Closer to the Ground (1971). Closer and Closer to the Ground, respective offerings of the Punk and Hippie "Joy" bands, offer as clear a contrast between adjoining avant-gardes as one can imagine.

I don't recall listening to Closer in my youth. Unknown Pleasures (1979) was a distinct presence though. A close friend owned a copy, and it was played frequently. The suicide of Ian Curtis added to the weight of the album. One did not hear Joy Division at that time -- the early 1980s -- without thinking of Curtis having hanged himself in his kitchen. Another friend, a girlfriend of a buddy, was morbidly fascinated by Curtis' demise and seemed to always have to re-tell the story whenever we listened to Joy Division.

What I was unaware of until this week is that Curtis had been watching Werner Herzog's Stroszek prior to his suicide.

In any event, Joy Division cast a shadow in my young-man youth of the early 1980s.

That is why when a young man who I worked with asked me to listen to a new album that he was impressed with, Turn on the Bright Lights (2002) by a band called Interpol, I told him right away, authoritatively, that they were ripping off Joy Division.

Around this time there was a rediscovery of Post-Punk by the young smart set, which is probably what paved the way for the renewal Joy Division's popularity, culminating in the effective biopic Control (2007) by Anton Corbijn and the terrific Grant Gee documentary Joy Division (2007).

While Control was still in the theaters I ran into a girlfriend with whom I had recently separated and she told me that I absolutely had to see it. I took note. Not too long thereafter I saw both Control and the Gee documentary, which impressed me enough that I started to accumulate Joy Divisions' recordings.

Closer, the band's second and last studio album released two months after Curtis' death, has always remained resistant and inscrutable to me. None of the songs "pop" like say the amazing "Disorder" from Unknown Pleasures.

Nonetheless Closer is consistently rated at the same level or above Unknown Pleasures by rock critics. (Christgau gives both albums an A-minus.)

This week of immersed listening I finally figured it out. It took a beautiful sunny day of clear skies after a day or two of rain to get it, to understand all that darkness. The consistency of Closer is its key. The steady level. The steady state is all there is. That is the message. Dark and light, matter and spirit, void and substance, the charnel house and the maternity ward -- it is all the same on the astral plane. That is what Closer tells us. It's a very Hippie message. It took a walk in the solartopia of winter's end in the Pacific Northwest to figure it out, to see it.

Listen to Joy Division's Closer sometime soon.