Hippies vs. Punks: The Bridge, A Tribute to Neil Young (1989)

Punk seems to be enjoying one of its periodic rebirths. Two recent articles piqued my curiosity. The first, "Berserktown Festival Offers a Chance to Meet Lesser Known Bands" by Ben Ratliff, mentioned a band by the name of Downtown Boys:

SANTA ANA, Calif. — “We are not all born equal,” announced Victoria Ruiz, the singer of Downtown Boys, on Sunday afternoon at the Berserktown festival here, in a voice usually reserved for megaphones at protests. 

“Some of us are born with resources very different from others,” Ms. Ruiz said. “These resources might be money, they might be land, they might be love. Maybe these resources shouldn’t be destroyed, but should be taxed. This inheritance is the euphemism for why we’re unequal. What if we taxed it by exactly 100 percent?” 

While introducing almost any song — this one was “100% Inheritance Tax” — Ms. Ruiz vaulted into sermons about ancient and modern power relationships, speaking to the end of her lung capacity and rushing on with gulps of air. 

Her speeches slid into music, and the band would start its wild, danceable clomp, accented by Joey L. DeFrancesco’s manic guitar riffing and Adrienne Berry’s short, stubborn tenor-saxophone vamps. 

Downtown Boys played one of the best sets at Berserktown, a provocative three-day festival of various extremes of punk, noise, metal and D.I.Y. culture, a sophisticated index of messy music and a rebuke to the proliferating summer music festivals that seem to book from the same pools of alternative music.

I downloaded the band's new album, Full Communism, but have only listened to it once. The sax does stand out, reminding one of First Wave Punks X-Ray Spex. Also, Victoria Ruiz's vocals seem to me to be similar to Meredith Graves of Perfect Pussy. Perfect Pussy is a Syracuse band, while Downtown Boys call Providence home. Maybe there is a I-90 Upstate New York to New England Punk sound.

The other article, Monday's "Review: Grace Jones Headlines a Bold Afropunk Festival Lineup," also by Ben Ratliff, caught my attention because of its mention of an incendiary set by the band Death Grips:

Punk appears to be back, to which I say good. Something is shifting. Punk usually arrives on the scene when dead weight needs to be blasted free. We can only hope that the present Punk rebirth is not of the ersatz variety. I am thinking here of the Green Day ascendancy. Following the Cobain burnout and the gradual banking of the flames of the grand Grunge barbecue, Green Day's schmaltzy pop Punk was shrewdly promoted by the major record labels as "the next big thing." It was nothing of the sort; it was an end of a line though.

Grunge got started at the end of the 1980s in Seattle, or so the story goes. But it was really two bands -- the Pixies out of Boston, and NYC's Sonic Youth -- and two records -- Surfer Rosa (1988), by the former; Daydream Nation (1988), the latter -- that made Grunge possible.

But the secret ingredient in Grunge is Neil Young. Throughout the 1980s, many a youth listened to Hardcore Punk -- Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Meat Puppets, Minutemen -- but when the lights dimmed at the end of the day and the last quart bottle of beer had been drained and the all the dope had been smoked likely to be found spinning on the turntable was After the Gold Rush (1970) or Harvest (1972).

When The Bridge: A Tribute to Neil Young appeared the summer of 1989 it heralded a new age. The Reagan era was coming to an end, and it was apparent, to me at least, that George Herbert Walker Bush wasn't going to be able to keep it rolling. I brought The Bridge home and played it repeatedly and I remember feeling validated, that I wasn't the only one who, despite the occasional derisive comment from a friend, was listening to Neil Young. Here, after all, were the leaders of the avant-garde, the Pixies and Sonic Youth, paying homage:

I read somewhere an interview with Neil Young where he said his two favorites tracks off The Bridge were "Winterlong" and "Computer Age." I think based on "Computer Age" he asked Sonic Youth to tour with and open up for him and Crazy Horse. (Kim Gordon had none too pleasant things to say about the experience.)

Most of the tracks on The Bridge are covers from songs off After the Gold Rush, like Victoria Williams' version of "Don't Let It Bring You Down":

A Nick Cave fan, I was partial to his version of "Helpless":

It was a high time, brimming with confidence that old forms could be made new.

It didn't work out that way. The flesh is weak and the mind is easily distracted. What starts out as a good idea usually gives way to the exigencies of making money. All we are left is the backward glance and the solace of sentimentality.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #76

It is NFL Week Four Sunday, which means if I am going to live up to my pledge and be done by the end of the season with this old letter project, the one I have dubbed "The Colt 45 Chronicle" after my beer of choice consumed while writing these epistles 25-years ago, I might have to start posting two a week. An audit of the remaining letters is called for at least to get a count. So far I have just been selecting them off the top. No culling, no cherry picking, no organization.

The letter below, addressed to my friends Greg and Tresca, is concerned primarily with the necessity of new music, pursuing new sounds. My wife and I often acted as hosts, and one my principal duties was as disc jockey. I liked to have the latest "leader of the pack," whether at the time it was Sonic Youth, or The Pogues or The Pixies, and then embed that in a foundation of Bob Dylan, Neil Young and The Velvet Underground.

I was reminded of the importance of fresh sounds this morning on a run around Lake Union. A couple years back I downloaded a free 2011 Merge Records sampler, on which appears a song, "Civilian" by Wye Oak. It shuffled on my iPod while I was working down the parking lots that line the lake just east of Westlake Avenue:

I close the letter with an expression of love. Greg and Tresca were important to me because they seemed to be doing their own thing. They were refuseniks. They worked but didn't believe that it would amount to anything. They drank. Greg was a tremendous athlete. A big guy at 6'3" or 6'4" and over 210 lbs. Drinking was what they did, drinking and listening to music.

Winter 1989

I finally shelled for some new music. It happened last Monday, down on Broadway and West 4th Street. It was a Monday, but I wasn't working; and the snow was sure snowing. But I braved it all -- the avoidance of worklife and the sloshing in West Village snow streets (like the cover of The Free Wheelin' Bob Dylan, Levi's feeling much too thin) -- so I could get some new music in my life, or at least some music that I hadn't heard for quite a while. 

Too many times in the near past I have found myself overcome, forlorn, because none of the stuff I have does the trick anymore. You know, people come over, bring a few bottles of wine or some quarts of beer (some of Ashley's med-school chums -- though, sadly, not very often; it's usually I who does most of the bringing) and you want to put something on that sparks, that inspires, that captures the mood, but you don't have anything. Sure, you have the old standards, the solid-and-always-reliable: the B.Dylan and N.Young and L.Reed and J.Rotten (everybody knows 'em and everybody loves 'em). But as your're fingering through the pile, you realize/know that they don't cut it, not when you're trying to get people up. People feel too secure around them, too normal and historical, like a high school yearbook; they've got too many memories, too many stories and sorrows attached to each tune you put on the turntable. It's like trying to get people to beer bong and dance, shoot a tequila shot and smoke a joint, all while eating Christmas dinner in the parents' living room and wishing mother a happy birthday, the bright light shooting off the freshly painted white walls down to your white china platter with the slice of white breast meat and the sliver of dark, the patch of stuffing and mash potatoes pig-penned in turkey-neck gravy, the cranberry sauce breeding on the perimeter. 

Music, I hope, isn't supposed supposed to be so comforting and tight-in-the-loins and unthinking as that. I would hope, and do think, that music -- and this is what makes looking for new music (or music you haven't heard before) necessary -- that music is something very outwardly social, energetic and revolutionary.

We, Greg and I, would drive out to San Ramon drinking 12-ounce coffees in paper cups. One morning he put on R.E.M., and I was just getting high from the caffeine. It was Green, and I hadn't heard it before. -- Because of my situation (staying over in S.F.), I was always drunk in the morning (as I know you guys were too). So the coffee would hit me hard -- but friendly -- and so would the sun (we were driving due East in the morning).

Without being hokey, because I'm good and drunk in one night, I love you two.  You're important to me.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #75

I met Gary and Eleni when my wife and I first moved to New York City. Gary was in Ashley's medical-school class. His wife Eleni was Greek. She came from Thessaloniki. 

Gary and Eleni also lived in married-student housing, but in a different building, one farther north from the hospital, across from J Hood Wright Park.

Gary and I liked to get together and drink and bullshit, and Eleni, who didn't feel a big connection to the women among Gary's classmates, usually hung out with us.

Gary was more of a dope-smoker than a drinker, but he could drink pretty well too. After I broke up with my wife, my friendship with Gary and Eleni remained strong. They were good friends while I lived in New York. Eventually my drinking would ruin our relationship. Alcoholics have a knack for blowing things up.

The partial transcript below of a conversation between Gary, Eleni and I recorded one cold, dark Saturday night was my attempt (which was intended to be a much more robust effort) to get a handle on writing dialogue as it is actually spoken. I was motivated in this by having recently read Visions of Cody (1972), part of which is Kerouac's transcription of conversations he taped between him, Neal Cassady and Carolyn Cassady while he stayed with the couple in their San Francisco home.

Typing taped conversations is hard work. Never a skilled typist, more a quick practitioner of the hunt and peck, the goal of creating a transcript of an entire evening's free-flowing drunk discussion was far too ambitious. I'm sure the idea was to send it off to my buddies on the West Coast once the entire tape was transcribed. That letter was never sent.

I have zero memory of who Urgeen the Turk was and why Gary, Eleni and I are badmouthing him. Our conversation is mostly gibberish with a sizable dose of immaturity.

Spring 1989

G. This is going to be--this is going be a test, just to see if it's working. Okay? --

M. Okay! Excellent. Excellent.

E. Okay. One-two-three. One-two-three --

G. Okay, wait.  .  .  Tes-- Testes, testes. I have one, two (Mike laughs). Testes, testes. I've got--

M. Genius, already! 

G. -- I've got (laughs), I've got one, two.

E. What is this . . .  (voice drops to a whisper; you can't hear the rest of what she says, something about disgusting")

G. Ha ha!

E. Huh? 

TAPE STOPS

G. Alright.

M. Isn't it horrible (Pixies playing on the stereo; "Boxcar Waaay-tin" can be heard in the background) when you, when, when you --

E. It's nice when a person . . . (peels off into a chuckle; Mike joins in)

G. Alright, so what were we talking about?

M. Urgeen . . . (nobody says anything; Pixies wail, "Wait so-oooh laaaw-ong") What I found so amazing --

E. I don't know, I think you, ah, you really, though, you, I mean, you over . . . you know, like, you misjudge the guy, you -- 

M. Yeah! I was, I was --

G. He's not that bad.

M. No, I know. I think he was --

E. Like, I not, I mean, he doesn't have, like, of course, like manners because --

G. Because he's a Turk!

E. Yeah. (Gary laughs) Yeah, a Turk, and --

M. But, but you know what I felt kinda bad about though is it there was -- he was so, being so obviously flirtatious . . . with you, and his wife was, you know -- 

E. Right next to him --

M. -- Right, right there.

G. Yeah.

E. -- with the children.

M. Well , sa-- I mean, I mean --

G. Take-- Taking care of Lily. Ha ha!

Hippies vs. Punks: Penelope Houston's Birdboys

The Friday before last Hippies vs. Punks dealt with the Avengers, the first wave San Francisco Punk band famous for preceding the Sex Pistols at the January 14, 1978 Winterland show that signaled the demise of the Pistols only a few months after the masterpiece Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (1977) was released.

Ten-years later -- nine years after the Avengers broke up and five years after the release of their sole full-length album, Avengers (1983) -- lead singer and feminine Punk avatar Penelope Houston released her debut solo album, Birdboys (1988).

It was my final year at the university. By 1988 I was, at 23 years of age, somewhat of a salty dog: a drinker, a confused philanderer and occasional street fighter, a reader of weighty texts and a teaching assistant. I was headed back East to live in the Big Apple where my girlfriend, who I would marry en route, had been admitted to medical school.

Nineteen-eighty-eight was a tumultuous year. The Pixies' Surfer Rosa (1988) would appear and put a little pep back into a music scene that was listing from underground indie toward the corporate mainstream. My friends and I were listening to a lot of The Pogues. We played constantly Rum Sodomy & the Lash (1985) and If I Should Fall from Grace with God (1988).

It was into this milieu that Penelope Houston made her debut with Birdboys (which was also the name she gave her acoustic backing band). I never owned or even heard the record. Put out by Bay Area Punk label Subterranean Records, I remember reading a review of it in the East Bay Express and seeing a picture of PH in what I took to be some sort of Hippie dress. It confused me. She still had her Punk insouciance, but she was wearing a Hippie dress. My buddy and musical mentor Oliver made a sarcastic comment about the former Avenger's metamorphosis from Punk to Hippie.

I don't think I was alone in avoiding Birdboys. The album didn't find an audience. Most of us were still fully wedded to the "Hey Hey, My My" rock 'n' roll fantasy. It took five more years for Penelope Houston to find her niche, and it turned out to be in Germany, where she was dubbed the "Queen of neo-folk" and would end up signing with major label WEA Germany. (For a helpful synopsis of Penelope Houston's career, see her interview with Richie Unterberger.)

When I was working on the Avengers post a couple weeks back I decided to download Birdboys and listen to what I missed out on 25 years ago. The album garners favorable reviews online.

I wasn't much impressed my first few listens. The songs have a "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" / "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands" elementary-school-growing-up-in-California-in-the-'60s-sing-along daintiness and preciousness that is off-putting when listened to on iPod ear buds, prompting me to say to myself, "No wonder she never cashed in like Suzanne Vega."

It wasn't until I heard Birdboys on good speakers at home on a Saturday evening cooking dinner that I found myself enjoying the record. I proceeded to play it repeatedly. I understood what Penelope Houston was up to -- the aural capture of empty space -- and how the "Kumbaya" folkiness of Birdboys is of a piece with the first wave Punk of the Avengers. Here is how Houston explains it in the interview with rock 'n' roll historian Unterberger:

I remember I used to tell people that we were a folk band when I was in the Avengers. What I meant was that we were just playing music that we made up for friends, the way the original of folk is just music of the people. It's the folk music of Mexico, or the folk music of whatever. It's music that's played by regular people. It's not played by the court entertainers for the king. It's just the music that people go out on their porch and start strumming, and the neighbors come around. When I said the Avengers were a folk band, I just meant that we were making it up ourselves, that we'd taken it out of the realm of arena rock and the gigantic showplaces, and taken it back to the garage. 

I never really thought, oh, I want to do a cover version of "Wild Mountain Thyme." But there wasn't any...the loudness of the Avengers was so much of the expression. There wasn't really a chance to actually sing. I don't remember ever having monitors. I know we must've had monitors, but I don't remember looking at them and thinking, "I'm not getting enough of myself on the monitor." Everything was really loud and you just screamed at the top of your voice to be heard in live shows. I didn't think our live shows were anything...they were so different than our recorded output. 

I guess it was 1984 that I did my first show that was acoustic. The idea of having these big holes in the music, where there was no sound and then my voice would come out, was the most terrifying thing to me. I thought it was much more frightening than getting up in front of a Marshall stack three-piece band and screaming your lungs out. It was like stepping on a tightrope over this huge hole that was left in the music. 

And I was never a big fan of rock. I was never a rock'n'roller before I was a punk rocker. I was just a punk. I was just doing it because it was the most exciting thing that was happening. It was different, it was new, and we were creating it ourselves, and I felt the same way when I started doing this music with different instruments that had big holes in it. I didn't think, I'm going to start playing folk music. I just thought, we're doing something new and it's exciting and it's scary. The whole thing became more musical after that. But the way we started it was more like the Violent Femmes. It was more like kind of a punk attitude towards really quiet music. Since then, I think I've become a lot more musical. I guess in that way, I've changed.

Going forward in future Hippies vs. Punks posts, several topics suggest themselves from Penelope Houston's biography; the aforementioned influence of the Violent Femmes, for starters. Also, Houston, during the period she lived in England in the early '80s, performed on Howard Devoto's only solo album, Jerky Versions of the Dream (1983). I intended to post on Jerky Versions of the Dream before. It was ubiquitous at the time of its release, and it typified a kind of sound that spelled doom for the Punks, much like the California pop rock of the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac spelled doom for the Hippies.

Finally, PH mentions in the interview that at some point in her solo career she realized how much she had been influenced by English folk rockers Fairport Covention and Pentangle:

When I was younger, before the Avengers, listened to a lot of Pentangle and Fairport Convention and Incredible String Band. I loved them. I didn't really realize this until maybe six years ago, after I'd recorded Birdboys. I got a copy of the double Pentangle album, Sweet Child. I listened to it and I knew ever song on it. I was like, "Whoa! This is weird." It was before my punk life, I'd heard a lot of English folk-rock. So I think that was a big influence that I'd forgotten about somehow.

These are bands that were vital for the Hippies but were also held dear by the Punks. Why is that? Which brings up the issue of Richard and Linda Thompson, who, as I will argue in a future post, provide an example of a Hippie counter-avant-garde during a time when the Punks were wiping out the last vestiges of the longhair Flower Power Freak scene.