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."

Hippies vs. Punks: Television's Marquee Moon (1977)

The problem with this time of year, spring, is that it is actually colder in my 100-plus-year-old apartment building than during the winter. With the return of the sun and the increase in air temperature, the landlord ratchets down the furnace in preparation for a complete boiler shutdown in May.

The radiator now fires up briefly, if at all, for about a half hour around seven a.m. For someone used to waking up at four a.m., getting out of bed only to sit huddled in a fleece and stocking cap in front of a laptop becomes a lousy choice. Combined with a cascading workload at my job, I have basically abandoned this page the last week. I have chosen instead to stay in bed until the last possible moment. Then I bathe, dress and leave the apartment for work downtown.

It was on such morning, Wednesday it was, that dazed and confused I stumbled into my neighborhood Starbucks to get a "shot in the dark." In front of me in the line to the register was a loquacious Metro bus driver. She was talking to any- and everyone in the shop. I think her topic was homelessness because there were several people sleeping bundled in blankets on the sidewalk outside. Her language was somewhat oblique. She was talking at one remove about how it takes time for people to get to know you; that you need to live in a place for a while before trust develops; but things are always changing so it is a balance.

By this time the bus driver had moved to the other side of the espresso machine and was talking to a young guy who was eating breakfast at a window counter seat. I was at the cash register waiting for my "shot in the dark." Suddenly I noticed a song that had been playing on the sound system. I noticed it because I knew it but in my dazed and confused cold spring morning state couldn't place it.

As my brain searched for the artist, it struck me that whoever it was, it was certainly au courant, tasteful, incisive guitar music. I thought maybe a Wilco release with Nels Cline on lead guitar, or Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks. Then it dawned on me. Of course, It was Television!

What had happened is I had wandered into the Starbucks during the long Tom Verlaine guitar solo that consumes the second half of the 11-minute "Marquee Moon."

Last October I wrote about Televison's second album, Adventure (1978); about how I heard "See No Evil" playing on the PA in my neighborhood supermarket and how it struck me as completely in tune with whatever Zeitgeist we are currently living through.

Here it is happening again. A message is obviously being relayed. But what is it?

Marquee Moon (1977), Television's first album, from which "Marquee Moon" is the first single, was recorded in September 1976, a critical time for UK Punk. Television had been around since 1974. The band was the anchor of the CBGBs scene. But like Quicksilver Messenger Service, the San Francisco Sound Hippie band who Verlaine admired, Television waited several years to sign a recording contract. The band had worked with Brian Eno, but Verlaine did not like the sound that resulted. He held out until he could produce, which Elektra allowed him to do.

Marquee Moon was a hit in the UK and elsewhere but not in the United States, where it failed to chart. Yet here it is ambient 40 years later, and not as a golden lite rock oldie like Fleetwood Mac's Rumours (1977) of the same period.

I think Television's Marquee Moon is a vindication of the Hippies vs. Punks hypothesis. Something happened in the United States and the rest of the West in the years from 1974-1975 to 1979. Social democracy was scrapped in favor of something new, a new paradigm, and that turned out to be what we now call neoliberalism. We are still in its thrall after many decades. If you want to hear what the essence of that is, where it gets its power, listen to Marquee Moon.

Christgau described Television as champions of a "single-minded Utopian individualism." When I was doing my week-long immersion in Adventure last fall, I wandered into a trendy cafe frequented by the young digerati and I realized that this is who Television is. That is why Marquee Moon sounds so fresh. "Single-minded Utopian individualism" has been translated into a cyber infinity where the digital and the spiritual are indistinguishable.

Hippies vs. Punks: After Bathing at Baxter's (1967)

After Bathing at Baxter's, released at the end of the revolutionary psychedelic year of 1967, is Jefferson Airplane code for tripping on acid. The album, I think, provides the best example of the what the Hippies, birthed as they were in the San Francisco Bay Area, were all about.

For an accurate, succinct appraisal let's turn to "The 40 Essential Albums of 1967" by Robert Christgau and David Fricke:

Jefferson Airplane: After Bathing at Baxter's (RCA)
Singer Marty Balin was so alienated by the acid-fueled indulgence of the sessions for the Airplane's third album -- four months in Los Angeles, where the band stayed in a mansion that once housed the Beatles -- that he co-wrote only one song, "Young Girl Sunday Blues." Yet Baxter's was the Airplane at their most defiantly psychedelic, exploring outer limits of despair and song form in the dark urgency of "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil," Grace Slick's "Rejoyce" -- a protest-cabaret adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses -- and the nine-minute instrumental improvisation, "Spare Chaynge." The raw challenge of Baxter's was also a requiem for the Day-Glo life promised a few months earlier by the Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow. In the closing medley, "Won't You Try/Saturday Afternoon," Paul Kantner looked back in longing at the Human Be-In of January '67, a new dawn that already seemed a lifetime ago.

Nineteen sixty-seven is the year the United States starts its slide into freak out. The year opens with the January release of the eponymous debut by The Doors, which implores people to "Break on Through (To the Other Side)" in its opening track, followed in February by Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow, before Sgt. Pepper's arrives in June. During 1967 the Beatles release not one but two psychedelic albums, Sgt. Pepper's and Magical Mystery Tour; as do The Doors, The Doors and Strange Days. The Jimi Hendrix Experience adds to the cerebral onslaught with two of its own, Are You Experienced?, released in August. and Axis: Bold as Love, in December. Not to be left out, The Who and the Rolling Stones get into the mix with psychedelic releases of their own: Their Satanic Majesties Request, The Rolling Stones' psychedelic one-off, and The Who's brilliant The Who Sell Out.

By the end of 1967 the U.S. body politic is roiling and primed for the "crack in time" to come in 1968. Nineteen sixty-seven began with the arrival of the counterculture as a political force. The event was the Human Be-In, the founding moment for the Hippie. Peace, love, self-exploration and rock 'n' roll were its high points. But by the time the year had run its course -- huge race riots in Newark and Detroit and the first massive march on the Pentagon to call for a halt to the Vietnam War -- the Hippies were mindful that "breaking through to the other side" was going to be a messy business.

A year or two back I did a week-long immersion in After Bathing at Baxter's, the idea being that it would be the subject of a Hippies vs. Punks post.

One winter afternoon I descended to the large file room on the first floor of the building where I worked. There, after eating an apple and CLIF Builders Protein Bar, I nestled myself in the stacks and flat on my back on the carpeted floor drifted off to a state of quasi-consciousness while listening to After Bathing at Baxter's on my iPod. The lights to the file room were set to a motion detector. So after 15 minutes they blinked off and it was as if I were in a John Lilly sensory-deprivation tank.

It must have been Paul Kantner's "Martha" that I was listening to. I heard the song's concluding lines -- "There she'll be: in green sun, on blue earth under warm running shower" -- and it all came back to me: My childhood growing up in the Bay Area in the Sixties and Seventies. The weekend family outings and nature getaways. The green space and wetlands. Cattails. An intimate up-close tactile memory of cattails. Who interacts with cattails anymore? I certainly don't. But there I was on my back in the dark file room with my face in a cattail smeared with duck down set against a background of cool blue sky.

I figured what had happened is that I had accessed a buried memory of After Bathing at Baxter's. I don't think my parents owned I copy. I think my parents' best friends, the Bruscas, did. Our family would often go over to the Brusca family manse, a restored Victorian, on Friday nights and while the kids played Monopoly and watched horror movies on television the adults would smoke dope and listen to the stereo in the living with a big fireplace. This is where I am certain I must have been exposed to After Bathing at Baxter's because I remember being mesmerized by Ron Cobb's cover art. The Bruscas were the family we went with on camping trips -- to the beach, to various area parks and trails.

When I think about the Hippies I think about the vast San Francisco Estuary. I don't think you have the Hippies without the sense of the ecology of this gigantic wetlands; that, and a platform of shared prosperity and social democracy that Pat Brown liberalism realized in Northern California.

The Hippies were weekenders retreating from the workaday world. They thought it would be a good idea to make the weekend retreat an everyday reality. I agree wholeheartedly. It is. If you want to hear what that idea feels like listen to After Bathing at Baxter's. particularly the last track, Kantner's elegy for the Human Be-In, "Won't You Try/Saturday Afternoon":

****

Apologies. I promised a hypothesis explaining our current hopelessness. Maybe next week. We'll stay on 1967. Get ready for The Monkees!

Hippies vs. Punks: Fugazi's Steady Diet of Nothing (1991)

Nirvana's Nevermind (1991) followed Fugazi's Steady Diet of Nothing (1991) by a couple of months. More than any other record, Nevermind launched the Grunge rocketship into orbit. It is ranked number 17 on Rolling Stone's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time."

My suspicion though is that Kurt Cobain would have loved Nevermind to sound more like Steady Diet of Nothing. Cobain was openly critical of the slick, commercial, classic rock mix that Butch Vig produced for Nevermind. But the kids loved it so much it created a situation that, as Guy Picciotto, one of Fugazi's two vocalists and guitarists, has noted (or something to the effect): "After Nevermind other bands might as well have been hobos pissing in the forest playing ukuleles."

This week and the next we'll look at two albums that appeared at the same time as Nevermind -- Fugazi's Steady Diet of Nothing, released in July of the all-important Grunge year of 1991; and Bullet LaVolta's Swandive, released the same day in September as Nirvana's Nevermind. Let's call it an homage to the "Ghost of Testosterone Past."

In 1991 I was a young man living alone in the megalopolis. I had copies of both Steady Diet of Nothing and Swandive, which I listened to frequently. When I look back on that time in my mind's eye it always seems to be at night and in the winter. I am alone in my studio apartment drinking quarts of beer and typing letters to friends. I didn't own a copy of Nevermind. I was suspicious of all the hoopla surrounding Nirvana. It seemed to me more about record industry marketing than the music. (I finally sat down and listened to Nevermind at the insistence of my friend and musical mentor Oliver when he visited New York City the summer of 1992. At first I thought Kurt Cobain was Sting.)

I recently found a used CD of Steady Diet of Nothing for $5. I happily snatched it up and loaded it into my iTunes. Walking to work in the February morning dark, saturated by the Pacific Northwest winter gloom and drizzle, and hearing Ian MacKaye, Fugazi's other guitarist and vocalist, sing "Reclamation," followed by Picciotto belting out "Nice New Outfit," I became transformed. The word I want to say is "tumescent," minus any sexual connotation. I was full, powerful. It felt like I was mainlining testosterone. I had the sense that muscle was stronger than the strongest metal. When "Stacks" followed "Nice New Outfit," it felt like I was about to blast off; literally, I could feel myself leaving the Earth.

Steady Diet of Nothing is an album like no other. It's the combination of the two guitars of MacKaye and Picciotto, their muscular male vocals, and the attacking drums of Brendan Canty. What's funny is that it is a record the band dismisses as a novice initial attempt at producing, one where each player was overly careful not to piss the other guy off; plus, MacKaye, Picciotto, Canty and bassist Joe Lally were fried from back-to-back tour dates. Nonetheless, for me at least, I'd say it is close to perfection.

Listening once to the 20th anniversary edition of Nevermind this week, I understand why Nirvana had such enormous appeal. Cobain was an unparalleled rock vocalist. He could shift on a dime from rager to crooner better than anyone else. Evan Dando of the Lemonheads, for instance, could do one song as a rager and then another as a crooner, but Kurt Cobain could do both in the same song effortlessly. Also the songs on Nevermind have a consistent vibe of blissed-out suffering. Cobain was a junkie who had an amazing ability to communicate a wide-panorama, unblinking view of the world.

Fugazi was the direct opposite of Nirvana. The band had its own label, MacKaye's Dischord, and sold its music at a much lower price than any other label, including other independents. I remember going to the record store in the early 1990s and Fugazi albums were $5 cheaper than the rest. You have to figure that took some hard bargaining by Dischord because the tendency of record stores at a time when big chains like Tower still existed was to mark up everything to the established retail price.

While Fugazi was radical commercially, it was even more so socially. Ian MacKaye is a founding father of the straight edge movement. Straight edge is a refutation of the mindless glorification of sex and drugs that goes back to the Hippies and their confused (and failed) ideas of liberation. Straight edge advocates abstemiousness and vegetarianism; it is against the worship of violence. In college straight-edge people were referred to as "Peace Punks." (One summer evening when I was an undergraduate a young black woman on a BMX-type bike who called herself a "Peace Punk" followed me home from Telegraph Avenue and asked if I wanted to hook up. I demurred, saying I lived with my girlfriend. )

Now, at 51, other than a devotion to coffee, I can declare myself straight edge.

Let's wrap things up with an assessment of Fugazi by the "Dean of American Rock Critics," Robert Christgau:

The most principled band of the '90s declined to send out promos, a decision I would have respected even if they hadn't been so stalwart in minimizing ticket prices, staging all-ages shows, and otherwise putting punk's D.C-based straight-edge ethos into practice. Since their Dischord label remained solvent as other indies went mainstream or under, I'm sure they understood venture capital better than me. I bought three early-'90s albums: 13 Songs, Repeater, and Steady Diet of Nothing. These were enough to convince me that from the strictures of Minor Threat's razor-sharp hardcore to the confrontational formalism of Fugazi's surgical AOR, Ian MacKaye has always been a musical puritan as well as all the other kinds. Obsessed with corruption, he figured out that words and voices don't excise it as efficiently as a well-honed guitar--specifically Guy Picciotto's precise, rock-solid distorto riffs. On Repeater, Picciotto offered something like pleasure. On the other two the resemblance was more abstract. I'm not any kind of puritan. So I stopped buying their records.

If you are a man, and you want to find purity, listen to Steady Diet of Nothing. 

Hippies vs. Punks: David Bowie's Young Americans (1975)

I've been listening to David Bowie's Young Americans (1975), the album, along with Station to Station (1976), that stands as a tiny island between the land masses of Glam and the Berlin Trilogy in the Bowie oeuvre. Though I am not what I would call a Bowie expert (more an appreciative student), I would say that there is no other Bowie record that is like Young Americans, with its strange combination of Philadelphia Soul and Beatlephilia.

Christgau's review is illuminating:

David Bowie: Young Americans [RCA Victor, 1975]
This is a failure. The tunes make (Lennon-McCartney's) "Across the Universe" sound like a melodic highlight, and although the amalgam of English hard rock and Philly soul is so thin it's interesting, it often overwhelms David's voice, which is even thinner. But after the total alienation of Diamond Dogs and the total ripoff of David Live, I'm pleased with Bowie's renewed generosity of spirit--he takes pains to simulate compassion and risks failure simply by moving on. His reward is two successes: the title tune, in which pain stimulates compassion, and (Bowie-Lennon-Alomar's) "Fame," which rhymes with pain and makes you believe it. B-

Christgau likes the two hit singles, "Young Americans" and "Fame." (Bowie shares a writing credit on "Fame" with John Lennon and Carlos Alomar.) But the entire album is chock full of excellent material. "Fascination" and "Somebody Up There Likes Me," not to mention "Win," are particularly strong.

What has made an impression on me this past week listening to Young Americans is the extent to which the alto saxophone of David Sanborn dominates the album. The guitar is reduced to the high treble fills found in funk, and the resulting sound, with the backing vocals of Ava Cherry, Robin Clark and Luther Vandross, is a slick edgy urban soul, what Bowie called "plastic soul," and what most of us recognize from the Saturday Night Live Band, which debuted in 1975.

So there is a "present at the creation" quality to Young Americans. Commodified urban chic is the product being extruded.  If you want to hear what an aural leap Young Americans represents, listen to Diamond Dogs (1974) or Pin Ups (1973). Bowie was shrewd to abandon Glam when he did. By the middle 1970s Glam, soon to be lampooned in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), had devolved into the same old arena rock god trap in which prog rockers found themselves.

My feeling is that Bowie has to be studied because he was an amazing synthesizer who had the ability to crystallize and commodify musical vapors swirling in the avant-garde. Basically the guy could do no wrong from 1969 to 1984. He popularized Glam and in so doing drove a stake in the heart of Hippie and his hopes that another world was possible. (After Let's Dance (1983) Bowie loses his mojo. I remember seeing him interviewed on television promoting his Glass Spider Tour. He was attempting one of his countless reinventions, this time as a Steve Jones Sex Pistols Punk rocker. Bowie had once again correctly identified the musical Zeitgeist. But at 40 years old in 1987, and famously androgynous in past personas, he could not pull it off. I remember thinking to myself, "Jesus, is that pathetic.")

Young Americans and its odd matrimony of Beatles and Philadelphia Soul is a one-off. The record strikes me as a conscious effort by Bowie to feed himself some sonic comfort food after starving the Hippies to death with Glam. It is his bon voyage to the 1960s, the best of which, Bowie is saying, are black music and the Beatles. (John Lennon's "Across the Universe" anchors side two of the album.)

Bowie would not tarry on "plastic soul." He would abandon Sigma Sound and Electric Lady for Cherokee Studios in Hollywood and the coked-out brilliance of Station to Station. Does a more bizarre song than "Golden Years" ever receive saturation airplay on AM radio?

Bowie retreats from the United States after Station to Station, relocating to the European continent to help remake popular music with Brian Eno. What we get is New Wave.

If anything, Young Americans and Station to Station, isolated and "islands in the stream"-like as they are in the Bowie oeuvre, buttress the Hippies vs. Punks hypothesis that in 1975 and 1976 something serious and dislocating happens in the West to set us on our current path to destruction. Let's hope the order that began to form back then cracks asunder in 2016.

Hippies vs. Punks: L7's Smell the Magic (1990)

The myth of progressive history is here refuted. The idea, championed by Christians, capitalists, Hegelians, Marxists, Nazis, you name it, that, primarily because of a technology, maybe Geist, maybe Christ, history is moving in an ascendant direction to greater perfection, can be junked irrefutably by viewing the two videos below, two versions of L7, the all-women Los Angeles Grunge rock quartet, performing "Pretend We're Dead" in 1992. The first, is the ballyhooed L7 appearance on the English television program "The Word," famous because lead vocalist Donita Sparks bared her ass and bush at the end of the song; the second, is an incendiary performance on The David Letterman Show:

Something has been lost. Nothing today can come close to this. We -- and when I say "we" I mean Western society -- are incapable of producing anything as powerful, fun, hopeful, self-deprecating as L7 in the band's prime.

I first heard L7 when "Pretend We're Dead" came on the radio in the kitchen of a house I rented in a rundown neighborhood in San Antonio the summer of 1993. The house was a few blocks from San Antonio College. San Antonio College had a radio station with an eclectic programming mix; Friday nights featured a show devoted to contemporary rock 'n' roll. It was a couple of hours of pure Grunge.

At this time, late summer of 1993, Grunge was approaching its zenith. After Cobain's suicide the following spring, Grunge would collapse in a year or two due to the insatiable greed of the recording industry promoting bands like Hootie & the Blowfish as the next Nirvana.

L7, slang for "square," was an essential band during the Age of Grunge. Hard-partying women who could out-cock-rock the greatest cock rockers (or, to crib a line from "Fast and Frightening," "Got so much clit she don't need no balls") I used to enjoy reading about them in SPIN magazine. They were honest about using a rhyming dictionary when writing lyrics. They didn't take themselves too seriously -- like the New York Dolls, except they were actually women -- but they were a serious band. They began Rock for Choice, a pro-choice benefit concert series that ran throughout the 1990s.

I decided to devote this morning's post to L7 because they reformed recently and our on tour now. They were in town at the beginning of the month. But most importantly they are my age, of my generation, and the generation of my old flame who is locked in a neck-and-neck race for a city council district that looks to be headed for a recount; that, and they are the cultural progeny of Patti Smith.

I had copies of L7's best known albums Bricks Are Heavy (1992) -- the record on which "Pretend We're Dead" appears -- and Hungry for Stink (1994). But I was unfamiliar with their earlier work, the eponymous 1988 debut album and the follow-up EP, Smell the Magic, released on Sub Pop at the end of the summer of 1990.

I got both over the weekend and have been listening to them all week, but mostly Smell the Magic (famous also for the t-shirt):

It is a great record. Christgau gives it an 'A':

Generalizing the hostile "Shove" with the balls-to-the-wall "Fast and Frightening," dissecting everybody else's suicidal tendencies on "Deathwish" before joining the fun on "'Till the Wheels Fall Off," humping a "Broomstick" as a preamble to "Packin' a Rod," these clitocentric trouble girls are everything the Runaways were supposed to be. Afraid of nothing including the four-syllable F-word, they go for an obsessive, dirty, punk pop-metal so aggressive it'll scare damn near every sister in sight. But the bravest will grow stronger. Soon they'll tell others. And start their own bands. And conquer the world. Right? A

But back to this idea of history moving in a regressive direction. Grunge was an attempt at a grand synthesis of Hippie and Punk, something I think it accomplished here and there, certainly in the case of L7's prime.

Then along came Riot Grrl, and things got preachy and precious and lost their sense of humor. The music market tended toward greater and greater segmentation. Interestingly, the recording industry today survives as an ever-diminishing corporate behemoth thanks to the continuing cross-over popularity of three young women artists: Adele, Taylor Swift and Beyonce.

Everyone knows today we're nowhere. Everyone subliminally understands the planetary crisis we're in. Things seem hopeless. And when things seem hopeless, it is hard to muster up any energy. That's why I say we can't match what L7 put out there 23-years ago. We don't have the time or the space -- after each economic downturn since the early '90s it has been more difficult for young people to find housing and work in the urban milieu while pursuing creative endeavors -- to articulate a counter culture. I think Grunge, however brief, was really the last time. Maybe now Black Lives Matter. But seeing that old video of "Pretend We're Dead" I can't help feeling some generational pride.

Hippies vs. Punks: Television's Adventure (1978)

The wonders of discovery never cease. I was unfamiliar with Television's second album, Adventure (1978), until recently. I checked it out from my public library and have been immersed in it all week; a true immersion, which involves listening morning, noon and night.

One of the reasons that I was unaware of Adventure is undoubtedly due to the long shadow that the band's debut, Marquee Moon (1977), casts. Marquee Moon -- released February 1977, the same month as the first UK Punk full-length, The Damned's Damned Damned Damned -- is one of the greatest records of all time. It sounds as fresh and incisive today as ever. 

Not too long ago I was shopping at my neighborhood supermarket when "See No Evil" began to play on the store's PA. It seemed odd at first that a track from one of the seminal Punk albums should be playing as background music at a supermarket chain. But after a moment or two I realized that "See No Evil" sounded completely appropriate to our present social milieu, whatever name it may go by.

Adventure was the follow-up to Marquee Moon. And while it was favorably reviewed by Robert Christgau, who awarded it an A-minus, it didn't fare nearly as well on the charts as Marquee Moon.

Then Television broke up the same year as Adventure was released. The break-up was due to a combination of drugs and the clashing egos of the band's two guitarists, Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, both of whom would go on to record solo album's for Elektra. 

Television's break-up combined with the super-historicity of Marquee Moon has to be the reason why Adventure is not more broadly acknowledged as an excellent album and a vital document. The guitar playing is luminescent, sounding at times like Richard Thompson's work from the same period, or Nels Cline's stuff for present-day Wilco, and the song writing is revelatory. But there is a definite spaciness and ethereal vibe to the record. There seems to be a synthesizer anesthetizing in the background on many tracks. Adventure isn't as sharp or exuberant as Marquee Moon. But if one plays the record repeatedly, a complex coherence emerges.

An epiphany I experienced this week while listening to Adventure is that it is an album that defines our Present Age. Gone is any aspiration for grand transformation, total rapture or transcendence. We've settled for a digitized life of individual dreams. The energy of our technocratic elite is intellectual and oblique, much like Tom Verlaine's lyrics.

Adventure was released the same month that Scorsese's The Last Waltz (which was shot at Winterland Ballroom) appeared in movie theaters, three months after the Sex Pistols disintegrated (at Winterland Ballroom). Nineteen-seventy-eight, a year when personal computers start to find their way into homes, is really the dividing line between our Present Age and what goes before. We have been living out 1978 in one form or another for the last 35-some-odd years, a "monochrone." Adventure should be studied as an ur-document for our time.

Robert Christgau wrote a prescient review of Television in June 1978 called "Television Principles" where he notes that 

Not that knowing the words is knowing what they mean--as Verlaine himself puts it in his ambivalent paean to rationality "Prove It "many of them are "too 'too too'/to put a finger on." His writing is genuinely idiosyncratic and spiritual, and although he's more humorous and dreamy on the new record, he stated his credo right after that classic riff at the beginning of Marquee Moon: "What I want/I want NOW/and it's a whole lot more/ than 'anyhow.' " 

Verlaine's needs and visions are deep-seated and obsessively personal; I wonder if even he knows what "Marquee Moon" is about any more. He's such a bourgeois individualist he even changed his credo to "and it's a whole lot more/than Chairman Mao" one time Sunday night, and I say good for him, because I believe he's ready to risk all in his quest. The line that haunts me from the new album--"I love disaster and I love what comes after"--could be a revolutionary's motto as easily as a mystic's. In this denial of limits, asserted too in the musical release they aim for, Television is representative of nothing. Almost every great rock band and a lot of the most successful bad ones culminate some general social tendency, be it the Ramones' pop economy or Kansas's greedy middle-American pseudo-seriousness or Steely Dan's expert programmability or Kiss's life-sized caricature. But while it's possible to imagine a late-'60s revival in which Television would spawn countless imitators, at the moment their single-minded Utopian individualism sets them apart. And it is just that that makes them seem so precious.

This is of course who we are today, or at least what the neoliberal paradigm screwed down on top of us over the last four decades would have us believe: a "single-minded Utopian individualism" that is inflating to enormous proportions the gap between the haves and have-nots; it is a post-familial world of mass extinction where we find ourselves alone in a cyber infinity. This is the dream's dream. The digital is indistinguishable from the spiritual.

Hippies vs. Punks: Hüsker Dü's Land Speed Record

Hüsker Dü's Land Speed Record was recorded live the summer of 1981 and originally released by New Alliance Records in January of 1982, about the same time that Sire Records released Tom Tom Club in the United States. In 1987 Mike Watt and Martin Tamburovich sold New Alliance Records to SST Records. Greg Ginn then promptly reissued Land Speed Record on SST. This is when I bought the album.

Nineteen-Eighty-Seven was generally a good year for me, a year I became a proto-burdened bachelor when my girlfriend, whom I would end up marrying a year later, moved out of the apartment in which we had lived together for five years. She would return six months later, but for the summer and fall I had the apartment to myself. 

Excepting the regular presence of buddies, who, like blackbirds swooping down on a morsel that had been dropped on the sidewalk, homed in once the girlfriend had vacated the premises, not to mention a cousin who split his time between Berkeley and Marin County, I felt freer than I had since my freshman year of 1982.

What I remember about Land Speed Record is side two. For some reason I was under the impression that "Data Control" spanned the entire second side of the album instead of the last five-and-a-half minutes. I liked the song. It was distinguishable, had a distinguishable beat, was slower than the rest of the material on the record; plus, it was menacing. After listening to side two I felt as if I had been through a trial by ordeal, made privy to secret information. For that reason, I mostly listened to Land Speed Record by myself in the sunny part of the day from 3 PM to 5 PM when the apartment building was largely abandoned.

By 1987 Hüsker Dü was in the process of falling apart. The band's time on a major label was modestly successful. The Hüskers were pioneers when they jumped the SST ship for Warner Bros. with the release of Candy Apple Grey in early 1986. The big migration of hardcore and No Wave independent label bands wouldn't happen for another couple of years. I had stopped buying Hüsker Dü records after New Day Rising (1985).

Until of course the reissue of Land Speed Record. (Then later during the zenith of Grunge I purchased a cassette of Metal Circus.)

Embarking on a work-week immersion of the album I was a little hesitant about making the commitment. I didn't know if I had the strength to absorb non-stop the sonic hydrochloric acid of early Hüsker Dü hardcore. At first, on Monday, after listening to the record on my iPod, I would intersperse a Nina Simone record or Frank Zappa's Sleep Dirt (1979) before repeating the process. But by Wednesday I was listening to Land Speed over and over on high volume to the point that Thursday morning I woke up with an earache.

I think Christgau gets it right when he says, 

Like a good Eno ambient, this raving nonstop live one provides just enough surface detail--recombinant noise guitar, voices tailing off like skyrockets, slogans such as "data control," "do the bee," and "ultracore"--to function as mood rather than trance music, though admittedly not for the same kind of mood. Guaranteed to assuage the nervous tension of co-op conversion, labor strife, bad orgasm, World War III, and other modern urban annoyances. In other words: aarrghhh! B+

What strikes me this morning is that by 1987 we were already vaguely aware that things had gone wrong, and we were looking backwards to the early '80s and the purity of hardcore.

Hippies vs. Punks: Bob Mould's Workbook

I immersed myself in Workbook (1989) this week; rather, I should say that I immersed myself in Workbook 25, the reissue of Bob Mould's first solo album on its 25th anniversary. I don't know why. I think the idea was to select another record, like last week's My War, that I tried to like, made an effort to enjoy, but never really did.

I have a very clear memory about this album because my wife's lover, the fellow she dumped me for who she ended up marrying and having children with, a really nice guy, an English traveling salesman of pewter animal brooches who was on the lam from collection agencies due to a mountain of credit card debt, told me how much he liked it.

I guess I had made a cassette copy of Workbook for my wife. Where she was living with her Englishman, a railroad apartment in a building on the northwest corner of 106th Street and Columbus not too far from Morningside Park, she didn't have a turntable, only a boom box. I can't remember when I bought the album; it couldn't have been too much longer after it had been released in the spring of 1989, a time I was still living with my wife (something I have been exploring sporadically on this page with "The Colt 45 Chroncile" posts).

I recall that my copy of Workbook was a cut-out, a sign that the album had been remaindered, which argues for my purchasing it the following spring or early 1990, the last months I would spend in cohabitation with my wife. I liked Mould's delicate, classical guitar on "Sunspots," which opens the record, as well as the next track, the outstanding "Wishing Well." But then my attention flagged as the rest of the album unfolded, the material never quite hitting the mark. In the end, Christgau's brutally dismissive criticism of Workbook is close to how I felt at the time:

Mould-Maimone-Fier are some kind of supersession, but they're no band, and between the cello and the acoustic guitar and the moderato and the lyric sheet that ought to have a little typeface note like at the end of a Borzoi book, I find myself disliking their record intensely. Until the raving finale, it's so respectable, so cautious, as if honest thought were a suitable substitute for wisdom, sarcasm, a good joke, or a suicide run for the next intro. C+

I wouldn't go so far as to say that I intensely disliked the record. It was after all Bob Mould, the sainted lead of Hüsker Dü, his first solo effort, and therefore worthy of study and respect. It's just that I never put a lot of effort into it. I tried to figure it out here and there, now and again, but never successfully.

Now, listening to Workbook again, my first reaction was in line with the one I had 25 years ago and with Christgau's critique: Elevator music for a maturing "adult contemporary" Hardcore Punk audience. Insufferable. But after listening to Workbook 25 nonstop all week I can safely pronounce the album a great one and certainly one meriting reissue. "Wishing Well" is truly an A+ track, as is the final cut "Whichever Way the Wind Blows."

I am drawn back to the assessment of Workbook by my wife's lover. He called it a great record. Trapped there in a dark flat with bars on the windows, he liberated me; he took a troublesome responsibility off my hands. I would blow in periodically -- this would have been 1991 -- on my way to a night out on the town and they always seemed so penned in and sullen. That's the dark side to pairing up. You're caught in a trap together.

The key to approaching Workbook lies here. Imagine yourself visiting an ex-wife and her traveling salesman lover in their dark third-floor walk-up right before you embark on a night of carousing in the big city. You're free, and they're not.

****

I'll be out of town for a few days. Back on Tuesday.

Hippies vs. Punks: Black Flag's My War

My War was a big deal when it came out in early 1984 because it represented a U-turn. Black Flag, more than any other band, created the sound that by the early 1980s had become synonymous with Punk, and that sound was California Hardcore. With My War, Black Flag moved away from the short, fast songs of the seminal Damaged (1981) debut LP, an album that most of my fellow undergraduate friends at Berkeley seemed to own, to longer, slower, brooding compositions punctuated by Greg Ginn guitar solos. The principal members of the band, guitarist Ginn and vocalist Henry Rollins, grew their hair out long while most of us were buzzing our locks off with electric shears for the first time.

The impression created was one of surrender, of retreat to old, spent Hippie forms. This was confusing to fans, like myself, who were just beginning to embrace Hardcore Punk.

I had dutifully made a trip to the record store and purchased a copy of My War when it first appeared, and had -- along with my wife (who was then my live-in girlfriend), cousin and a couple of friends -- gone to see Black Flag promote the album when they performed at the Stone in San Francisco. This wasn't the show captured on the Live '84 album, or maybe it was; I can't rightly remember. The one we saw, as I recall it, was in the early spring or might have even been in February, just prior to the release of the record. I remember it was a cold, dark evening. And I remember that Bob Dylan's Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) was being pumped through the PA. (I don't think I caught the pun, though I appreciated hearing the album. I too was in the habit at the time of marrying on mix tapes Hardcore music with pre-electric Dylan.)

When the Black Flag came on stage, the presence of a petite girl bass player, Kira Roessler, and the shaggy Hippie heads of Ginn and Rollins, along with the shirtless, beefy, hirsute Bill Stevenson was jarring. I don't know why but it seemed self-indulgent to me. I guess I thought of Hardcore as part of a movement, and here were the founders getting way out ahead of or doing an end-around the faithful.

There were a lot of dewy, downy high school Nazi Punks from the suburbs ready to slam to "Spray Paint" and "TV Party." And things started well enough, with a fast-moving pit circulating to "My War" and some of the other tracks featured on the first side of the album, before hitting the sand with the side-two material (which Christgau dismissed as the "Three dirges that waste side two").

I remember being offended by Rollins' "Rock God" preening. During one of those  "dirges" he pulled down around his thighs the tight black running shorts he wore and displayed his genitals and gyrated his hips in front of the face of a milk-fed, flannel-clad Punk who was jammed against the lip of the stage.

I don't know if we left early or if we stuck it out for the whole show. But I do remember in the subsequent months making an effort to couple with My War and try to get my head around what Ginn was up to. Usually, depending on what my course schedule was for the semester, I would have an early afternoon hole in the school day. I would return to an empty apartment -- the girlfriend, still on campus in class or at work -- and eat lunch, drink coffee and listen to music. It was then, free of the distractions of the evening and cohabitation, that I could really figure music out.

And I did try with My War at least a few times. There was one sunny afternoon that I almost got there, almost "achieved climax." It was with one the "Three dirges that waste side two." But in the end, I never went back to My War. I never bought another Black Flag album.

Nineteen-Eighty-Four was the year that Black Flag would be toppled from its Hardcore pinnacle by three other SST Records bands -- Meat Puppets, Minutemen and Hüsker Dü. Basically, My War was the beginning of the end for Black Flag, even though the band would amazingly release four LPs in 1984.

What makes my immersion in My War this past week so interesting is that immediately upon hearing the album for the first time in many years -- if not three decades -- I knew it was good. Gone was any resistance to the material or difficulty in comprehension. The record makes perfect sense, particularly compelling is Greg Ginn's guitar sound. Something has happened in thirty years. What I tried to accept and could not at the age of 19 is now "music to my ears" at 50.

And what is that?

It has something to do with time itself. What psychedelic ballroom bands like Quicksilver Messenger Service achieved was a sonic mirror of time -- how it meanders and eddies, how there are concentrated pockets and empty gaps; what the athlete knows as "time within time." The second side of My War brings this home beautifully, and that is why I'm sure it will be played for a very long time.

Hippies vs. Punks: Santana's Inner Secrets (1978)

So what were the Hippies doing in 1978? I think they were feeling pretty good about themselves. The peanut farmer who they helped elect president initiated and then presided over the signing of the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt at the end of summer. Peace in the Middle East seemed like a done deal. This was before the Iranian Revolution, Grand Mosque seizure in Mecca and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prompted Carter's sharp swing to the right, paving the way for the "Reagan Revolution." The nation, a few short years after abandoning Vietnam (a great victory for the Hippie), was back in the grip of militarism, a grip that would never loosen. Now we have come to the point of no return. The Middle East is cracked beyond repair. War rages in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, not to mention conflicts in Gaza, the Sinai, Lebanon, and Libya.

But in the summer of 1978 the Hippies were feeling fine. And when they got to feeling that way it meant that it was time to make some real money.

Heading into this week I mused, "When Poly Styrene was raging against the plastic machine of capitalism in Germfree Adolescents (1978), what was a big established Hippie band doing? -- Hey, what about Santana?"

Since watching a DVD of Fillmore: The Last Days a while back I have had Santana on my mind. If you have seen the documentary you know that its organizing principal is Bill Graham's efforts to piece together a bill for the final show at Fillmore West. The "Great White Whale" the megalomaniac promoter hunts throughout the film is Santana; he wants them to close out the final show. And in this Moby Dick Ahab gets his whale.

Fillmore: The Last Days is an amazing document because it records how spent the Hippies are as early as the early summer of 1971. Santana, based on the strength of the bands first three albums --Santana (1969), the super-historic Abraxas (1970) and a Billboard 200 #1 album Santana III (1971) -- as well as the orgiastic performance captured in the Woodstock (1970) film, is at the top of the Hippie heap in Nixon's pre-Watergate America:

Growing up in California in the 1970s, the sound of Santana was ambient. "Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen" and "Oye Como Va" floated in the air, ever-present. Wherever one went there it was. Whether you were at a public park or driving down the main thoroughfare the sound of Santana was the sound of life then. "La Raza." It must have scared the shit of the Hoover types in Washington D.C.

But Fillmore: The Last Days is the end of the line for the band's original lineup. There would be no more chart-toppers until Santana reunites with Clive Davis for the 1999 blockbuster Supernatural.

After the shakeout of the original lineup Carlos gravitates to the fusion camp of Mahavishnu Orchestra, coming under the sway of John McLaughlin's guru Sri Chinmoy. Chinmoy gives Carlos a new name, Devadip, and Santana releases a few fusion albums before returning to the charts with Amigos (1976), much to the relief of executives at Columbia Records.

Amigos and 1977's Festival have a salsa-heavy vibe spiced up by Devadip's guitar-hero fusion blasts. Both records are produced by Columbia Records journeyman David Rubinson (who we last encountered with Moby Grape).  All these records are excellent. In fact, for every Santana album I have listened to this past week I find little to complain about. They're immaculate and soulful. Which makes me question Robert Christgau's stingy grades and dismissive tone. I don't think his reviews are accurate. I think Christgau is captive to some East-Coast snobbery here.

To be fair, I would mark everything up to Inner Secrets which I listened to this week -- I didn't hear the double-album Moonflower (1977) though or any of the post-Caravanserai (1972) fusion records -- at grades of excellent. And I would grade Inner Secrets excellent as well; let's say "A-minus."

What is controversial about Inner Secrets is its choice of producers, Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter, the two award-winning music industry insiders responsible for the successful turnarounds of the Four Tops and Glen Campbell. It is the Lambert-Potter "One Chain (Don't Make No Prison)," a song the duo wrote for the Four Tops, that alienated, or so the story goes, diehard Santana fans. It's a disco dance track, plain and simple. (Listen to the YouTube at the top of the post.) As Christgau opined, "It's sad when one of the few megagroups with a groove powerful enough to get it out of any jam resorts to hacks like Lambert and Potter for a hit. I mean, Santana is schlocky anyway. But Santana's own schlock has some dignity. C+"

Lambert-Potter were also responsible for Tavares and Player and mega-hits like "It Only Takes a Minute" and "Baby Come Back":

Another curious track on Inner Secrets is "Open Invitation," a hat tip to heavy metal. I thought I was listening to Scorpions.

But for all its crass commercialism and a vibe that evokes a clean room at computer chip manufacturer, there is something about Inner Secrets, its blending of fusion with disco, of Mahavishnu Orchestra with Tavares, that is fascinating. The Hippies are cashing in but trying not to cash out. It is an interesting effort.

In the end, we can pronounce it a failure. Meditation and Eastern esoteric religion proved to be not a powerful enough talisman to fend off the vampire of commercialism. But that was not as obvious in the summer of 1978 as it is to us today.

Hippies vs. Punks: X-Ray Spex's Germfree Adolescents

Germfree Adolescents (1978) was not released in the United States for more than 20 years after it first appeared in the UK. Robert Christgau lamented the fact that it was unavailable stateside four months after its UK release in November 1978:

My two favorite LPs of recent months are not available in domestic release and it pisses me off. So let me recommend once again Pere Ubu's Dub Housing on English Chrysalis, especially to admirers of Captain Beefheart who find themselves attracted by the force but put off by the simplifications of most new wave. Simplification fans should seek out the even more exciting Germ Free Adolescents, by X-Ray Spex on English EMI. Poly Styrene's cheerfully moralistic nursery rhymes sound samey at first, but their melodies soon reveal themselves and the dubiously tuned one-sax horn section provides irresistible color. From a song about suicide: "Did you do it for fame?/Did you do it in a fit?/Did you do it before read about it?"

Finally in 1991, during the heyday of Grunge, Caroline Records reissued Germfree Adolescents in the United States, an interesting synchronicity since 1991 is the year Bikini Kill's first record appears.

X-Ray Spex was definitely a Poly Styrene vehicle. She put the band together after seeing the Sex Pistols perform in Hastings the summer of 1976 (just as Bernard Summer and Peter Hook of Joy Division decided to form a band after seeing the Sex Pistols in Manchester the summer of 1976) and the band quickly fell apart after she left in 1979, burnt out from the exigencies of the popular music industry touring and promotion.

Poly Styrene née Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, who died of cancer at the age of 53 in April of 2011, was part Scotch-Irish and part Somali. She ran away from home as a teenager to live the life of a Hippie. Prior to her Sex Pistols conversion, she put out a record in 1976 as Mari Elliot that was produced by Falcon Stuart.

Falcon Stuart produced Germfree Adolescents as well, and Poly Styrene wrote all its songs. And what I took away from my immersion in the album this past week is Falcon Stuart, or whoever did the sound engineering, did a fantastic job. Despite the fact that it is garage rock Punk and therefore has that monaural, bleached quality, the high end of Styrene's vocals most of the time is in perfect balance with Rudi Thompson's saxophone which simultaneously occupies the low end vocal range. So what is created is a steady sonic wave. I find it quite unique.

Then there is the uniqueness of Styrene's anti-consumerist invective. The entire record is a sustained bombardment directed at the artificiality and alienation of capitalist society as actually lived by a human being. I can't think of another first wave Punk album that is anywhere near as focused and consistent in its message.

Germfree Adolescents is a Punk document because it doesn't hold out the possibility of a New World, a Hippie retreat to a pasture in the sun or a rock'n'roll revolution where sexual liberation will provide happiness for everyone and the kids are alright. No, it wades out into the plastic muck and says, "Take a look! This is all we are."

Studying Germfree Adolescents this past week has opened up a hidden reservoir of memory. Falcon Stuart was instrumental in getting Adam and the Ants launched. Adam and the Ants were everywhere when I first moved out on my own to attend the university.

X-Ray Spex's first saxophone player was Lora Logic, who got me thinking about Lene Lovich, who got me thinking about Nina Hagen. And then there is Lydia Lunch. Female Punk artists who were ubiquitous when I was a young man. Then there is Judy Nylon. Let's not forget Judy Nylon.

We're going to have to return to this topic soon. The idea here being that feminism made huge strides because of Punk.

Hippies vs. Punks: Joy of Cooking's Closer To The Ground (1971)

Last weekend I spent a refreshing afternoon reading Paul Krassner's Patty Hearst & The Twinkie Murders: A Tale of Two Trials. It is a real treat. The section of the slim paperback devoted to the Patty Hearst trial mentions a mock interview with Patty that Krassner published in the April 1975 issue of Crawdaddy:

Q. What about music? What have you been listening to?

A. Well, we only have a radio here. At a previous safe-house there was a stereo, but we didn’t have a variety of records. Joy of Cooking, we played them a lot. Pink Floyd, too. And there’s a group called The Last Poets, and there’s one cut on their album where they give their interpretation of all the symbolism on a dollar bill, and we just sat around, wiped out on some really excellent grass, looking at a dollar bill while they were reciting that. It’s very powerful. I remember how I used to think, when I was a little girl, that real money was just official play money.

First mentioned? Joy of Cooking, the female-led Berkeley quintet, labeled previously on this page a "fern bar boogie band." It got me thinking, Why would Krassner imagine that the Symbionese Liberation Army listened to Joy of Cooking?

It sent me back to the band's recordings, specifically the second album, Closer To The Ground, which was released by Capitol Records in 1971, the same year as Joy's eponymous debut.

A couple years back I immersed myself in the first album as part of an effort to explore the bands that performed at the Aquarian Family Festival, a multi-day free festival of rock 'n' roll on the campus of San Jose State in May 1969.

I had heard about Joy of Cooking but never sat down and consciously listened to their music. To me the band evoked a distant past, a time, as Robert Christgau mentioned in one of his rock reviews, that represented a massification of bohemia in the United States.

The story of Joy of Cooking is ably set forth in an article by Tony Sclafani, "Joy of Cooking's innovative recipe." The band's two principals, keyboardist/vocalist Toni Brown and vocalist/guitarist Terry Garthwaite, meet in Berkeley and form a band in 1967. Both were folk/country-folk performers who worked at the university. Brown was a literature major from Bennington College who traveled to the West Coast because of her love of the Beats. Garthwaite was a Bay Area native.

Robert Christgau describes the band in an unusually adulatory appraisal from April 1971 "Joy":

Joy of Cooking is Berkeley-based and has gigged around Northern California--most often at a little club called Mandrake--for the better part of three years. It is led by Toni Brown and Terry Garthwaite, women in their thirties who are veterans of the Bay-area folk scene. Toni does most of the composing, plays keyboards, and sings harmony, counterpoint, and some lead. Terry is the lead singer and plays guitar. The other band members are men. Conga drummer Ron Wilson studied classical piano for twelve years and somehow ended up working with computers, a life he gave up at age thirty-five to join the group. Bassist Jeff Neighbor, who also plays violin and numerous other instruments, replaced Terry's younger brother David shortly after the first album, Joy of Cooking, was released. Neighbor teaches music in the Berkely elementary schools. Drummer Fritz Kasten has also played piano and alto sax. He has worked with Vince Guaraldi and with the San Francisco State Symphony Band. At twenty-six, he is the youngest member of the group.

Joy of Cooking was a house band at Mandrake's, a roots music club on University Avenue near San Pablo. There is a good description of Joy's attractiveness from the Sclafani piece:

Joy of Cooking became the "house band" at the Berkeley club Mandrake's, performing Wednesday evenings. It was there they acquired a rabid local following and attracted the attention of record company executives. Rock critic Ed Ward recalls the scene. 

Ed Ward: When I went to see them, people got up and danced. That may not seem like such a huge thing, but I was coming off of life around Rolling Stone, where you'd go to the Fillmore and people would sit on the floor in comatose lumps, smoking dope and looking at a band. The musicians could have been on television, almost, for all the interaction there was. And then I discovered that there was a club scene in Berkeley, that a lot of the music there was funkier, and that people got up and shook their butts. The Joy was the band that got people up the most. Plus, the audience was different: Fillmore audiences tended to be guys, with the girls dragged along as an afterthought. The Joy attracted a more varied crowd, maybe a tad bit older, who seemed a bit smarter.

(If you ever want a get a taste of what Ward is talking about in terms of the Fillmore scene, watch Last Days of the Fillmore (1972). Shot in early summer of 1971, the Hippies have doom written all over them.)

This week I've immersed myself in Joy's second record, Closer To The Ground. And I've got to say it keeps getting stronger with each listen. Though it is Christgau's lowest rated of any of the band's albums at B+, I like it better than the first. Toni Brown's piano and organ are always pushed up to the top of the mix, which is the way I like it. Her skipping keyboards on "Humpty Dumpty" propel the tune. It is a great song.

What is distinctive about Joy as a band is its combination of keyboards, congas, harmonizing vocals, understated guitar playing -- all smartly arranged.

I appreciate Toni Brown's take on masculinity -- an empty, devouring infantile narcissism -- in "The War You Left."

As well as her deconstruction of the one-night stand, "First Time, Last Time" -- a manifesto of liberation.

Christgau thought that Joy of Cooking was going to be the next big thing. I don't think I've ever read such a positive Christgau review. I laughed out loud:

Terry's unique power as a performer came clear to me the third time I saw the group perform, between a terrible macho-rock band called Robert Savage and sexpot Linda Ronstadt in the enormous Long Beach Municipal Arena. My previous experiences had been at the Mandrake, in Berkeley, and at the Troubadour, in Los Angeles, where the intimate circumstances favored the group's quiet style. At Long Beach, especially in the wake of all that amplification, they seemed likely to disappear. Response was lukewarm to "Hush," which had enjoyed some local AM air-play, and the next song was no better. Then the band went into an adapted folk medley of "Brownsville" and "Mockingbird." To my astonishment, the intro elicited some spontaneous clap-time from the audience. Toward the end of "Mockingbird" Terry took the mike off its stand and began her scatting counterpoint with Toni. Then Terry began to scat alone. She has been described as a laid-back Janis. Her voice has that gritty quality, but she never screams, and what she abjures in power she makes up in subtlety. There is no better improvisatory singer in rock, but she gives the sense that it hasn't been easy. Terry is a beautiful woman whose initial impact is mostly toughness; both her frizzed-out hair and something embattled in her face obscure its delicate bone structure until you get to know her. The sexuality she projected as she bobbed about the stage in Long Beach showed a similar reserve. It was self-contained, true to its own rhythms; it was sexual, not sexy, completely unlike the gyrations expected of chick singers who are getting it on. Yet the audience began to clap again, and the turned-on greaser next to me, who had been demanding an encore from Robert Savage half an hour before, turned and commented: "They've really got it together." Could any band of women ask for a more miraculous compliment? Not yet. 

Edgily, Toni and Terry insist that Joy of Cooking is not a band of women, and it isn't. It's an integral unit. But it's led by women, and it seems to speak for them. Not long ago, Joy of Cooking preceded Barry Melton, the former Fish, at a small Bay-area concert. Melton is a good guy in his way, but he is a classic example of the white singer who tries to camouflage his racial confusion with a mask of phony black misogyny, and when he started to sing about gittin him four or five wimmin, he was booed to a halt. Such incidents have been rare, but they're bound to increase. Whenever hard-core rock fans talk about their subculture, they forget how many brothers and sisters are left out of the consensus. Many vaguely feminist women have no special connection to rock not out of ideology but simply because it has never really spoken to them. Joy of Cooking can end that. Not that Toni's lyrics are any more political, in the narrow sense of that term, than her stage demeanor. She is simply a literate female who has not been a girl for quite a while and who writes from the experience of trying to be her own person. Allow me to quote a long stanza as a kind of finale: "I used to think a woman was just made to love a man,/ That a man was someone for a woman to hold to while she can./ And then one day my man walked out on me. Well, you know I got the blues./ I'd been living off him for so long I had nothing of my own to lose./ And now I'm gonna move,/ Stretch out and find my wings and who I am/ And if I ever pass this way again I'll be ready for a good man." 

If the women's movement has taught us anything, it is that such realizations are political if anything is. It's enough to make you believe in art. You, and maybe the greaser next to you, too.

Which is probably why Krassner imagined Joy in heavy rotation on the SLA turntable. The message is simple. It is a radical leveling. Women can lead and men can follow. Women can be strong and sexual and creative and so can men, but men can also be weak and needy and selfish. The frozen traditional division of the sexes is upturned in favor of a more equal, productive collaboration.

That was the talk that Joy of Cooking walked. It took a much more egalitarian society than we have today to produce the massification of bohemia of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Joy never achieved super-stardom. Toni Brown left the band in 1972. Women have made important strides in the 40-plus years since. But in many ways it is still man's world, more so today than back then.

Hippies vs. Punks: Richard & Linda Thompson's "Light(s)" Albums, Pt. 3, Shoot Out the Lights

There is one run I have been doing for over 15 years now. I call it the "Big Man's Run" because it involves running for over an hour. When I was in my thirties I could complete it in one hour. Now, it takes me an hour and a quarter. The Big Man's Run (BMR) is a little under eight miles and takes me north out of my Capitol Hill neighborhood over the University Bridge and then onto the Burke-Gilman Trail until I get to Fremont; at which point I exit the trail, cross the Fremont Bridge and then head east down the hill to hook up with Westlake Avenue, more exactly, the miles of parking lot that rim Lake Union. I head south until I get to the South Lake Union Cascade neighborhood, which used to be a funky, bohemian low-rent district but is now dominated by new concrete architecture that anchors the Amazon commercial empire. Then I head east climbing hills and a freeway overpass until I am back in my Capitol Hill neighborhood.

On the BMR, right when I cross the University Bridge and am connecting with the Burke-Gilman Trail, there is a sculpture that incorporates the words "The Wall of Death." It is located, incongruously, beneath the north end of University Bridge where the Burke-Gilman Trail passes underneath. The Wall of Death was a once-popular carnival sideshow where stunt-riding motorcyclists ride around a circular wall climbing higher and higher as their centripetal force grows. (A variation of The Wall of Death opens the 2013 Derek Cianfrance film The Place Beyond the Pines.) The Wall of Death sculpture beneath the University Bridge might be so named because it is a popular spot for skateboarders attracted by the forty-five-degree angle concrete walls.

Whenever I run past the sculpture, which, as I said, I've been doing regularly for a long time, I can't help but think of the final track on Richard & Linda Thompson's break-up album, Shoot Out the Lights (1982).

Shoot Out the Lights is widely acknowledged as Richard & Linda Thompson's masterpiece. For instance, it comes in at number 332 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, significantly outpolling I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight (1974) which comes in at 471.

I prefer Bright Lights and First Light (1978) of the three great "Light(s)" albums of Richard & Linda Thompson. But thanks to the success of Shoot Out the Lights -- it was a critics choice album back in 1982 boosted by Robert Christgau's 'A' grade in The Village Voice -- it established Richard Thompson on a long, productive solo career that is still going strong, and it sparked a much-deserved reappraisal of the couple's previous recordings.

Recorded quickly in the summer of 1981 while Linda was pregnant, Shoot Out the Lights was produced by Joe Boyd (the guy responsible for discovering and recording Fairport Convention back in the 1960s) for his small Hannibal Records label. Richard & Linda Thompson had been dropped by Chrysalis because of the poor sales of Sunnyvista (1979). By the time Shoot Out the Lights is released in March 1982, the Thompson's marriage had collapsed.

An earlier version of the album exists in bootleg form. Recorded by Gerry Rafferty (lead guitarist of Stealers Wheel and co-writer of "Stuck in the Middle with You," the pop tune memorialized in Reservoir Dogs) in September and October of 1980 and unsuccessfully shopped to record labels, it is a slicker studio album; some of its tracks can be found online under the heading "Rafferty's Folly," like this version of "Don't Renege on Our Love":

For me, my memories of Shoot Out the Lights always begin with the first side of the album, particularly the first three cuts: "Don't Renege on Our Love," "Walking on a Wire," and "Man in Need." These songs are a point-counterpoint of an aggrieved wife and husband. I would listen to this album before heading off to work a second-shift job on the 99th floor of the World Trade Center. My own marriage was collapsing that sunny spring. I believe, looking back now, that Shoot Out the Lights provided excellent counsel: