If you want to know what the new West Coast tech hub feminist dispensation sounds like, it sounds like Childbirth's 2015 release, Women's Rights. Part early Black Flag, part Sonic Youth, the album clocks in at just under 26 minutes. The songs are irreverent -- tales of cocaine at baby showers, broken condoms, refulgent fertility, tech bros, etc.
I work with and for women who are all younger than I by at least a decade. The Childbirth vibe is their vibe. If, as James Brown sang in the 1960s "It's a Man's Man's Man's World," then now I would say it is something different. It is still a man's world. No doubt. The old bald white guy is still calling the shots from his sky box atop the pyramid. But women are playing an increasingly important role in late stage Western capitalism.
Women are definitely on the ascent. And let me tell you, they are not particularly gracious to a brother on his way down. Women feel a lot of pent up disdain and resentment, if not outright hatred and anger, towards men. "Loathing" might be the best term. I can bear witness as the only man at many a behind-closed-doors staff meeting.
Cry no tears for men though. We deserve every bit of bad news coming our way. There will be no Donald Trump helicopter rescue touching down in a green field to lift us off to safety as the boreal forest burns all around. No, it is all hellfire and sinks of sulfurous acid for us.
In all of Robert Christgau's vast trove of criticism on his excellent web site, www.robertchristgau.com, I could find only one review of a Lemonheads record:
Come On Feel [Atlantic, 1993]
Evan Dando is a good-looking guy with more luck than talent and more talent than brains who conceals his narcissism beneath an unassuming suburban drawl. Twenty years ago he would have affected an acoustic guitar and acted sincere; now he affects a slacker-pop band and acts vulnerable. His songs don't bite, they sidle over and nibble your ear when you're not looking, and if you throw him a withering glance, no problem--he'll just move on to someone else. Exception: the one about drugs. C+
Brutally dismissive as it is, and applied to an album that most of us who were Lemonheads fans at the time would freely admit as proof that the band had lost its purpose (the dividing line for Taang!-era Lemonheads devotees like myself was Dando's cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" on the album that preceded Come on Feel the Lemonheads, 1992's It's a Shame About Ray), it is pretty much how I felt about Lovey (1990), The Lemonheads major-label debut on Atlantic Records, when I started listening to it again this week.
But after only a couple of days, I changed my opinion. There is no indication that Christgau had anything more than a superficial familiarity with Taang! bands such as The Lemonheads, Bullet LaVolta and Moving Targets, bands that were powering the Grunge revolution before it turned into a Grand Barbecue the summer of 1990 when Sonic Youth released Goo on Geffen Records.
What is not readily recalled is that Lovey was released in July shortly after Goo. Considering that it would be another year before major-label honchos would bring Nirvana to market, not to mention Hardcore founding fathers fIREHOSE and Meat Puppets, we have to ask ourselves the question, What did the corporate recording industry power brokers see in The Lemonheads to put them in the same bracket as Sonic Youth?
And here is what I concluded: The Lemonheads were not signed by Atlantic to be the equivalent of a Grunge Bobby Sherman act; if that were the case, the label would not have allowed Dando to make "Ballarat," an homage to Charles Manson's Helter Skelter eschatology, the first cut on Lovey. And while "Ballarat" might not be the equal of Sonic Youth's "Tunic (Song for Karen)," I would argue that it is of a piece (and that is not pretty boy Grunge).
The next clue is that of all the Taang! back catalog songs selected to appear on Lovey it was "Left for Dead," a re-titled "Clang Bang Clang" from Creator (1988), that made the cut; it is a truly great song that points clearly to what Atlantic had planned for The Lemonheads -- a chick-friendly Hüsker Dü.
The fact is that Lovey is loaded with grand gesture Grunge statements like "Li'l Seed" and "(The) Door," both of which are powered by the superb "guitar hero" playing of Corey Loog Brennan, filled out with an uptempo number like "Stove" and a Grunger, "Year of the Cat." As Brennan says in an interview that appears on the English fan web site devoted to Dando and The Lemonheads, "I thought that Lovey was going to sell a million copies. Then I was devastated when it semi-flopped."
But what Lovey did do is turn Dando into a Grunge heartthrob (see the video for "Half the Time" at the top of the post). I can bear witness. In last week's post I described seeing The Lemonheads at CBGBs the summer of 1989 and the only women there were the dates of the record industry guys at the back by the bar. I saw the band again at CBGBs the winter of 1991, seven or eight months after Lovey's release, and rather than being deserted, as it was the time before, the place was packed. So packed that it was difficult to move about. And most of the people at the front near the stage when Dando appeared in a 1960s-era red nylon windbreaker with racing stripes, his beautiful long blonde tresses catching the spotlights, were young middle-class women. The only explanation, given Brennan's assessment that the album semi-flopped, is that video for "Half the Time" found a passionate audience on MTV.
Hence, The Lemonheads coming pop flame-out, casually derided by Christgau as narcissistic, is set in motion by Lovey. Which is too bad because Lovey is an excellent album, one that was important to me and that I played a lot. Hearing it again repeatedly this week -- that and the fact that light is already starting to return at the end of January -- I started to feel not so bad about myself. I realized that at 26 years of age I was a solid householder, but one who nonetheless was hounded by the troika that has felled many a man -- work, women and alcohol. Maybe to become who we are we need to go back and figure out who we were.
Which should be the main theme of this post -- the shortcomings of our purportedly fully-retrievable, enhanced digital World Wide Web.
By happenstance, last week I started listening to a lot of Aphex Twin, in particular Selected Ambient Works Volume II (1994). It is a quiet album of electronica. I need quiet. The year is in its last month and I'm limping to New Year's Eve. I feel no vigor and am waiting for the clock to run out while I expedite my remaining goal for 2015, one last race.
But so far in December as each day arrives I have been trying to think of at least one thing I want to accomplish, not only in the New Year but during the day itself, even if it is so humble as taking two tablets of vitamin C. So far I have been successful. But I need the musical accompaniment to be subdued.
Last weekend I got to thinking about a performance of Lee Ranaldo's that I saw with a friend and coworker back in the dark days of the post-9/11 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Ranaldo was playing guitar in a theater at the Experience Music Project while a film by his wife, Leah Singer, was projected on a screen above him. He was joined on stage by a guy (maybe two, I can't remember) with a stack of electronic hardware. This guy, if my memory serves me, was introduced as "Golden Aphex Twin."
The show itself was excruciatingly painful. My friend Tony and I laughed about it, saying it was akin to torture (very timely since torture was being embraced by U.S. policymakers as "enhanced interrogation techniques" permissible as long as it did not result in organ failure).
The problem is that the only record on the Internet that I can find of this show is a tiny announcement in The Stranger. Plus, there is no such electronica artist as "Golden Aphex Twin," or at least one searchable on the Web. There is Aphex Twin. But my sense is that Richard David James is too big time for a gig as a sideman for Lee Ranaldo's free jam accompanying an esoteric art film.
Ranaldo is important not only as a founder of the enormously influential Sonic Youth (just about any alt rock produced post-Grunge is inflected with Sonic Youth), but also as a keeper of the Beats flame.
An intellectual foundation of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs underlies postwar U.S. cultural revolt -- both Hippie and Punk as well as Grunge -- leading up to the millennium. But I don't think it pertains any longer.
I think something has shifted post-millennium, and it has to do with the all-pervasive digital milieu we find ourselves in today. But as my experience shows, the Web is not a repository of consciousness. It might seem so, but it is not.
I found this album recently in the dollar bin of a Belltown Punk record store, one of the only record stores left in the area. Tucked in among CDs of Stevie Ray Vaughn, Sinéad O'Connor and other sonic detritus, I happily snatched out Julie Doiron and the Wooden Stars (1999).
I am a Julie Doirontrue believer. There is a plaintive, narcotic quality to her music that I believe taps into an emotional cosmic background radiation of peaceful sadness. I am of the opinion that this state of peaceful sadness, though it might sound frou-frou, is the best state we can hope for, a place we will hopefully find ourselves when all is said and done and we're ready to shuffle off this mortal coil.
To get the flavor of what I am talking about here, sample track seven, titled "Seven," from Julie Doiron and the Wooden Stars:
Wooden Stars are, like Doiron herself, Canadian. Their sound on this record has obviously been influenced by Sonic Youth. It is interesting to consider that this indie rock "shining city on a hill," now 16 years old, still beckons.
So impressed with the album, I gifted it to my new boss, a woman of 37 years, who is the first of her sex to lead the central labor council where I am presently employed.
Since she was raised in the post-rock indie-rock riot-grrrl sonic milieu, attending Red Stars Theory shows and listening to Bikini Kill and Team Dresch, I thought she would like it.
But she basically rejected it. Too sad, she said. It made her want to cry.
It is NFL Week Four Sunday, which means if I am going to live up to my pledge and be done by the end of the season with this old letter project, the one I have dubbed "The Colt 45 Chronicle" after my beer of choice consumed while writing these epistles 25-years ago, I might have to start posting two a week. An audit of the remaining letters is called for at least to get a count. So far I have just been selecting them off the top. No culling, no cherry picking, no organization.
The letter below, addressed to my friends Greg and Tresca, is concerned primarily with the necessity of new music, pursuing new sounds. My wife and I often acted as hosts, and one my principal duties was as disc jockey. I liked to have the latest "leader of the pack," whether at the time it was Sonic Youth, or The Pogues or The Pixies, and then embed that in a foundation of Bob Dylan, Neil Young and The Velvet Underground.
I was reminded of the importance of fresh sounds this morning on a run around Lake Union. A couple years back I downloaded a free 2011 Merge Records sampler, on which appears a song, "Civilian" by Wye Oak. It shuffled on my iPod while I was working down the parking lots that line the lake just east of Westlake Avenue:
I close the letter with an expression of love. Greg and Tresca were important to me because they seemed to be doing their own thing. They were refuseniks. They worked but didn't believe that it would amount to anything. They drank. Greg was a tremendous athlete. A big guy at 6'3" or 6'4" and over 210 lbs. Drinking was what they did, drinking and listening to music.
Winter 1989
I finally shelled for some new music. It happened last Monday, down on Broadway and West 4th Street. It was a Monday, but I wasn't working; and the snow was sure snowing. But I braved it all -- the avoidance of worklife and the sloshing in West Village snow streets (like the cover of The Free Wheelin' Bob Dylan, Levi's feeling much too thin) -- so I could get some new music in my life, or at least some music that I hadn't heard for quite a while.
Too many times in the near past I have found myself overcome, forlorn, because none of the stuff I have does the trick anymore. You know, people come over, bring a few bottles of wine or some quarts of beer (some of Ashley's med-school chums -- though, sadly, not very often; it's usually I who does most of the bringing) and you want to put something on that sparks, that inspires, that captures the mood, but you don't have anything. Sure, you have the old standards, the solid-and-always-reliable: the B.Dylan and N.Young and L.Reed and J.Rotten (everybody knows 'em and everybody loves 'em). But as your're fingering through the pile, you realize/know that they don't cut it, not when you're trying to get people up. People feel too secure around them, too normal and historical, like a high school yearbook; they've got too many memories, too many stories and sorrows attached to each tune you put on the turntable. It's like trying to get people to beer bong and dance, shoot a tequila shot and smoke a joint, all while eating Christmas dinner in the parents' living room and wishing mother a happy birthday, the bright light shooting off the freshly painted white walls down to your white china platter with the slice of white breast meat and the sliver of dark, the patch of stuffing and mash potatoes pig-penned in turkey-neck gravy, the cranberry sauce breeding on the perimeter.
Music, I hope, isn't supposed supposed to be so comforting and tight-in-the-loins and unthinking as that. I would hope, and do think, that music -- and this is what makes looking for new music (or music you haven't heard before) necessary -- that music is something very outwardly social, energetic and revolutionary.
We, Greg and I, would drive out to San Ramon drinking 12-ounce coffees in paper cups. One morning he put on R.E.M., and I was just getting high from the caffeine. It was Green, and I hadn't heard it before. -- Because of my situation (staying over in S.F.), I was always drunk in the morning (as I know you guys were too). So the coffee would hit me hard -- but friendly -- and so would the sun (we were driving due East in the morning).
Without being hokey, because I'm good and drunk in one night, I love you two. You're important to me.
I thought I knew TheHot Rock (1999), but it turns out I really don't. In any event, I was listening to the album this past weekend when "Get Up" came on. My goodness, what an ass-kicker. Granted, like so much that Sleater-Kinney did and did well, it owes a lot to Sonic Youth. I'm thinking here of Kim Gordon's channeling of Karen Carpenter on "Tunic (Song for Karen)."
There is something that I want to mention and if I don't do it soon I'll forget it entirely. Two weeks for me is about the outer limit of keeping something in mind without writing it down.
Not last week but the week before, when I was limping along in a great deal of pain one morning trying to get through a crosswalk before the light turned red, The Damned's "New Rose" shuffled on the iPod:
What a song! Though each step sent a jolt of misery into my brain, I smiled a bruised smiled because my brain was also filled with the aural ecstasy of "New Rose."
Released in October of 1976 when Fly Like an Eagle was soaring the charts and giving the Hippies a swan song, "New Rose" is credited with being the first single by a UK Punk band; I think it might be the purest expression of Punk any Punk music not just first wave English Punk.
The Damned were always considered also-rans to The Clash and Sex Pistols. On the storied Anarchy in the UK Tour, The Damned decided to perform at a few venues that refused to allow the Pistols on stage (due to the band's super-historic incendiary appearance on the Today show). The Clash and The Heartbreakers showed solidarity and refused to perform.
I was so affected by hearing "New Rose" that I purchased the first album, Damned Damned Damned(1977), though it can be streamed for free on YouTube:
I know I have written briefly before about this album, the first full-length Punk record released in the UK, preceding The Clash (1977) by two months. I called it good. But it is time to amend that. I am ready to class Damned Damned Damned -- along with The Clash (1977), Never Mind the Bollocks (1977) and Pink Flag (1977) -- as a timeless monument to Punk.
Listen to this record. Put your player on repeat. Summer is upon us. July approaches. The planet is growing hotter.
The sound you will hear is the sound of purity. The buzz burning blur of youth and its confused clarity.
"Society is a Hole," as Sonic Youth would sing eight-years later. The Hippies felt the same way but acted as if there there was a way out of the hole. The Punks brought home the message that there is no way out.
Riding home on the train last night, the first post-work commute following the end of Daylight Savings, the evening chilly and dark, "Death to Our Friends" by Sonic Youth appeared on my iPod. It was perfect.
Though EVOL was originally released on SST Records in May of 1986, I didn't purchase the LP until fall of that year. I remember playing it a lot that winter. So I associate the album with a dark, cold (as cold as it gets in the Bay Area) Northern California winter.
Everything about EVOL had an impact on me, from the album cover art -- the picture of Lung Leg on the front crouching on that fucked-up wooden floor; the back shot of the band looking like filthy Hippies -- to the single "Star Power"; but mostly that deep, dark sound. Like stars blinking in a frozen sky as rats skitter on inky black city streets.
Tonight caps a work week where I was put fully in mind of the Hobbes quote "that Man to Man is an errant wolf." In my case, a wolf, perched atop an ergonomically correct chair, trapped in a carpeted, air-conditioned pen, transfixed by a flat screen. Granted, no one is lighting me up with mortar fire -- it's not truly a "war of all against all" -- but it is, after a fashion, a hell realm.
Fortunately I can still sprint. I sped across six busy of lanes of International Boulevard traffic to catch the bus to the train station, and then I sprang up four flights of stairs and jogged over a skybridge and up an escalator to enter the train car just as it was about to depart. A miserable work week gives way as a promising weekend begins.
Last weekend I kept thinking that it was June. But it's not. It's already August. The light here is already starting to recede ever so slightly. What a joy it was on Saturday night to be alone -- a bachelor at home -- cooking a sirloin and listening to Music From Big Pink (1968):
It was as if after nearly 50 years of existence I have arrived at some sort of dialectical synthesis. The past sublated into a healthy, relaxed, unitary present free of man-woman conflict. For a musical accompaniment I could ask for nothing more than "Tears of Rage," the first track Richard Manuel/Bob Dylan masterpiece:
And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse
When Levon Helm died last year I received a request from my mother, who is a resident in an assisted-living facility, for a copy of Music From Big Pink. Under the impression that I had a copy in my iTunes, I assured her that I'd have it in the mail right away. To my surprise it turned out that I was mistaken. All I had on my computer was The Band (1969) and The Best of the Band (1976). I promptly went online and downloaded the 2000 digital remaster and burned the old gal a copy.
All my other recordings of The Band were on magnetic tape. The copy of Music From Big Pink that I thought I had was actually a used cassette that I purchased the first summer I lived in the Emerald City 23 years ago. If you don't count Planet Waves (1974) and The Basement Tapes (1975), which are Dylan and Band collaborations that were staples of my university days, it was the first album of The Band's that I owned. For me it will always be the best. It is linked in my mind with my first run at being a bachelor.
In 1990 I left my wife in New York City and flew to San Francisco. From there I took a Greyhound to Southern Oregon where I purchased a used Jeep Gladiator pick-up manufactured in the late 1960s. It was a "high, rat-colored car" (which is Flannery O'Connor's description of Hazel Motes' automobile in Wise Blood), and I drove it north up I-5 to Seattle, entering the city the morning after Randy Johnson threw a no-hitter against Detroit.
I worked construction that summer and jogged the ribbon of greenery that I run to this day and listened to Music From Big Pink,Sonic Youth's Goo (1990), The Lemonhead's Lovey (1990), Nick Cave & the Bad Seed's The Good Son (1990) and plenty of Neil Young's Tonight's the Night (1975). I drank Midnight Dragon malt liquor and slept on the floor and read about Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in the national edition of the New York Times. I was a young man alone, estranged from his wife, but okay with it. Rick Danko's cover of "Long Black Veil" spoke to me.
At the beginning of fall that year I traveled back to New York City in an unsuccessful attempt to patch things up with the wife. It was then that The Last Waltz (1978) -- that end-of-the-line love song to arena rockers -- became my manifesto, my lifeline. But my first love is Music From Big Pink. It's my bachelor's anthem, a perfect organic whole of funky, folksy, iridescent, soulful, regenerative music that occupies a timeless space -- a triumphant tribute to the Hippie wisdom contained in Timothy Leary's "turn on, tune in, drop out." -- It can done! The Band proved it at Big Pink.
I gave away my copy of Pure Mania by The Vibrators, one of the seminal Punk recordings from 1977. Nineteen-seventy-seven was the year that Punk broke into popular consciousness and knocked the Hippie off his avant-garde pedestal.
My girlfriend Stacey expressed surprise that I owned Pure Mania. At that point, early 1988, copies were somewhat rare. One afternoon I had been browsing for used records in Rasputin's with my buddy and musical mentor Oliver when he came across the LP in one of the bins. Being a prodigious collector, he already owned a copy; but he suggested that I get it for myself, which I did, since I always deferred to Oliver's judgment on music.
I listened to Pure Mania quite a bit. You could say I made a study of it. I like its energy, its propulsion.
But I didn't bond with it; it didn't work for me. So when Stacey showed an interest in it, I was happy to give it to her.
Shortly before I met Stacey she had been in a garage band. All I remember about it was the name, Tons of Bugs, which I thought was a good one, and a song of hers (she drummed and shared vocals) that she included on a mix tape. She sang something like "Baby, I love you/Because you've got a tattoo/You wear my heart on your sleeve." Pretty horrible. But we both loved music.
Stacey had a nice apartment on the Oakland-Berkeley border near Alcatel Bottle Shop. It was a second-story walk-up, a railroad apartment. Her bedroom, which was the locomotive, was spacious. The windows opened to trees. The sun filtering through created a green light. I remember one Sunday we spent the afternoon in bed listening to Sonic Youth's Sister (1987), their last album with SST.
Stacey and I listened to a lot of music together in that apartment. For us, the Spirit of '77 was a reconstruction. The first wave English Punk bands burned rock 'n' roll back to its roots, incinerating the outer layers of Hippie pomposity. I never listened to a lot of the Ramones; their garage rock was never my cup of tea. But I don't think you can understand the UK Punk bands of 1977 without "Blitzkreig Bop."
This week at work, YouTube streaming Damned Damned Damned(1977), Pure Mania and The Clash (1977) (one of the two great monuments to Punk from 1977, the other being Never Mind the Bollocks), listening on my ear buds as I organized old grievance files, I realized that this is music not easily ingested. It demands a certain level of commitment from the listener. And the Hippies, no longer "forever young," were, for the most part, unwilling to provide this commitment.
I appreciate Pure Mania much more today than I did in 1988.
My only moments of true relaxation -- tiny patches of fleeting bliss -- come when I'm en route, either when I'm on the train or waiting for the bus. Last week I listened to Helmet's "In the Meantime," the lead track off their 1992 album, Meantime. This album represented a highwater mark for underground rock'n'roll bands cashing in, a trend initiated by Sonic Youth when they released Goo in 1990 with DGC.
Two years is a long time. The Great Barbeque that Goo kicked off culminates with Meantime, a slick, soulless but quite good record which I dutifully purchased long ago the summer it first appeared. Now for some reason when I see young men in my neighborhood carrying their six-packsof good beer home for an evening of R&R I think of "In the Meantime":
I ran into an old pal tonight on the train. He had just finished refereeing one soccer match and was on his way to officiate at another. In 2004 Chris ran as a Green against incumbent Dem Jim McIntire (now the august Washington State Treasurer) in the 46th Legislative District. Despite raising a decent amount of money and having a legitimate campaign apparatus with volunteers and the whole nine yards, Chris and the Greens finished third in that race behind McIntire and a kid who ran as a Republican (the kid was just a name on the ballot; he had absolutely no campaign presence in the district -- they don't call our political system a "duopoly" for nothing). That year -- 2004 -- was the last hurrah for the Greens. The party split nationally between those (like myself) who remained loyal to Ralph Nader (who in 2004 refused to run as a presidential candidate exclusively on the Green Party line) and those who bought the snake oil being peddled by a charlatan named David Cobb.
