Hippies vs. Punks: The Lemonheads' Lick (1989)

One thing is clear to me as this rainy week winds down: Lick (1989) is certainly the best Lemonheads record. It has it all. Ballads -- "A Circle of One" (The YouTube above) -- powerful Grunge rockers like the two opening tracks, "Mallo Cup" and "Glad I Don't Know," not to mention an amazing Punk love song, "Ever" (see You Tube below) and an adroit reworking of Suzanne Vega's contemporaneously popular hit "Luka."

Lick is the last Lemonheads album with Ben Deily and the last on independent label Taang! Records. Without Deily the band loses a lot of its Punk juevos and it basically becomes a vehicle for Dando's pretty boy Grunge (which achieves breakout commercial success a few years later with It's a Shame About Ray).

On the strength of Lick the Lemonheads were signed by Atlantic. I was at the performance where the deal was either broached or consummated, a show at CBGBs on a rainy summer Saturday night in 1989. There was hardly anyone there except for a bunch of older affluent record industry types with their dates sitting at tables back near the bar, 

Downtown Manhattan's population, at least when I lived in the city, tended to drop in density in the summer months; that, combined with the torrential downpour, made for deserted streets and a mostly empty CBGBs. Dando was out front in a white t-shirt chatting with someone when my buddy Gary and I got there. We had taken the 'A' down from Washington Heights and walked over from the West Village.

The Lemonheads -- Dando, Jesse Peretz and some guy on drums that I recognized from a photo on one of the albums -- were incredible that night. I shared the pit with two skinheads. (My friend Gary was not a fighter; he enjoyed the whole show positioned directly beneath one of the PA speakers. I would look over at him occasionally and he looked as if were teleporting Star Trek style, like he was atomizing before my eyes. That is how good the Lemonheads sounded that night.) The Punks and I beat the shit out of each other all night. They battered away at me, and we plowed through tables at the edge of the pit, yanking one another up off the floor when someone lost his footing so we could get right back to pummeling each other. I think we were as much a part of the show to the execs in the back of the hall as the band up on stage. I had an edge over the Punks because I was a believer in the music. I had picked up a copy of Lick as soon as it was released that spring. My wife and I played it non-stop. So by the end of the night, when the Punks had tossed in the sponge and sat down, I was dancing blissfully -- sort of a James Brown shoulder roll -- by myself on an empty floor.

As the old year was drawing to a close last month and I was walking to the library after work a New Pornographers song shuffled on my iPod, "Execution Day." It made me feel incredibly good. And since I was starting to think about The Lemonheads because I was watching Nurse Jackie episodes directed by Jesse Peretz, I thought about that night at an empty CBGBs dancing along to the band. And I realized I have never had a better night than that one.

Hippies vs. Punks: The Lemonheads' Creator (1988)

The plan is that for the remaining Fridays in January Hippies vs. Punks will be devoted to what I believe to be the seminal recordings of The Lemonheads -- Creator (1988), Lick (1989) and the major-label debut on Atlantic Lovey (1990), leaving us deposited in February at the doorstep of It's a Shame About Ray (1992), the breakthrough album for Evan Dando during the zenith of Grunge.

It is unclear at this point if I'll have the stomach to plow forward to Car Button Cloth (1996), the last album before the band was mothballed; there is some merit in doing so because the seven albums The Lemonheads produced from 1987 to 1996 correspond to the rise and fall of Grunge, a decade when it seemed possible that there might be some sort of durable counterculture forming.

The release of Creator in August 1988 coincided with my relocation to New York City. I bought the album at Bleecker Bob's in the West Village, probably after work or on my lunch break at my first job in the Big Apple, a research assistant for a lady manager at Scholastic Magazines.

I listened to the album a lot because it reaffirmed a sense of pure youth endangered as I became devoured by the brutal post-collegiate workaday world. Looking back now I realize that the hat tips to Charles Manson on Creator -- "Your Home Is Where You're Happy" and "Die Right Now" -- were an upside down flag, a signal of not only distress but refusal to assimilate.

This refusal to assimilate would mark my years from 1988 all the way to the millennium. By the time the millennium rolled around the confidence of a youth-based counterculture had been narrowed to a select urban milieu, which I suppose is a return to the origins of Punk.

But in 1988 the Grunge rocketship is fueling on its launch pad, and in 1989 it would blast off.

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.