Hippies vs. Punks: Van Morrison's Into the Music (1979)

If you are like me, the chronology of work produced by the great trinity of singer-songwriter solo artists -- Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young -- is not difficult to recapitulate until the beginning of the Hippie vs. Punks period, 1975 - 1979. Then things get murky.

Most of us know Dylan's Desire (1976) and Neil Young's Zuma (1975), and hopefully we have all listened to Van Morrison's Veedon Fleece (1974) into the triple figures. But who can say whether Neil Young's American Stars 'n Bars comes before or after Comes a Time? Or whether Dylan's Shot of Love antedates or follows Saved?

For Van Morrison this "Bermuda Triangle" period begins later because after the breakup-from-Janet-Planet album Veedon Fleece he takes a recording hiatus before reappearing in 1977, the big year for UK Punk, with A Period of Transition, basically naming the departure of the Aquarian Zeitgeist, which he then follows up the next year with the successful "New Wave" album, Wavelength.

The murkiness of Van the Man's discography begins, for me at least, with his last album of the 1970s, Into the Music (1979). I have always been under the impression that Beautiful Vision (1982) follows Wavelength. It doesn't. Beautiful Vision actually follows the Celtic rocker, Common One (1980).

I say all this to emphasize the point made last week in relation to Wavelength. The late-70s were a confusing time. Old verities were vanishing. And a simple sort of satori to bring this home is the attempt to chronologize the oeuvre from this period of the trinity of our modern masters, Dylan-Morrison-Young.

Apropos of this, the last few weeks I have traveled directly into the "heart of darkness," immersing myself in Into the Music. Though I would identify myself, like my father, as a Van Morrison man, I was not familiar with this record. I think I might have heard it once or twice back in the day. If I reach way back I might have a vision of a sun-bleached album cover and the smell of lavender perfume so strong it makes me gag.

The backstory of Into the Music is that Van, alienated by Wavelength, went for a reboot. So he traveled to the English countryside and walked the fields at dawn, getting into the music by plucking out songs on his guitar. The result, as the 1970s come to a close and Jimmy Carter greases the skids for the Reagan-Thatcher lurch to the right, is -- believe it or not -- a critic's choice album of the year (#4 on Robert Christgau's Pazz & Jop Dean's List for 1979).

I say "believe it or not" because the album is so sugary and earnest it is hard to hear it as anything other than a precursor of the Boomer nostalgia, perfectly captured by the Big Chill (1983), that is about to burst forth in the 1980s as Reaganism takes hold.

But Into the Music provides an amazingly accurate template for the type of record that Morrison would perfect in the 1980s once he leaves off his Celtic Scientology synthesizer voodoo (an album that I never tire of, 1983's Inarticulate Speech of the Heart).

You can hear it all in two tracks -- "Troubadours" (above) and "And the Healing Has Begun" (below).

In "Troubadours" Van introduces the piccolo trumpet and stroviola (not your usual rock'n'roll instruments) to go along with the strings and other horns to create a signature "neo-Avalon" sound that would become a staple of  '80s albums like No Guru and Poetic Champions, an ideal accompaniment for the one-time Hippie now a solid burgher drinking his delicious Peet's coffee and scanning the morning business page.

From there it gets worse. "And the Healing Has Begun" is the type of Vegas showtune that Van has been able to extrude for the last 30 years as if he is the artistic equivalent of a plastic injection mold. Listening to it with its caws and whoops and "yeows!" one can't help but see the lads and lasses hoofing a Riverdance while the aging Boomers sip white wine in the audience and smile.

Of course we must doff our caps because it is after all 1979 and none of this was visible back then. Though it is hard to accept that Christgau was being sincere when he labeled Into the Music a pick hit, awarding it a rare A, and describing it as "Van's best album since Moondance."

Corbyn's Triumph Another Ill Omen for Hillary

Hillary's grave has been dug.

Back at the beginning of May, after Ed Miliband led Labour to a historic defeat in Britain's parliamentary elections, I opined that it augured ill for corporate Democrats in the U.S. At the time, analysts in the mainstream media were trying to spin Cameron's big win as a cautionary tale for Labour moving to the left. Somehow these analysts (I'm thinking here of Steven Erlanger's "Appeal to Dwindling Core Proves Costly for Labour Party in Britain") interpreted Miliband's meekly mouthed promises to roll back some of the egregious aspects of Tory austerity, and Labour's subsequent collapse at the polls, as proof that a leftist attack on neoliberalism was a surefire loser. These analysts failed to account for the incredible showing of the Scottish National Party, a party far to the left of Labour.

Now, this past weekend, Labour has corrected course by shifting hard to the left. Longtime socialist, anti-war firebrand and Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn has been elected leader of the Labour Party. (See top of the post the informative interview with Tariq Ali from yesterday's Democracy Now! for a good intro to Corbyn.) He won thanks in part to a change in rules that broadened the base of who could vote for party leader. Young people overwhelming supported Corbyn and his message of equality, fraternity and an end to foreign wars; he won with 60 percent of the vote over a mishmash of Blairites.

So Labour is starting its journey back to relevance. Rocky will be the road because zombies occupy most positions of power in neoliberal Western society. (Erlanger pitifully reprises his tune from May by arguing that Corbyn's election means a big Tory win in 2020.)

But the canon has sounded and the blast has been heard across the pond. The U.S. and UK are cousins. When neoliberalism drove it piles into the soil 40 years ago it did so with Thatcherism and Reaganism. Markets are always right and unions are insidious special-interest groups and blacks are lazy scofflaws and military might must be exercised frequently (preferably against a powerless opponent). These are some of the tenets of Thatcherism/Reaganism. And I would say that they have largely lost their purchase on the general public.

Hillary as the Democratic banner-waver of the neoliberal consensus has said that her plan to win the White House is based on returning the Obama coalition to the polls. One crucial bloc of the Obama coalition is the youth vote. Youth went overwhelming with Corbyn in the Labour leadership vote. Youth is not going to go for Hillary in any significant number.

Richard Hell said that the truth is in the youth. The youth has rejected neoliberalism and its perpetual wars and inequality. Even if Hillary manages to cart her carcass across the finish line and defeat Sanders in the Democratic primary, Trump's traveling fascist road show will prove far too formidable for a conventional champion of neoliberalism like Rodham Clinton.

Hippies vs. Punks: Balin (1981)

Something unusual happened on the way home from work last night. I was on the train reading; I had my earbuds in, and I was listening to the research subject for this week's Hippies vs. Punks post, Marty Balin's solo debut full-length record, Balin (1981), when suddenly I could take no more and thumbed my iPod over to Interpol's El Pintor (2014).

This is out of the ordinary because even taxing albums, like last week's Land Speed Record (1982), I am able to fully immerse myself in repeated non-stop listening for the duration of the work week. But Balin's slick commercial amalgamation of disco-pop-rock proved too much for me.

To get the sonic flavor of the album all one need do is sample the lead track, "Hearts" (see the YouTube above), which reached #8 on the singles pop charts, the highest position a song by Marty Balin ever achieved.

"Hearts" is a perfect example of the default sensibility of white middle-class America at the dawn of the Reagan Age. A ballad dominated by its "Cinderella's Ball" high school slow dance synthesized keyboards and its back beat, "Hearts" conjures up a time of suburban prosperity, stability and safety.

The other single from Balin to chart was "Atlanta Lady," another lite rock ballad with a discernible back beat:

Interestingly, Marty Balin didn't write any of the material on Balin besides sharing a credit for "Lydia!," my favorite track on the record, a disco rocker that has the Jefferson Airplane founder singing about subways and freeway overpasses:

Balin is a largely pristine commercial album. It reached #35 on the Billboard charts. (The only clunker is "Elvis and Marilyn," a song co-authored by Leon Russell, Kim Fowley and Dyan Diamond.) As Stephen Thomas Erlewine reports in his AllMusic review, Balin is a valuable aural document of the early 1980s rock-disco-soul steady state:

Marty Balin left Jefferson Starship in 1978, not long after "Miracles" gave the group a Top Ten soft rock hit in 1975, thereby providing a window into the world the singer inhabited when he went solo in 1981 with Balin. He largely abandoned songwriting -- he collaborated on one song on the record -- in the pursuit of being an AOR superstar. The 1981 eponymous album was indeed a hit thanks to the gorgeous soft rock staple "Hearts," written by longtime friend Jesse Barish, as was a good chunk of the rest of the album. Some of Balin follows the direction of "Hearts" -- "Atlanta Lady" and "Music Is the Light" both softly shimmer -- but the album overall plays like a sampler of the mainstream rock sounds of 1981. On "Spotlight" and "I Do Believe in You," guitars are cranked up to 11 so they can fill an arena, "Tell Me More" cops some of Michael McDonald's Doobie Brothers disco-soul, and "You Left Your Mark on Me" and "Elvis and Marilyn" flirt with new wave while "Lydia!" outright embraces it, sounding a bit like Donnie Iris. Maybe this hodgepodge didn't do much to establish Balin as a recording star at the time -- certainly it didn't please some Jefferson Starship fans -- but as an artifact of early-'80s rock, it's wildly fun and somewhat compelling.

I chose Balin for today's post because it was produced in 1981, and I thought it would be interesting to contrast the creative efforts of a Founding Father of the San Francisco Sound of the 1960s (the sound more than any other that defined the Hippie Zeitgeist) with a Hardcore Punk album like Land Speed Record or a New Wave Hip Hop/House Music record like Tom Tom Club, both also produced in 1981. Plus, having recently viewed Gimme Shelter, I was impressed by Marty Balin's display of personal physical courage when he jumped into the pit in front of the Altamont stage and mixed it up with the Hells Angels.

The takeaway is the obvious one. By 1981 all fight or even the ability to critique society was bleached out of the Hippies. They were integrated back into the mainstream capitalist paradigm as entrepreneurs, lawyers, tradesmen, accountants, what have you; they were looking for and sometimes achieving commercial comfort. Of course a society with a background sound of Balin, The Doobie Brothers and Earth Wind & Fire is long gone. It seems from this vantage point a society more orderly than anything we will ever again encounter. Maybe it was that orderliness, that saccharine commercial tidiness with the compact clean guitar solos set off in spotlight which proved too much for me.

Hippies vs. Punks: Tom Tom Club

Back in February I posted on The Clash's "Overpowered by Funk."

Punks do hip hop. That was the message. I cited Tom Tom Club's "Wordy Rappinghood" as a probable influence. I put a request in at the public library for the 2009 deluxe edition 2-CD import of the 1981 eponymous Tom Tom Club debut album and the band's follow up, Close to the Bone (1983). Last week it finally arrived, and I've been listening to it since.

Tom Tom Club (1981) is another product of the genius of Chris Blackwell. He saw explosive creative potential in the Talking Heads rhythm section of Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz that others did not (or possibly he could have just been following the market, since both David Byrne and Jerry Harrison also released solo debuts in 1981). Blackwell's plan was to pair Frantz and Weymouth with superstar producer Lee "Scratch" Perry in a Bahamas recording studio. But Perry was a no show. So Steve Stanley stepped in and produced a miracle.

The album charted in both the UK and the United States on the strength of the first two tracks, "Wordy Rappinghood" and "Genius of Love," which became dance hall favorites.

I owned the album in cassette form back in the day, purchasing it when I first arrived at the university as a freshman. This would have been the end of summer 1982. At the time, Tom Tom Club seemed incredibly fresh and novel even if it was part of an old tradition of white artists "borrowing" from black ones. It seemed spontaneous, exuberant, playful, multicultural, with both black urban and French Caribbean influences.

For me Tom Tom Club and those first two cuts represent the sunshine of the early 1980s, an interesting time. Reaganism and Thatcherism were new and not really accepted as legitimate. Most thought of these new conservative governments as aberrational one-offs. We had no way of knowing the extent of the regression that Reagan and Thatcher represented. There were dark hints in the Reagan recession (something I have explored in a previous Hippies vs, Punks devoted to Generic Flipper) but for the most part the early 1980s were a time of hope, ska, new horizons and multiracial possibilities (something I scratched the surface of in a previous post on 2 Tone Ska).

In listening to the 2009 deluxe edition re-issue of Tom Tom Club what is striking is that once you get past the opening cuts and into the second side of the album a more ominous and brooding sound surfaces. I think the tendency in the early '80s was to not think too much about songs like "As Above, So Below"; "Lorelei"; "On, On, On, On . . ."; "Booming and Zooming" but the dystopian future was all there to hear.

One remarkable track from the 2009 deluxe edition re-issue that was not included on the LP, cassette or CD versions of Tom Tom Club is "Spooks (Single Version)." It is a menacing ambient harbinger of the "total awareness" national security state aborning. Even if it had been included on the original album, we wouldn't have noticed it. We were too busy dancing in the sunshine to new rhythms and beats. It is very noticeable now though:

Hippies vs. Punks: Grant Hart's Intolerance

The Labor Day weekend draws to a close. It was a good one. I was able to scratch my way back to a semblance of balance after several weeks operating with an energy deficit.

I spent the three-day holiday weekend listening to a lot of jazz and Traffic. I also, as you know if you looked at this page over the last couple of days, have revisited some of the seminal recordings of SST Records.

This afternoon I am listening -- on repeat -- to Grant Hart's first solo full-length album after the demise of Hüsker Dü.

Intolerance (1989) appeared at a time when SST Records had lost its steam. I consider it the last great record the label put out. Greg Ginn was focusing his energy on the Cruz Records sub-label. Cruz featured Grunge and Pop Punk music before it became the next -- and probably the last -- Grand Barbecue for the major labels. 

Intolerance was released December of 1989, but I didn't purchase it until I moved to the Emerald City for the first time, the summer of 1990. (In the early '90s, after I returned to New York City from my Seattle sojourn, I was an acolyte of ALL, the top band for Cruz Records. I listened to ALL and Dinosaur Jr. religiously from 1990 to 1993.) 

My marriage was ending and I was living alone up the east flank of Capitol Hill, a mile or two from the University of Washington. I worked as a laborer for a drywall contractor. I had a tiny sublet apartment. I drank when I could. But I had the sunshine too, sonically represented by Grant Hart's Intolerance.

SST Records, the label that had created, more than any other, the American Hardcore Punk sound (think Black Flag), was, by the end of the 1980s, basically a purveyor of Hippie sensibility, albeit the kind found at the end of the Reagan era. And this sensibility, if I had to define it, which I believe I can since I was in and of it -- I  represented it more than most -- was a rejection of Yuppie career-track achievement and status in favor of alcohol and independent artistic/scholarly pursuits. -- Good homemade meals, I should mention that as well. As a young man who turned his back on the Academy, not only did I read my fair share of Bukowski and Kerouac, but I also spent a lot of time blendering basil and pine nuts for pesto and stir-frying tofu and snow peas in oyster sauce. (I used to spend a lot more time cooking; part of that was living with and taking care of women.)

So by the time the '80s draw to a close Punk has come full circle. The Punk is now a Hippie. The Hippie is in the vanguard once again. This is what makes Intolerance a standout, unique record. The opposition, the anger of Punk towards Hippie has disappeared. The progeny has assumed the forebear's identity; the son now wears the father's beard.

Listen to the album if you can; it is a great one.

Hippies vs. Punks: Generic Flipper

After work I have to pick up a packet for a race I'm running Sunday morning. It involves a trip up to the Green Lake neighborhood. I don't know what time I will get home. So I am posting the weekly installment of Hippies vs. Punks this morning instead of tonight.

I mentioned in a Monday post on the SST Tour that my Hardcore bonafides boiled down to a love of the Minutemen. To add to that I would be remiss if I did not mention Album – Generic Flipper.

In the 1980s entertaining in the university city of Berkeley usually involved having friends over for beers, sometimes a meal, and then out into the night to go to a bar or a party. Sometimes we would stay all night in the apartment I shared with my girlfriend (who became my wife, and then my ex-wife) and just drink, talk and listen to music. At a certain point in the evening, after all the records had been played, usually sometime around midnight, one album would be placed on the turntable, an album irrefutable and dense, inky black, dark and deep, an album that said, "It is over." That album was Generic Flipper.

Listening to a song like "Life is Cheap" before trundling off to bed to sleep off the alcohol reminded one that the world is ruled by brute force wielded by alien forces -- an important lesson to imbibe along with one's liberal education.

Flipper was formed out of the wreckage of Negative Trend. It combined Negative Trend bassist Will Shatter and drummer Steve DePace with vocalist/bassist Bruce Loose and guitarist Ted Falconi. (A college buddy of mine lived next door to Ted.) The band was controversial in that their slow, bass-driven droning sound went against the speedy grain that dominated California Hardcore.

Generic Flipper -- recorded in 1980 and 1981, released in 1982 -- overlaps with and provides perfect sonic documentation of the "Reagan Recession." 

Nineteen-eighty-two was the first time I was living on my own as an adult. Nationwide unemployment hit 10.8% in November and December, higher than any time -- including the Great Recession of 2008 -- since the Great Depression. Attempting to cut inflation Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker took a meat ax to the economy, the prime interest rate hitting 21.5% in June of '82.

Though I was safely ensconced in the protective arms of the university, I remember the vibe of that time of high unemployment. I remember it was a cold fall and winter. Living in an urban environment for the first time I became aware of the shit and piss and broken beer bottle alleyways and the hatred, vomit, rage, junk, dread, squalor, hopelessness of life that Generic Flipper so accurately records.

Reaganism was definitely the end of the line for any Hippies who were still holding out in the early 1980s. Flower Power had been rendered juiceless. The Punks, who first appeared in the avant-garde at the same time as the stagflation of the 1970s, painted a picture of a future we are presently living.

Hippies vs. Punks: Bob Dylan's Gospel Period

After my parents separated in early 1977 my mother moved to Southern Oregon. The family was split: I stayed with my father the first year while my sisters took up residence in Ashland with my mother. This entailed many regular seven-to-eight hour trips up and down Interstate 5 in my mother's old orange (because it was once owned by the county) Dodge three-speed pickup. Along the freeway in Northern California huge "I'M SAVED!" signs starting springing up over the next couple of years. This was also the time that Rollen Stewart, The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, inserted himself into the national consciousness via televised professional sporting events.

Bob Dylan's conversion took place at the end of 1978 while he was performing on the road. He was on stage in San Diego when someone threw him a silver cross. He bent down and picked it up and put it in his pocket. Then later, one night in Arizona, feeling low and in need he reached into his pocket and found the crucifix. That was it. Dylan was Born Again. He began preaching the Gospel during his shows.

In preparation for tonight's post I reread Saved! The Gospel Speeches of Bob Dylan, a tiny little paperback (part of a series, No. 36, put out by Hanuman Books, which also include titles authored by Richard Hell and Cookie Mueller) that I picked up at St. Mark's Bookshop at a time when I had recently separated from my wife. What Clinton Heylin, the Dylan scholar who edited the book, must have done (there is no forward or introduction) is transcribe all the talking parts from concert bootlegs in 1979 and 1980. The book is organized in numbered sections that correspond to concert locations/dates or interviews listed in an index at the back; it is a record of Dylan proselytizing his audience. Sounding like a fire and brimstone Pentecostal preacher, Dylan warns his fans to be wary of this world because it is ruled by Satan, the prince of the power of the air; that Jesus defeated Satan when he died on the cross; that they must let Jesus into their hearts for the end of the world is nigh. Dylan draws heavily from the Book of Revelation; he sees proof of its prophecy in geopolitical current events -- Iran, Afghanistan.

Dylan saw it all at the end of the 1970s. And the grip of the prince of the power of the air has done nothing but tighten in the last thirty years. Oil, money, power -- a profane world grown ever more corrupt. Slow Train Coming (1979) is a truly great album. Listen to it today and you'll find that it sounds like it was just recorded.

By 1979 the path is already cleared for Reagan. The previous year there was the rise of anti-tax ideology in the form of Howard Jarvis' Proposition 13. This began a generalized vilification  from the Right of all things governmental. By 1979 you also had the rise of an American version of the stab-in-the-back myth with the politicization of the POW/MIA issue. Captured in the Chuck Norris film, Good Guys Wear Black (1978), the idea is that the G.I.s would've crushed the gooks if not for being sold out by venal politicians and those fucking filthy peace-freak Hippies. This ideology becomes rampant in the '80s with the Rambo movies; it is synonymous with the zenith of Reaganism. In 1979 you had the creation of the Moral Majority by Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell whose plan was to harness the resurgence of that "Old Time Religion" for a new, more conservative Republican Party.

A couple months after the Moral Majority is founded, Dylan releases Slow Train Coming. The one-time standard bearer of the counter culture is reading from the same script as Jerry Falwell. That's it. The party is officially over. The Hippies have melted away. They remain only as a scarecrow in the Right's stab-in-the-back myth and never-ending culture war, a pitiful effigy to toss around at the end of a noose and then set ablaze. The Punks never had the numbers to engage mainstream culture in serious battle. The Hippies did at one point. But by the end of the '70s, they're done. The field is free for Reaganism.

And though Dylan's three Christian albums -- Slow Train; Saved (1980); Shot of Love (1981) -- are significant events in the extinction of the Hippies (whether as effect or cause doesn't matter) and presage ever-darkening times, they are the Dylan albums (along with Time Out of Mind from 1997) that I continue to listen to the most.