Hippies vs. Punks: Bullet LaVolta's Swandive (1991)

While the end might not be clearly visible, I can sense that it is coming.

When I was young, at least for a period of a few years, between the time my wife divorced me and I moved in with a new girlfriend, I was fascinated by the alchemical idea that you could think yourself back to the moment of conception. The alchemists believed human cognition was this powerful, which they captured in the motto VITRIOL, Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem  -- "Visit the interior of the Earth and rectifying (i.e., purifying) you will find the hidden/secret stone." What was accomplished by this, I assumed, was some sort of omniscience -- the Philosopher's Stone. By thinking oneself back to the womb one was able to perceive the moment nothing becomes something.

In my mid-20s I despised working, whether at an office job or as a laborer. I was a drinker. I liked to read, scribble notes and listen to music. My marriage was failing. So I decided to leave my wife and New York City and head back to the West Coast and work for a drywall contractor located in Seattle. I had worked for him a few summers while I was still enrolled at the university in the Bay Area. At the time he was working rat jobs in Oakland and San Francisco,

I arrived in Seattle, late spring 1990, the day after Randy Johnson had thrown a no hitter, right when Grunge was blasting off.  Soundgarden. Skin Yard. Nirvana, Screaming Trees. But other than reading SPIN I had no idea what was going on because I never went out. I worked and came home to a sublet studio apartment in a house on 23rd Avenue East and drank 40-ounce bottles of Midnight Dragon malt liquor and typed on a Brother manual typewriter. I had some sense something was percolating because when I got a day off I would head to the local coffee house and it was chock full of hipsters and rockers.

My personal motto at the time, not dissimilar from the alchemists' VITRIOL, was RECLAMATION EVERYTHING. (It probably had something to do with my collapsing marriage.) On my way to the Emerald City I had stopped off in The Haight and picked up a used copy of Quentin Lauer's book on Husserlian Phenomenology. The idea that there was a pre-linguistic or meta-linguistic way to approach the world that might free us from error, confusion and loss was very compelling to me. It seemed a road to redemption.

The hubris of a motto like RECLAMATION EVERYTHING was perfectly in sync with the Grunge Age. It takes a lot of chutzpah to attempt to re-energize, re-new, re-vivify the old, decades-dead form of the classic rock cock rocker. But that was the conceit of my generation. I think it came about organically from young men and women listening simultaneously to Punk bands as well as Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Rolling Stones, Richard Thompson et al. without the filter of a dialectical understanding.

An excellent example of a Grunge band, now largely buried by the sands of time (even in our digital age), is Bullet LaVolta. While it might be a stretch to argue that Bullet LaVolta was ubiquitous during the Grunge Age, the band was certainly a fixture on my stereo. Listen to Bullet LaVolta's Taang! Records/RCA album, The Gift (1989), and I think you will agree that rock is reanimated. My buddies and I would regularly celebrate the zenith of our evening's intoxication by blasting at high volume and jumping along to "Trapdoor." (For a visual sample of Bullet LaVolta at the band's apex, look at the video from a 1990 show in Dusseldorf.)

The followup to The Gift was Swandive (1991) released on RCA the same day as Nirvana's Nevermind. (There is a good article about this temporal Ground Zero of Grunge -- late summer/early fall 1991 -- by Bullet LaVolta drummer Todd Philips, "The night before Nevermind: Bullet LaVolta's drummer on opening for Nirvana in Boston on September 23, 1991.")

That fall and winter I probably listened to Swandive more than any other record. Immersed in it this week 25 years later I didn't feel the same empathy. One track, "Before I Fall," my favorite from back in the day, still holds up. I used to think that the chorus was "What I want to do before I am born" rather than "What I want to do before I fall." I took this as proof that there was a generational intuition about the importance of alchemical VITRIOL and the idea that everything can be reclaimed.

I think Bullet LaVolta achieved a measure of perfection for a brief time. The band broke up in 1992 and never got to wallow in the corporate trough. Hopefully The Gift and Swandive will be reclaimed. Those two albums document the essence of Grunge.

Hippies vs. Punks: The Lemonheads' Lovey (1990)

In all of Robert Christgau's vast trove of criticism on his excellent web site, www.robertchristgau.com, I could find only one review of a Lemonheads record:

Come On Feel [Atlantic, 1993]
Evan Dando is a good-looking guy with more luck than talent and more talent than brains who conceals his narcissism beneath an unassuming suburban drawl. Twenty years ago he would have affected an acoustic guitar and acted sincere; now he affects a slacker-pop band and acts vulnerable. His songs don't bite, they sidle over and nibble your ear when you're not looking, and if you throw him a withering glance, no problem--he'll just move on to someone else. Exception: the one about drugs. C+

Brutally dismissive as it is, and applied to an album that most of us who were Lemonheads fans at the time would freely admit as proof that the band had lost its purpose (the dividing line for Taang!-era Lemonheads devotees like myself was Dando's cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" on the album that preceded Come on Feel the Lemonheads, 1992's It's a Shame About Ray), it is pretty much how I felt about Lovey (1990), The Lemonheads major-label debut on Atlantic Records, when I started listening to it again this week.

But after only a couple of days, I changed my opinion. There is no indication that Christgau had anything more than a superficial familiarity with Taang! bands such as The Lemonheads, Bullet LaVolta and Moving Targets, bands that were powering the Grunge revolution before it turned into a Grand Barbecue the summer of 1990 when Sonic Youth released Goo on Geffen Records.

What is not readily recalled is that Lovey was released in July shortly after Goo. Considering that it would be another year before major-label honchos would bring Nirvana to market, not to mention Hardcore founding fathers fIREHOSE and Meat Puppets, we have to ask ourselves the question, What did the corporate recording industry power brokers see in The Lemonheads to put them in the same bracket as Sonic Youth?

And here is what I concluded: The Lemonheads were not signed by Atlantic to be the equivalent of a Grunge Bobby Sherman act; if that were the case, the label would not have allowed Dando to make "Ballarat," an homage to Charles Manson's Helter Skelter eschatology, the first cut on Lovey. And while "Ballarat" might not be the equal of Sonic Youth's "Tunic (Song for Karen)," I would argue that it is of a piece (and that is not pretty boy Grunge).

The next clue is that of all the Taang! back catalog songs selected to appear on Lovey it was "Left for Dead," a re-titled "Clang Bang Clang" from Creator (1988), that made the cut; it is a truly great song that points clearly to what Atlantic had planned for The Lemonheads -- a chick-friendly Hüsker Dü.

The fact is that Lovey is loaded with grand gesture Grunge statements like "Li'l Seed" and "(The) Door," both of which are powered by the superb "guitar hero" playing of Corey Loog Brennan, filled out with an uptempo number like "Stove" and a Grunger, "Year of the Cat." As Brennan says in an interview that appears on the English fan web site devoted to Dando and The Lemonheads, "I thought that Lovey was going to sell a million copies. Then I was devastated when it semi-flopped."

But what Lovey did do is turn Dando into a Grunge heartthrob (see the video for "Half the Time" at the top of the post). I can bear witness. In last week's post I described seeing The Lemonheads at CBGBs the summer of 1989 and the only women there were the dates of the record industry guys at the back by the bar. I saw the band again at CBGBs the winter of 1991, seven or eight months after Lovey's release, and rather than being deserted, as it was the time before, the place was packed. So packed that it was difficult to move about. And most of the people at the front near the stage when Dando appeared in a 1960s-era red nylon windbreaker with racing stripes, his beautiful long blonde tresses catching the spotlights, were young middle-class women. The only explanation, given Brennan's assessment that the album semi-flopped, is that video for "Half the Time" found a passionate audience on MTV.

Hence, The Lemonheads coming pop flame-out, casually derided by Christgau as narcissistic, is set in motion by Lovey. Which is too bad because Lovey is an excellent album, one that was important to me and that I played a lot. Hearing it again repeatedly this week -- that and the fact that light is already starting to return at the end of January -- I started to feel not so bad about myself. I realized that at 26 years of age I was a solid householder, but one who nonetheless was hounded by the troika that has felled many a man -- work, women and alcohol. Maybe to become who we are we need to go back and figure out who we were.

Nihilism #5

The problem with nihilism -- its Achilles' heel -- is the past. The past exists as a real other -- a god -- that is part of the self. All is not merely limitless striving.

There is an object of consciousness. One exists. It is not timeless. It is time-bound. It is the past. It usually reveals itself to me via music. Schopenhauer thought music was pure spirit.

This morning suffering through a long run, my left foot giving me trouble in form of a strained arch, a song from Mike Johnson's doleful Year of Mondays (1996) shuffled on my iPod. Hearing "Eclipse" I was transported back to the downhill slope of the Age of Grunge. The spirit world confronting me inside my mind was a recollection of a torpid time of futon lounging, book devouring and living underground, on the run from everyone and myself.

Then there was yesterday at work. For some reason I decided to YouTube Blake Babies. Sunburn (1990) popped up. Sunburn is one of those albums that will never be given the credit that it deserves in terms of creating the Age of Grunge. Sunburn represents an approach to the peak of Grunge. Mammoth Records Grunge-Pop.

I saw Blake Babies perform at CBGBs. It was 1991. The summer I devotedly listened to Rosy Jack World (1991). Rosy Jack World and the summer of 1991 -- this represents the summit for Grunge. Think Pearl Jam's Ten (1991) and, at the end of summer/beginning of fall, Nirvana's Nevermind (1991).

To end their CBGBs set that night, Blake Babies did a cover of Neil Young's "Barstool Blues." A diehard Zuma fan, I went berserk, shouting along exuberantly, gesticulating wildly. If only you could have seen Juliana Hatfield that night! She anchored the band from the lip of the stage. With her bass strapped on over a plain white t-shirt, Hatfield was the apotheosis of the real cool. Now, after crossing an ocean of time, that might seem impossible. But that night it was unquestionable.

I had not listened to Blake Babies in a long, long time. But when I heard Sunburn yesterday, it all came back. The past is alive inside of us. As I said, this is a problem for nihilism.