Hippies vs. Punks: ALL's Trailblazer

Recorded live at CBGBs during the summer of 1989 -- the same summer and venue I witnessed The Lemonheads perform music off their new album Lick (1989) -- and named after a portable camping commode (featured on the album's cover art), Trailblazer (1990) is my favorite album by the too-little appreciated Pop Hardcore Punk group ALL.

ALL is the band that was formed in the wake of the dissolution of Descendents after Milo Auckerman left the group to pursue a graduate degree in biochemistry. ALL is basically Descendents without Milo. At first Dave Smalley was Milo's replacement; then the able Scott Reynolds (who performs on Trailblazer) took over the lead vocals until leaving the band in 1993 (which is when I stopped buying ALL albums).

I listened to a lot of ALL after the breakup of my marriage and my return to the East Coast. I lived in a studio apartment in the Washington Heights neighborhood. By climbing my fire escape to the roof I could take in a soothing view of the greenbelt of Fort Tryon Park and Inwood Park hugging the Hudson River. Up in that northern tip of Manhattan there were hawk and raccoon. I would run in Fort Tryon and do my shopping at a Korean green grocer on 181st Street. I felt good up there.

Listening to ALL is like listening to the heartbeat of a late 1980s California young man nourished on SST Records. You feel yourself jogging out into the surf and butterflying through the breakers. If you ever want to get a sense of what our youthful sensibilities were at the end of Reagantime, Trailblazer is an excellent document.

The subject matter is the usual one for bubble-gum pop -- girl/boy trouble; but it is treated from a California Hardcore perspective, which is to say with a cynical honesty. So the combination that results -- a pining earnestness matched by withering self-deprecation -- is embracing and novel.

What is also unique about ALL as found here in Trailblazer are the bass and drums of Karl Alvarez and Bill Stevenson, respectively. Athleticism was always an essential, though never explicitly acknowledged, part of the California Hardcore ethos. In Trailblazer, with the sound of the CBGBs mob roaring its approval, one feels almost as if he is listening to a Punk Flashdance.

Suffering through Keith Jarrett's "Mirrors." Saved by The Lemonheads' "Nothing True." World War IV.

I can't say that I am Keith Jarrett expert. I do like his music. But this morning I went out, iPod earbuds attached, for an hour-plus run, half of which was accompanied by "Mirrors" off Keith Jarrett's Arbour Zena (1975), and I suffered acutely. It felt like I was being tortured. The strings of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra cloyed like diethyl ether; Jan Garbarek's sax waddled and dribbled; and Jarrett's keys tinkled like a fat crazy housewife alone with her ironing board on a weekday afternoon.

To top it off, I was exhausted and gasping for breath. I'm working my way back from a significant injury. And if I am not at absolute zero, I'd say I'm definitely below five on a scale of ten, with ten being god-like conditioning and 5.5 being the ability to run at an eight-minute-mile pace over a distance of 5,000 meters.

"Mirrors" lasts for almost 28 minutes. I became transfixed with its interminable length. When was it going to end? Would it ever end? The morning was overcast. A drizzly rain fell. Hardly anyone was out. My run slowed to a jog. The jog slowed to a septuagenarian shuffle. The shuffle towards the end became a mummy's plod.

Finally, relief came in the form of "Nothing True" off The Lemonheads' first LP, Hate Your Friends (1987). What a difference. The harmonizing of a young Evan Dando is unparalleled. 

 

In case you missed it, Alissa Rubin filed a story yesterday, "5 Bombs Explode in Baghdad as Dispute Continues With Jordan," which brought home to me how above board World War IV is. Jordan, which does nothing without the explicit clearance from USG, hosted in Amman this past Wednesday Sunni groups allied with Islamic State in its war with Iraq:

The Jordanian government was not involved in the meeting, but after the groups put out a strident statement asking other nations not to side with the Iraqi government in its conflict with Sunni militants, the Iraqis were angry that Jordan had allowed the meeting to take place.

Iraq recalled its ambassador and the Jordanians apologized on Friday, but Iraqi Parliament members are accusing Jordan of knowing the groups were there and not arresting them.

The groups, which included tribes, former Baath Party members and the Islamic Army, a radical group that has carried out multiple attacks against the government, have been willing to tolerate the presence in Iraq of the militants known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, as a means to get rid of the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

Aliya Nusaif, an Iraqi Parliament member from Mr. Maliki’s State of Law Party, criticized the Jordanians for permitting the meeting, saying, “The government of Jordan should be familiar with such activities.” 

That they did not prevent it or even arrest the people participating suggested “that they knew about it,” she said.

Bear this in mind as the United States continues to press its case in public that Russia is to blame for the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Rather than working for a ceasefire, the Obama administration seems intent on framing Moscow. For an interesting counterpoint to the Russophobic media onslaught, check out this article, "The crash of the Boeing 777 is a failed global staged act," by Col. Igor Maatev, which I gleaned from Niqnaq's blog.

Hair Cut

Every five weeks or so I go to the barber and get a hair cut. The shop I go to is in my neighborhood, very close to my apartment building; it is actually a unisex place of the Punk variety.

I've been going there for years -- since I last lived with a woman. My last live-in girlfriend would cut my hair. She had a pair of electric shears. It is too much trouble for me to cut my own hair. I did it a few times. It makes a huge mess and there was always a fist-sized spot on the back of my head, right side, that I couldn't get.

Last night I ducked into the shop on my way home from work. I sat down in the chair. The owner, a large woman with multicolored dreads and tattoos, draped me in a cutting cape and asked me what size blade she should put on her shears. I told her, "Two all the way around."

She set to work.

I asked her how she had been. She proceeded to tell me about how she had moved to an adjoining town and how her car had died and how now she was forced to take two buses back and forth and it took a long time, like three hours a day.

While she spoke I faced myself in a large mirror. It was an unpleasant surprise. The person I was looking at was not the person I imagined myself to be. The person I was looking at was old and tired. His hair was almost entirely gray; his eyes had dark circles. This guy seemed beaten, meek; no gangsta lean there. "Wow," I thought. "Things have gotten pretty bad."

I tipped my barber and paid the cashier. I walked outside into a sunny evening. Next to me, waiting for the traffic light to change, was a tall healthy young woman in nylon jogging shorts and a sleeveless runner's top. She bounced in place on the balls of her feet. The light changed and off she went looking beautiful.

"I am not in the game anymore." -- That was my realization.

"The clock on the wall I can no longer fool," to quote The Lemonheads from "Ride With Me," the fourth track off the band's major-label debut, Lovey (1990).

I've been walking around for years thinking I'm still in the game, but I'm not.

But, hey, it's okay. I'm thankful for what I've got. Believe me.

Hippies vs. Punks: The Last Waltz, Pt. 3, Music From Big Pink

Tonight caps a work week where I was put fully in mind of the Hobbes quote "that Man to Man is an errant wolf." In my case, a wolf, perched atop an ergonomically correct chair, trapped in a carpeted, air-conditioned pen, transfixed by a flat screen. Granted, no one is lighting me up with mortar fire -- it's not truly a "war of all against all" -- but it is, after a fashion, a hell realm.

Fortunately I can still sprint. I sped across six busy of lanes of International Boulevard traffic to catch the bus to the train station, and then I sprang up four flights of stairs and jogged over a skybridge and up an escalator to enter the train car just as it was about to depart. A miserable work week gives way as a promising weekend begins.

Last weekend I kept thinking that it was June. But it's not. It's already August. The light here is already starting to recede ever so slightly. What a joy it was on Saturday night to be alone -- a bachelor at home -- cooking a sirloin and listening to Music From Big Pink (1968):

It was as if after nearly 50 years of existence I have arrived at some sort of dialectical synthesis. The past sublated into a healthy, relaxed, unitary present free of man-woman conflict. For a musical accompaniment I could ask for nothing more than "Tears of Rage," the first track Richard Manuel/Bob Dylan masterpiece:

And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse

When Levon Helm died last year I received a request from my mother, who is a resident in an assisted-living facility, for a copy of Music From Big Pink. Under the impression that I had a copy in my iTunes, I assured her that I'd have it in the mail right away. To my surprise it turned out that I was mistaken. All I had on my computer was The Band (1969) and The Best of the Band (1976). I promptly went online and downloaded the 2000 digital remaster and burned the old gal a copy.

All my other recordings of The Band were on magnetic tape. The copy of Music From Big Pink that I thought I had was actually a used cassette that I purchased the first summer I lived in the Emerald City 23 years ago. If you don't count Planet Waves (1974) and The Basement Tapes (1975), which are Dylan and Band collaborations that were staples of my university days, it was the first album of The Band's that I owned. For me it will always be the best. It is linked in my mind with my first run at being a bachelor.

In 1990 I left my wife in New York City and flew to San Francisco. From there I took a Greyhound to Southern Oregon where I purchased a used Jeep Gladiator pick-up manufactured in the late 1960s. It was a "high, rat-colored car" (which is Flannery O'Connor's description of Hazel Motes' automobile in Wise Blood), and I drove it north up I-5 to Seattle, entering the city the morning after Randy Johnson threw a no-hitter against Detroit.

I worked construction that summer and jogged the ribbon of greenery that I run to this day and listened to Music From Big Pink, Sonic Youth's Goo (1990), The Lemonhead's Lovey (1990), Nick Cave & the Bad Seed's The Good Son (1990) and plenty of Neil Young's Tonight's the Night (1975). I drank Midnight Dragon malt liquor and slept on the floor and read about Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in the national edition of the New York Times. I was a young man alone, estranged from his wife, but okay with it. Rick Danko's cover of "Long Black Veil" spoke to me.

At the beginning of fall that year I traveled back to New York City in an unsuccessful attempt to patch things up with the wife. It was then that The Last Waltz (1978) -- that end-of-the-line love song to arena rockers -- became my manifesto, my lifeline. But my first love is Music From Big Pink. It's my bachelor's anthem, a perfect organic whole of funky, folksy, iridescent, soulful, regenerative music that occupies a timeless space -- a triumphant tribute to the Hippie wisdom contained in Timothy Leary's "turn on, tune in, drop out."  -- It can done! The Band proved it at Big Pink.

Tawana Brawley Retrospective + Lemonheads' Creator

The day after famous former mayor of New York City and confirmed bachelor Ed Koch died I read his obituary and posted my comments, which drew attention to the Tawana Brawley controversy as a factor in Koch's failure to win a fourth term.

The other day a video -- decent, but not stellar -- was posted on the New York Times web site recapping the case. It's the twenty-fifth anniversary. The video, which is 14 minutes, is heavy on the investigation and on the incendiary aspects of some of Al Sharpton's statements and light on the social milieu that produced all the race crimes; it doesn't even mention the murder of Yusuf Hawkins.

The archive-project post from this past Sunday was written at a time when Tawana Brawley was probably on the television in the next room. At the time I was addicted to the Lemonheads' Creator (1988). Here's "Postcard," with Ben Deily on vocals: