This morning will continue a pattern started with the last Hippies vs. Punks post (on Contact High with the Godz) -- a quick hitter on an important Hippie-era recording that I am exploring thanks to having recently read Lester Bangs' essay, "Do the Godz Speak Esperanto?"
I've listened to One Nation Underground (1967), Pearls Before Swine's debut on ESP-Disk, several mornings this week and I've got to say it has been a real treat. I seem to have found myself in almost a constant state of stress for the last month and partly thanks to listening to One Nation Underground I found that the state has almost entirely disappeared.
One Nation Underground was recorded right before the Summer of Love and released three months before the Tet Offensive drove a stake through the heart of LBJ's Great Society. You would be hard pressed to find a better vehicle to transport you back to a time when the masses were cohering into Hippiedom. One Nation Underground is an amazing aural document, necessary listening, I think, for any serious student or dialectician who wants to understand how we ended up in our current predicament.
With my current situation -- increased pressures at work, reduced stamina because of ever-eroding physical conditioning -- it is becoming apparent to me that I will never be in a position to post Hippies vs. Punks unless I cut it short.
So here goes. The Godz first album, Contact High with the Godz (1966), is worth checking out. I'm reading Lester Bangs' Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, and he's got an essay in there devoted to the eccentric label, ESP-Disk. One of the bands ESP featured was the Godz.
Yesterday, wiped out and in bed with Scott Jurek's Eat & Run, I listened to Contact High with the Godz repeatedly. It is available on YouTube.
It is a folk music send-up by a bunch of music store clerks who can barely play their instruments; yet it nonetheless taps into a hoodoo vibe that is real and replenishing. Check it out.
In order for a society to move forward it has to be able to generate a popular vision of the future -- A WAY OUT. What makes our present age so perilous is we have lost our ability to produce a collective perception of a way out. Our current neoliberal neoconservative cultural dead end predominantly manufactures dystopian fantasies (The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad) or historical paeans (Vikings, Mad Men).
The Hippie was the new man the Western World produced at the zenith of its 1960s post-war prosperity. The Punk was the new man spawned in reaction to the Hippie's failure. The Hip Hop artist has been our new man here in the West for decades -- really since Grunge quickly collapsed under the weight of its commercial excesses twenty years ago.
I don't think there is a finer, more sensitive, honest, hopeful vision of the future -- a discourse on possibility itself -- than Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966). This is what the Western World looked like when there was still hope and the future was open. Starring a Dylanesque David Hemmings as a fashion photographer in "Swinging London," The Yardbirds appear in the middle of the film performing "Stroll On." Antonioni wanted The Who because he was entranced by Pete Townshend's guitar-smashing routine. The Who declined. Antonioni then tried to get The Velvet Underground but was unable to either because of the band's inability to secure a work permit in the UK or the prohibitive cost of transatlantic travel. So he settled on The Yardbirds; Jeff Beck did the guitar smashing.
When I last saw this film, my unemployment spring of 2011, I was struck by how fresh and new the band looked, as if they truly were pioneering new territory with no attachments to binding constraints of the past.
The Yardbirds, along with The Who, were the new men of the middle 1960s. They as much as anyone else created the Hippies and the Hippie era. This is Lester Bangs' take. The Yardbirds changed music. They brought fraying, shattering guitar distortion to the fore, and they perfected a heavy-bottom backbeat. This inspired countless imitators and knockoffs ("Punks," such as Count Five of Bangs' title essay in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung) across the broad expanse of Great Society suburban American. Out of the suburban garage emerges the Hippie.
Bangs' spontaneous-prose-style analysis is basically in line with an academic study by Michael Hicks titled Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic and Other Satisfactions (1999) I read last summer.
We all know that out of the ashes of The Yardbirds Jimmy Page forms the Hippie supergroup Led Zeppelin, an endless source of Bangs' ire (so too for the Punks) because of the band's artistic pretensions and superstar status demanding hero worship and mindless fan obeisance.
****
Last night I attended a union meeting. We voted on a tentative agreement (TA) that will more than likely result in the loss of our current health plan in favor of a cheaper one. This means that for those of us who seek medical attention regularly there will be a significant increase in out-of-pocket expenses.
I voted against the TA. Our bargaining team only met with the employer group twice, and then basically rolled over and presented us with a TA that is nothing but givebacks.
I understand that the costs to our current health have shot through the roof -- a 29% jump this year alone -- and that it cannot be maintained and in the long run we will have to move to another plan. But year after year the only thing that we focused on in our bargaining was maintaining the health plan. Now in less than two full bargaining sessions we are caving in. Unacceptable.
Nonetheless, the tentative agreement passed, and it passed by a healthy margin. People are scared and beat down and have no fight left in them. Our union representative, who is also the head of the union local and our chief negotiator with the employer as well as a trustee of our foundering health plan, took the employer's side. The message, simply put, was that we all are a bunch of monkeys easily replaced, and we are lucky to have whatever the employer gives us. So we should shut our fucking traps and take was is being offered pronto.
Needless to say, it was an unpleasant experience. One interesting sidebar was our union representative's opinion that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a.k.a., Obamacare is proving to be very damaging to union Taft-Hartley regulated health plans. There is a firewall between Taft-Hartley plans and the ACA insurance exchange; they cannot buy insurance on the exchange. Yet the ACA brought a whole host of additional costs, such as covering adult children up to the age of 26.
The crowning achievement of the Obama administration, elected with fulsome union support, is Obamacare. Obamacare will be the undoing of a basic foundation of union membership, blue-chip medical coverage. Defined-benefit pensions are almost all gone (see the recent Boeing Machinists' capitulation where they voted to go to a 401(k) plan); now, fully-paid, employer-provided health insurance. Soon belonging to a union will not mean much.
As this reckoning sinks in, the only way Democrats will be able to win elections is solely by tapping plutocrats and playing the big money game. They do this now of course. But they have managed to keep healthy numbers of working people aligned with the party because it is the lesser of two evils. After Obamacare and the death of the unions, this alignment becomes increasingly problematic.
We need new men! We must be inspired by a vision of the future as fecund as Blowup and The Yardbirds of the middle-60s. Right now there is nothing.
Today, April Fools', marks one year of commuting three hours every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Never before have I existed on so little sleep. I now squeeze in a 15-minute catnap at lunch to help me get by. When you spend your whole life (nearly a half century) getting eight hours of sleep and then suddenly you shift to getting seven hours (often less), it is rough. My training regimen has also suffered. I now run only on the weekends, not counting the sprinting and jogging I do to and from the train. Gradually, over the span of the year, my conditioning has diminished, and I have gained about ten pounds. It is a situation that if maintained will lead to a continued deterioration until some form of breakdown occurs.
A couple months back I found a damp paperback copy of Lester Bangs' Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1987) on a sidewalk near my apartment building. I was on my way out for a run. So I stowed it in the bushes for my return. Some drunken youth walking home after a night of debauchery probably dropped it. When I left my wife and New York City to make my way back to the West Coast a quarter-century ago, for about a month I stayed with my friend Niall who lived in Haight-Ashbury. He had a copy of Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, parts of which I read and enjoyed. I never read the first essay, "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: A Tale of These Times." I did last night on the train home from work. The essay originally appeared in 1971 and contains the first known reference to Punk. What captivated me though was Bangs' description of worklife (the boldface is my addition):
Why, I recall when I was in high school (oh, I told you -- that was kind of where they put you when they didn't know what to do with you -- when you were too big for the Kiddie Kokoons and too young to go out an' hafta assume what we call Manhood, which involved going at the same time every day to some weird building and doing some totally useless shit for hours on end just so you could get some bread and have everybody respect you) -- when I was in high school, we used to have some mighty snappy patter. For instance, if somebody did something stupid, we used to say, "Whattaya got, shit for brains?"
What I remember about Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung from reading it 25-years ago is Bangs' essay on The Clash. That is why I started reading the book again last night: I'm working my way towards a Hippies vs. Punks post on The Clash.
*****
UPDATE: I meant to include a link to a video that appeared recently on the Gray Lady's web site. The video tells the story of Dr. John Kitchin, a successful neurologist and psychiatrist, who abandons his career in order to skate all day on a San Diego boardwalk; in so doing, he creates a new identity for himself, Slomo. Basically, the video is a literate indictment of the insanity of the rat race. Kitchin, a.k.a., Slomo, articulates a theory how motion, the sensation of acceleration, stimulates calcium deposits in our inner ear that are somehow aligned with the center of the Earth, and all of this arouses pleasure.
Lou Reed died this past Sunday. Here is one of the items from his New York Times obituary by Ben Ratliff that caught my eye:
Beloved of Mr. Reed and not too many others, “Metal Machine Music” was four sides of electric-guitar feedback strobing between two amplifiers, with Mr. Reed altering the speed of the tape recorder; no singing, no drums, no stated key. At the time it was mostly understood, if at all, as a riddle about artistic intent. Was it his truest self? Was it a joke? Or was there no difference?
Mr. Reed wrote in the liner notes that “no one I know has listened to it all the way through, including myself,” but he also defended it as the next step after La Monte Young’s early minimalism. “There’s infinite ways of listening to it,” he told the critic Lester Bangs in 1976.
I read the obit Monday morning on the train coming into work. As an homage I listened to Metal Machine Music, which was released the summer of 1975, all the way through on Wednesday. I made another attempted go-round on Thursday, making it only halfway before I was pulled away from my desk to rearrange the conference space on the first floor. I resumed this afternoon approximately where I left off
James Wolcott in a review from August 14, 1975 in Rolling Stone calls M/M/M a masochistic indulgence:
If this album is Reed's Self Portrait, then we may have to tolerate a lot of stroboscopic sludge before he gets back on the tracks. What's most distressing is the possibility that Metal Machine Music isn't so much a knife slash at his detractors as perhaps a blade turned inward. At its very worst this album suggests masochism.
And I think there's something to it. Absorbing all that guitar feedback you can't help but feel as if you are indulging in self-punishment. The sound is the sound of radio signals bouncing through deep space; it's the sound reminiscent of the soundtrack of low-budget science fiction masterpiece Dark Star (1974); it's a sound that includes squeaking noises of small feral animals; it's the sound of the monkey-mind chattering away during that part of the race when you are done, finished, kaput but you have miles left to go -- "Stop! Give up! You're just hurting yourself." / "No. I must continue." Metal Machine Music is the sound of suffering.
But for all of that, listening to M/M/M is not unpleasant. It was appropriate that I did so at work, ear buds affixed to head, toiling away at my Bartlebyesque chores. The modern office, boneyard of Western Man, is a perfect environment to hear Metal Machine Music. No one wants to be in an office: it's a soulless, sorrowful place filled with electronic equipment and alienated people; it's not a place for pop or hard rock or really for any music other than the distorted electronic feedback sounds captured on M/M/M.
Lou Reed biographer Victor Bockris has called Metal Machine Music "the ultimate conceptual punk album and the progenitor of New York punk rock." And while this may be true, M/M/M is fundamentally an homage to drone music. Lou Reed gives a shout-out to La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, the group John Cale was a member of prior to The Velvet Underground, in the liner notes to M/M/M: "Drone cognizance and harmonic possibilities vis a vis Lamont Young's Dream Music."
A prime example of drone music is Dream House 78' 17" (1974), by its chief creator La Monte Young, with his partner Marian Zazeela and the Theatre of Eternal Music:
La Monte Young's drone music is influenced by Hindustani classical singer Pran Nath. (Lou Reed might have loathed the Hippies, but drone music is important to both.)
In the last five years Lou Reed returned to Metal Machine Music by performing as part of the Metal Machine Trio. A recording of their first live show is excellent and available for download on Lou Reed's website.
To draw an illuminating contrast, a brief inspection of an album released a month prior to M/M/M is called for. Gary Wright's The Dream Weaver (1975) is touted as the first-ever all-synthesizer pop album (if you don't count the many Wendy Carlos albums like the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange (1971), or session superstar Jim Keltner's drumming or some Ronnie Montrose guitar on one track).
Released in June 1975 The Dream Weaver peaked in the spring of 1976 at #7 on Billboard's pop album chart. I listened to it twice in a row at work today. And believe it or not, while much shorter in length than Metal Machine Music, I found it more painful to listen to. There are some decent tracks. I like "Can't Find the Judge" and "Much Higher" where Wright is doing his best to channel his inner Stevie Wonder. (The Dream Weaver features the ARP synthesizer and the Fender Rhodes electric piano, Stevie's instruments of choice from the albums of his classic period.) I'm less enamored with all the Moog Wright employs; it frequently rises from the back of the mix like a stoned zombie teenager stumbling out of a Friday night 1970s planetarium laser light show.
Gary Wright was definitely a Hippie. A buddy of George Harrison -- he played piano and organ on All Things Must Pass(1970) -- and previously the organ player and a vocalist for Spooky Tooth, Gary Wright wrote the song "Dream Weaver," which, along with "Love is Alive," reached #2 on the Billboard singles chart, after reading the Hippie manifesto Autobiography of a Yogi, a gift from George Harrison. (I grew up in the 1970s frequently glancing at the picture of Paramahansa Yogananda that adorned the front cover of his autobiography; for a couple of years there my father always seemed to be caring around a copy.)
One thing you can say about Gary Wright's The Dream Weaver, it successfully forecast the synthesizer-based, slow-dance schlock that dominated the 1980s.
The moral of the story? In 1975 the Hippie cashed in while the Punk took a courageous stand.
When you wake up in the morning with the worst hangover of your life, Metal Machine Music is the best medicine. Because when you first arise you're probably so fucked (i.e., still drunk) that is doesn't even really hurt yet (not like it's going to), so you should put this album on immediately, not only to clear all the crap out of your head, but to prepare you for what's in store the rest of the day.
Speaking of clearing out crap, I once had this friend who would say, "I take acid at least every two months & JUST BLOW ALL THE BAD SHIT OUTA MY BRAIN!" So I say the same thing about MMM. Except I take it about once a day, like vitamins.
