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.

Hippies vs. Punks: Subway Sect

Tonight, we're at halftime of the The Last Waltz posts. So it's time for a breather. Next week Hippies vs. Punks will return to The Last Waltz for part three, the main focus of which will be Music From Big Pink. Then on Friday, August 16, we will conclude with The Brown Album.

In the meantime, let's look at a band that performs at the seminal 100 Club Punk Special in London two months before The Last Waltz concert is staged in San Francisco. The 100 Club Punk Special is considered a seminal event because it marks a dividing line, according to an excellent interview with Punk promoter Ron Watts, between the close-knit London pub scene that spawns Punk -- what most people think of when they think of Punk -- and the national and then international celebrity that soon follows (and in so doing hastens the Hippies' extinction).

The Punk festival happened over two nights in September of 1976 just before the equinox. It featured big hitters like the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned and Buzzcocks. But there were other lesser known bands that performed. One, Subway Sect, so named because they first played together busking in the Hammersmith subway, kicked things off. True to previous posts where I explore undercard bands at Hippie music festivals like the Aquarian Family Festival and the Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival, I thought tonight I'd do the same with the 100 Club Punk Special.

Led by singer/songwriter Vic Godard, Subway Sect formed after seeing the Sex Pistols. They were managed by the same guy, Bernie Rhodes, who managed The Clash, for whom the band warmed up on the White Riot tour in 1977. Subway Sect then recorded an album with Rhodes, after which he shit canned the entire group except for Godard. The album went unreleased and was lost except for the single "Ambition," released in 1978, and some tracks that eventually showed up on the 1999 Twenty Odd Years compilation (which sells new for $3K on Amazon!):

The original Subway Sect lineup released only two singles -- "Nobody's Scared" b/w "Don't Split It" (at the top of the post) and "Ambition" b/w "A Different Story." Thank goodness then for the Peel Session from October 1977. I have been listening to it all week -- "Chain Smoking" kicks ass! -- and it captures the punch -- the mojo -- that first iteration of the group had working in 1977:

The young Vic Godard was a skilled songwriter with the looks of Another Side of Bob Dylan Bob Dylan; he sounds at times like Richard Hell, Johnny Rotten and Pete Shelley ( -- a prism of first wave Punk, Godard sings better than all three); plus, he strikes me as a good guy. Reading a November 1976 interview with him in the punk zine Sniffin' Glue, his sincerity and earnestness shine through.

Godard reformed Subway Sect as Vic Godard & Subway Sect with a different set of players. He put out three more albums (two with Subway Sect and one solo effort) and moved through styles -- swing and jazz -- before going to work for the postal service in 1986.

There's a great interview that Godard does with 3:AM magazine from 2002 after he finished working on his Sansend album. (Three of these songs are available as Lazy So and So for MP3 download from Amazon; I've enjoyed listening to it, particularly on the morning train into work.) Godard talks about the process of trying to be creatively productive (i.e., perform and produce an album) while holding down a full-time job. As far as I'm concerned, it's a feat of heroism. Here's his description:

Sansend -- it took years to put it together. Because, really, we were only working on Sunday afternoons. A lot of the time we'd arrive at about six thirty on a Sunday afternoon, so that's why it took so long. There was the odd evening session, but with me being uninformed, and my mate in the group who does all the computer side of it, he's a carpenter, so his hours are basically about ten until six, so by the time he'd finished his carpentry and got down there it took you till about seven thirty and then I've got to be up at four or five the next morning which meant we couldn't work much beyond nine thirty. So we did start off at the beginning with the evening sessions, but we soon reverted back to Sunday afternoons. That explains why there are so many ideas running around in the album. We recorded quite a lot of songs on top of the ones we've put out. The first fourteen that came to us that gelled really well we worked on and we abandoned about six songs I suppose. We just didn't bother working on them. It was all done on a Mac and he was learning it from scratch. So at the beginning it was really slow because he was learning. I wrote all the lyrics except the reggae one which was written by Ken Wisdom. I've changed the odd bits to fit in with what he wrote. He didn't write it to that tune. He gave me a set of lyrics so I fitted them to a tune. So I had to change the odd bit here and there. But it's basically the same.

Godard maintains an active website which features an interesting blog. It's human and alive and not made opaque by commercialism. He continues to tour and make music. He is an exemplar of Punk revolutionary spirit: