Hippies vs. Punks: The Fleshtones' Hexbreaker (1983)

Evidence of time-past is all around. The Damned are coming to town soon, on tour to promote a 40th anniversary edition of the album, Damned Damned Damned, the record that kicked off UK Punk. Then in the fall it will be Depeche Mode. Posters are up in abundance. Oh, and this August, at CenturyLink Field, where the Seahawks play, Metallica.

A couple months back, I experienced a "rock is dead" epiphany. I was sitting in a coffee house during my lunch hour, eating a grapefruit and reading the newspaper. Playing on the sound system was some sort of turgid tar-sands Grunge -- Screaming Trees? Skin Yard? And it struck me how truly distant and mothballed rock'n'roll has become.

The whole point of Grunge was to reanimate, revivify the old longhair Hippie headbanger cock-rocker by tapping into the uptempo testosterone of Punk. Well, on this particular winter afternoon, it might as well have been a recording of The Kingston Trio performing at The Purple Onion. That's how dead the sound was. Gone, baby, gone. A set of sensibilities as far removed as the horse-&-buggy days.

Then, not too much later, maybe just a day or two, I happened to be in a different neighborhood, and I decided to try the swank coffee bar in the main lobby of the Seattle Center building that houses the new KEXP studio. The coffee bar is staffed by attractive, well-mannered young adults, and it is next to the front entrance of a large, museum-type room -- almost an auditorium in size -- of architectural concrete. There is a stage for performances at one end of the room and a little Light In The Attic Records kiosk in a corner at the other end; in between are tables and chairs, coaches and stuffed chairs. Young people hang out and study their tablets and laptops. The sound system is state of the art

On this particular afternoon Television was on the PA. I was feeling good from a double espresso. The music sounded pristine and very much alive. Maybe rock isn't dead, but it lives on as a museum piece.

Another band on tour is The Fleshtones. They'll be touring Europe this summer.

I started thinking about The Fleshtones again after listening extensively to The Feelies last month. The Fleshtones, like The Feelies, are a band that we listened to a lot in the first half of the 1980s. Like The Feelies, The Fleshtones got their start performing at CBGBs in 1976. Like The Feelies, The Fleshtones have put out a new album recently. And like The Feelies, I saw The Fleshtones perform live at Berkeley Square in the 1980s.

At the time they were on tour promoting what is now regarded as their most successful album, the I.R.S. Records release, Hexbreaker! (1983). I can't remember if it was the late fall of 1983 or the early winter of 1984 that we -- my girlfriend (wife-to-be), my fellow student co-workers at the U.C. Berkeley library and I -- saw them perform one Friday night. What I can remember is that it was not one of the best shows I have ever seen. It was the best show I have seen. Ever.

This week has been a pleasure because after downloading Hexbreaker! this past Sunday I've been listening to it all week, particularly the title track, "Hexbreaker." I've listened to "Hexbreaker"on repeat over and over. There is something that sax player Gordon Spaeth achieves at the crescendo of the song (there is a technical name for it; I just don't know what it is, when the notes are splaying, the saxophone reed is splintering, like Anthony Braxton is playing in a garage-rock band) that makes me feel as good as I did that night at the Berkeley Square.

I felt so good that night -- dancing side-by-side with my girlfriend and my friends who I worked with at the library -- that I think I stayed high for a whole week. And I wasn't stoned or even that drunk. Toward the end of the show lead singer Pete Zaremba danced a floor tom down to the pit in front of the stage and held it in one arm (no easy feat) while banging on it furiously with the palm of his other hand. We deliriously danced alongside him.

I remember the feeling well. I was high. We were all high. But we kept going higher. I remember thinking, "This has to stop. I can't keep feeling this good." But it just kept getting better and better.

The show finally ended with a bunch of people following Zaremba back up on stage and pogoing with him and the rest of the band, Zaremba placing a headlock on a Marilyn lookalike -- short-sleeved A-line dress, curly peroxide-blond hair, shock-red lipstick -- who I recognized from the coffee houses around campus, and dancing with her that way for several minutes.

There are some important Hippies vs. Punks clues to be found here. What The Fleshtones did, what the essence of the band is, is to return rock'n'roll to its rudiments, which is in the garage, before the Hippies, the Haight and the Summer of Love. The template they used is Lenny Kaye's Nuggets. Bands like The Seeds, The Standells, The Chocolate Watchband, Count Five, The Leaves.

When I started thinking about The Fleshtones again I checked first with my public library out of curiosity to see if they had any Fleshtones material in their collection. The only thing that came up in a keyword search was the 1982 film Urgh! A Music War.

Urgh! A Music War is a priceless document memorializing how different the Punk, Post-Punk and New Wave scene was from its Hippie predecessor.

For one, you had a band at the top of the heap for a spell of time, say, 1980 to 1983, that was progressive and supportive of the B- and C-list acts -- Skafish, Au Pairs, Wall of Voodo, The Fleshtones -- and that band was The Police.

Two, the shared traits of Post-Punk music -- the high-treble lead guitar; the robotic and repetitive drumbeat; and most all, the fact that the music is pretty uniformly uptempo --  clearly distinguish it from the lengthy and meandering ruminations of, for instance, Pink Floyd's Ummagumma (1969).

Why? So you can dance.

Nineteen-eighty to 1983 is an interesting period for rock'n'roll. Situated just outside the boundaries of the 1975-to-1979 Hippies-vs.-Punks war, it is pre-MTV and pre-Hardcore. The Hippies aren't an issue. They're zombies off to the side, staggering and stupefied. The essence of music is now dance, movement. 2 Tone ska.

With the ascent of MTV and the music video this kind of simple dance-party vibe gets crushed by commercialism. People like me found our way soon thereafter to Hardcore. The important year being 1984, when both Zen Arcade and Double Nickels on the Dime are released, effectively wiping out all other pole-position aspirants in the rock avant-garde.

But with Hardcore, whether we realized it or not, we were smuggling in a lot of metaphysics that would come back to haunt us. Maybe the metaphysics weren't as pie-eyed as the Hippies, but they were whoppers nonetheless. The divination of the D-I-Y working man for starters. (It is no coincidence that the mass appeal of Charles Bukowski's fiction corresponds to a time when young men were listening every night to "Working Men are Pissed.")

But, really, is there a working class in this country anymore? Was there one in the 1980s? I made a decision in my young-man youth to live as a member of the working class, but aren't we just consumers?

For rock to renew itself I think it has to go back to the garage, back to the dance party.

Hippies vs. Punks: The Interpol Oeuvre

I think I mentioned in a previous post that I've been listening to Interpol's El Pintor (2014). Recently on Fridays, after I've spent the week immersed in whatever record I am studying for the Hippies vs, Punks post, I find that hearing Interpol again is like slaking a great thirst. I don't know what exactly it is, but I suspect that it has something to do with disappearing testosterone.

When Interpol's debut full length, Turn on the Bright Lights, appeared in 2002 it had a great impact on me. Part of the millennial Post-Punk revival (think Franz Ferdinand), Turn on the Bright Lights was recommended to me by a buddy and coworker. I was going through a breakup with my girlfriend of 11 years while struggling with a return to alcoholism after six-plus years of teetotaling; at the same time, I was getting traction as a local politico, even quoted once in a while in the weekly city newspaper.

It was an intense time. Looking back now, I can clearly see it for what it was, a classic end-of-young-manhood overextension and freak out, some sort of ego-driven self-immolation. And there was no better soundtrack for such a production than Interpol's guitar-drenched derivative (of Joy Division and Sonic Youth) Turn on the Bright Lights.

El Pintor is Interpol's fifth studio album in 12 years. While succeeding records have not been able to match the instrumental power of the band's debut, all are remarkably consistent. Interpol has not monkeyed much with their sound. You don't get extreme creative pivots. There are stable components: the defensive restrained vocals of frontman Paul Banks; the pulsating, chiming guitar of Daniel Kessler; and the efficient score-keeping drums of Sam Fogarino.

The album prior to El Pintor, the eponymous Interpol (2010), I listened to a lot. Its release roughly coincided with my last lay off. The three months I was unemployed I did a lot of running, usually five days a week. I had Interpol loaded on my iPod. I bonded with Interpol, as I did with the follow-up to Turn on the Bright Lights, the commercially successful Antics (2004), which was also a time I was laid off.

The only Interpol record I never really meshed with is the band's one non-Matador album, 2007's Our Love to Admire, released on Capitol Records. It is a perfectly good album. It just happened to coincide with a time that I was fully employed and with a new girlfriend. So I guess I didn't need any lengthy testosterone-laden sonic sojourns.

Last night walking home from the train station listening to "PDA" from Turn on the Bright Lights, it hit me what I have been after, what holy grail I have been searching for in the years I have been listening to Interpol recordings.

One hot Friday in July I got stoned with a guy after work. He was a techie, a Photoshop guru who had been hired by the magazine where I worked as a production coordinator. He was an offensive guy who had been after me to get high with him for a while. On this particular day I relented.

Afterwards I walked over to 8th Avenue from 25th Street. My girlfriend, the one who I would break up with tens years later, the year of Interpol's debut album, worked at a magazine on 8th and 34th and I was going to meet her. We were to take the subway to Brooklyn where she lived in a spacious railroad apartment that occupied the entire top floor of a tenement building on 2nd Street near 4th Avenue.

It was hot, and I was stoned. The sun was scorching. When I got to 8th Avenue, which at that time, the early 1990s, was pretty dicey between 23rd and Madison Square Garden, populated by junkies, panhandlers, thieves, petty toughs -- the urban milieu that used to be commonplace in New York City before gentrification began in earnest during "Giulianitime." (It is surprising how many Whole Foods pop up as I Google Map some of these streets now.)

As I walked up 8th I noticed a young blond woman in modest professional attire pulling a suitcase behind her. I figured she was making her way up to the Garden for the Democratic National Convention. The denizens of the street had already started to prey on her, and it was apparent that she was unnerved.

So in the full flower of my street-fighter 27-year-old youth, clad in my red 501s, my Black Flag bars t-shirt, my Carolina boots, arms muscled from curling a barbell, waist narrow from running, I strolled up beside her. I was not close enough to exchange a greeting, but near to where the junkies and thieves thought we might be together.

Suddenly the gauntlet that she had been walking fell back. She looked around to see what had happened. She saw that it was me. And that look of recognition in her eyes -- she was young and attractive -- that I was the reason she was no longer being harassed, well, it is hard to describe how it made me feel because it is such a core male fantasy; but in my stoned state it felt for a moment there like I was Clint Eastwood swinging his arms up the avenue.

In four blocks we arrived at the edge of Madison Square Garden. She crossed the street toward the blue police sawhorse barricades and the many satellite television trucks. I walked up the steps of the U.S. Post Office across from the Garden and sat down in the high heat. And I remember I had two very clear realizations as I studied all the satellite trucks with their parabolic dishes pointed to the heavens in a religious fashion: 1) This -- meaning the Democratic National Convention -- was obviously too important to be free and spontaneous -- money clearly controlled the outcome; and 2) the planet was getting too hot.

Ten years later, as my relationship with the best girlfriend I ever had disintegrated and I looked forward to trading it in for some ego-addled male fantasy of being a "player," I connected with NYC's Interpol because -- as I realized last night walking home in the July sunshine -- Turn on the Bright Lights aurally captures how I felt when I escorted the young lady up 8th Avenue to the 1992 Democratic National Convention.

But, as I was to painfully learn, there is a big difference between 37 and 27. Alcohol doesn't get you as high; sex cannot be pursued with the same abandon. Now that I am 50 and have given up both for years I think Bob Dylan pretty much says it it all when he sings in "Highlands":

The sun is beginning to shine on me
But it’s not like the sun that used to be
The party’s over and there’s less and less to say
I got new eyes
Everything looks far away

Hippies vs. Punks: David Bowie's Low (1977)

We are approaching the heart of the matter with Hippies vs. Punks. At the heart of the matter -- which you will recall are the years 1975 to 1979, years when Punks appear on the scene to wipe out the last vestiges of the Hippies from the avant-garde -- are David Bowie and Brian Eno.

David Bowie and Brian Eno have more to do with the destruction of the Hippies than the Ramones, Sex Pistols and Patti Smith combined. First, as progenitors of the "Glam/Glitter Thermidor" and then New Wave.

Low (1977) is the first installment of the "Berlin Trilogy" -- followed by "Heroes" (1977) and Lodger (1979) -- hugely influential collaborations between Bowie and Eno which establish a new sonic paradigm as the decade draws to a close.

This week I decided to immerse myself in Low, listening basically non-stop from Monday morning until last night on the train home, after watching a documentary on Brian Eno -- Brian Eno: 1971-1977 - The Man Who Fell to Earth (2012) -- and learning that Eno was really the driving force behind Low and the key track on the album, "Warszawa." It is "Warszawa" that gives Joy Division its first name, Warsaw (which the band changed to Joy Division upon realizing that there was a London Punk group called Warsaw Pakt). Interestingly, the album that Ian Curtis listened to the night of his suicide is Iggy Pop's The Idiot (1977), an album that was released after Low but was actually recorded prior to it and is generally considered the opening salvo of the Berlin Trilogy since David Bowie produced it for his RCA label and has been quoted saying that he used Pop as a guinea pig for the development of a new sound.

So obviously the work that Bowie did at Château d'Hérouville in 1976 looms large in Hippies vs. Punks given that both The Idiot and Low were recorded there and those two albums provide bookends to one of the most important Post-Punk bands, Joy Division. (We'll return to Château d'Hérouville in a future Hippies vs. Punks post. It was there that Elton John produced Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973), another hugely devastating album for the Hippies.)

The story of Low is well known. Bowie, trying to rid himself of a cocaine addiction, abandoned Los Angeles, where he had recorded the extremely successful Station to Station (1976) in a drug-induced haze, and retreated to Europe. 

When Bowie hit a brick wall in production he called Brian Eno, whose Discreet Music (1975) was a personal favorite, and Eno arrived on the Continent with his EMS suitcase AKS synthesizer and worked his magic.

Immersed in the album all week there is of course the obvious. The first side is composed of pop songs ("Be My Wife" is the best of the bunch) with a New Wave vibe, something that must have sounded unique in January 1977 but today strikes one as fashionably au courant, and a second side of what Christgau derisively referred to as movie music. "Warszawa" does seem like a futuristic avant-garde musical interlude played during the intermission of Hollywood feature in the heyday of the studio system.

But my favorite track is the final one, "Subterraneans" which Bowie recorded as part of the soundtrack for the Nicolas Roeg film he starred in, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), but which Roeg spiked in favor of a score written by "Papa" John Phillips, a Hippie founding father.

Hippies vs. Punks: Siouxsie and the Banshees, Pt. 2, the McGeoch Albums

Following Siouxsie and the Banshees' Join Hands (1979) album, guitarist John McKay and drummer Kenny Morris are replaced by Magazine co-founder and guitarist John McGeoch and Budgie, the drummer on the Slits' debut album, Cut (1979). With this lineup -- Sioux, Severin, McGeoch, and Budgie -- Siouxsie and the Banshees would record their most influential albums by far -- Kaleidoscope (1980); their masterpiece, Juju (1981); and the proto-House music, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse (1981) -- before McGeoch is purged following what is termed a "nervous breakdown" due to alcohol and exhaustion.

McGeoch is called "the Jimmy Page of New Wave." His work with Howard Devoto on Magazine's Real Life (1978) defines Post-Punk and, as I proffered in a previous Hippies vs. Punks, presciently captures the sound of the 1980s. McGeoch's 2004 obituary in The Independent describes his joining the Banshees:

In 1980, the "guitarist for hire" came to the attention of Siouxsie and the Banshees, then a trio of the singer Siouxsie Sioux, the bassist Steve Severin and the drummer Budgie, with occasional help from the Cure's Robert Smith. "I was surprised to get the call," said McGeoch. "Steve Strange told me to wear black and we met up in a pub in Notting Hill. They invited me along to their rehearsal studio in Camden and, within two days, we'd routined 'Happy House.' They really liked that guitar line, that was the clincher. I was going through a picky phase, as opposed to strumming. 'Happy House' was lighter and had more musicality in it. They invited me to join. I was sad leaving Magazine but the Banshees were so interesting and it felt like a good move."

I had both Kaleidoscope and Juju back in the day in the early 1980s. I remember being home, skipping class in order to finish papers that were due at the end of the week. I remember sitting in the kitchen at the kitchen table in front of the television which also doubled as a computer monitor. My live-in girlfriend had a Texas Instruments TI-99, one of the first personal computers; it hooked up to the TV. We used it mostly as a word processor on which we composed our college papers. It was balky, and if you jostled the software cartridges that fit into the keyboard you could lose everything you were working on.

Like I say, I have memories of being home alone on dark overcast afternoons, probably in 1984, and sitting in the kitchen in front of the television / Texas Instruments TI-99 monitor and listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees records I had playing on the stereo in the living room. "Spellbound" was my favorite track. It seemed at the time to have more testosterone than anything else around.

Immersing myself this week in the three McGeoch Siouxsie and the Banshees albums, it is clear that these are great records. Kaleidoscope is fantastic. I particularly like "Trophy" and "Clockface."

Kaleidoscope is more like Join Hands in that the individual cuts cohere to form a whole whose sum is far greater and more different than its parts. But with Juju you have an album that is loaded with songs that rock and rock hard repeatedly throughout the album. "Sin in My Heart" and "Monitor" are two fine examples, but really every track has ass-kicking quality. McGeoch's guitar playing and Budgie's drumming drive the album.

I never owned A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, McGeoch's last album with the band. At first I was put off by the Flashdance (1983) vibe of the first track, "Cascade":

The drums have that flat, bottom-heavy, slightly echoey sound that becomes prevalent in the 1980s. This is not noticeable in the video clip above. Budgie's drums sound warm here. (But look at the size of the audience, and the size of Budgie's kit; he's a veritable Post-Punk Carl Palmer!)

In any event, after listening to A Kiss in the Dreamhouse several times, I got over my aversion to its Flashdance aspects. It is a complex, rich album that was ahead of its time; it forecasts the urban dance hall revival of the 1980s. But at the same time it also is the end of the line for Post-Punk.

Hippies vs. Punks: Magazine's Real Life 1978

Magazine is an interesting band to listen to now if like me you never listened to them back in the day. I listened to plenty of Buzzcocks, the band that Howard Devoto formed with Pete Shelley but had left by early 1977, but never any Magazine. I'm sure I had heard "Shot by Both Sides," Magazine's big single -- the one that Devoto co-writes with Shelley that sounds like a Buzzcocks song; and the one to this day that is most likely to be found on a first wave Punk compilation -- I'm just not conscious of it. And that's the source of my fascination with Magazine -- and Howard Devoto, as I mentioned last week in the post on Penelope Houston -- the extent to which the sound of New Wave English bands formed the backdrop of life in the 1980s and how that backdrop was created out of the clay of first wave UK Punk.

Make no mistake, Magazine is a New Wave band. Devoto leaves the Buzzcocks because he wants to move beyond the Punk formula. He meets art student John McGeoch in April 1977, and they start writing songs that would end up on Magazine's debut album, Real Life (1978).

I downloaded Real Life last weekend and have been listening to it all week. Recorded in the spring of '78 (at a time shortly after the disbanding of the Sex Pistols and shortly before the Hippie bon voyage masterpiece, The Last Waltz, appeared in movie theaters), Real Life was released in June 1978 to strong reviews and ended up making the UK Top 30. It continues to this day to rank in "Greatest" album lists.

Real Life is an excellent album that grows stronger with each listen. For me the real test is when at lunch I retire to the first-floor file room. I lie on my back on the carpeted floor in the dark and drift off listening to my iPod.

The album starts strong with "Definitive Gaze," "My Tulpa," and "Shot by Both Sides." Then it levels off while maintaining its force. The effect is an organic one. By the time you've gotten to Track 8, "The Light Pours Out of Me," you're on higher ground.

What struck me in listening to the lead cut, "Definitive Gaze," is that in one song from 1978 you can hear the entire decade of the New Wave 1980s to come -- its Thatcherism and Reaganism, its nerdy male vocals, its synthesizer parts, its John Hughes The Breakfast Club celebration of suburbia and the transcendence of the Simple Minds sound.

English New Wave of the 1980s. One swam in an ocean of it. One ate it and drank it and bathed in it and slept in it and shit in it. It was the air that one breathed. Most of it sounded the same to me. Bloodless. Any sort of social critique, if there at all, was inscrutable. You would be hard pressed to devise a more anesthetizing music. Sonic ether. Bilious, suffocating, synthesizer-driven pop -- the perfect soundtrack for neoliberalism triumphant.

Real Life should be studied as a rich "present at the creation" record -- spring 1978! -- of how Punk becomes Post-Punk and paves the way for New Wave. The 1978 Peel Sessions kick ass!

I made a list off the top of my head sitting at my desk at work of all the UK New Wave bands and singer-songwriters that would follow the first wave of Punk. Après moi le déluge:

Tubeway Army
Gary Numan
Ultravox
Adam and the Ants
Cabaret Voltaire
Cocteau Twins
Thompson Twins
Simple Minds
The Cure
Thomas Dolby
Flock of Seagulls
Teardrop Explodes
Julian Cope
Echo & the Bunnymen
XTC
OMD
Psychedelic Furs
Spandau Ballet
Depeche Mode
Duran Duran
Soft Cell
The Human League
Howard Jones

One could keep going. But you get the idea. Something terrible happened to us in the '80s.