Hippies vs. Punks: Balin (1981)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hippies vs. Punks: Tom Tom Club

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hippies vs. Punks: The Clash's Combat Rock, Pt. 3, "Overpowered by Funk"

Something has been lost. My first year of adulthood, my first year living alone was my freshman year at the university. The year was 1982, the year The Clash released Combat Rock.

Combat Rock is widely accepted today to be the beginning of the end of a great band. Conventional wisdom holds that the album is a radio-friendly sop to commercialism.

What cannot be denied is that Combat Rock is the last record featuring the band's main lineup -- Strummer, Jones, Simonon, Headon. The final studio album of The Clash, the universally panned Cut the Crap (1985), is minus Mick Jones and Topper Headon. The former, sacked by Strummer and Simonon over creative differences; the latter, because of his drug addiction.

I think dismissals of Combat Rock are off the mark. I think appraisals that class the record below the band's eponymous debut or the double album London Calling (1979) are largely due to Combat Rock's massive popularity and crossover appeal. For the most part, smart-set taste-makers eschew anything that has mass-market appeal.

But back to this idea that something has been lost. Last October I wrote about sitting in Dwinelle Plaza next to gridiron star Ron Rivera (now head coach of the Carolina Panthers) at the beginning of the 1982 school year and listening while he sang "Should I Stay or Should I Go" to himself. If one compares the Congressional midterm elections that year, 1982, with the midterms that transpired shortly after the Ron Rivera post, 2014, one sees a country that is no longer a Democratic Party majority.

The Democratic Party swept the 1982 midterms in the popular vote 55% to the Republicans 43% owing to the unpopularity of the Reagan Recession. In 2014 the Republicans won a bare majority of the popular vote, 50.9% to the Democrats 45.3%. But the Republicans actually have a greater majority of House seats now -- 247 -- compared to what the Democrats had in 1982 -- 243.

So in the 32 years of my life as a voting, tax-paying adult citizen of the United States, the nation has done a flip. We are no longer an egalitarian-minded, working-class nation, or at least that is what a reading of the poll results tell us.

Another way to look at this loss is by the results of the radical leftist 1960s-spawned Peace and Freedom Party. The Peace and Freedom Party, which was ubiquitous in my lower division years as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, a presence I lazily took for granted, won 34,422 votes in 1982 and competed in numerous California Congressional Districts; in 2014, the Peace and Freedom Party polled 9,192 in the midterms.

The Peace and Freedom Party from its inception has been concerned with racial justice. The party planned to support Martin Luther King, Jr. for president in 1968 but chose Eldridge Cleaver instead because of MLK's support for mustering the National Guard to handle the Detroit riots.

The Clash as a band always acknowledged the influence of Black artists, for instance the collaboration with Mikey Dread.

One of the tracks that adds depth to Combat Rock is "Overpowered by Funk," The Clash's homage to early hip hop artists Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five and Sugarhill Gang. Joe Strummer raps "Funk Power" with graffiti artist Futura 2000.

Combat Rock is basically released the same time as Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five's The Message (1982). I owned both. Popular music was never the same after "The Message":

To me, listening to "Overpowered by Funk" again, it reminds me less of "The Message" and more of Tom Tom Club's "Wordy Rappinghood," which preceded Combat Rock by one year. Both showcase Punks (in the case of Tom Tom Club, the husband and wife rhythm section of Talking Heads) taking a stab at hip hop:

There was a lot of sunshine and hope back in the first few years of the 1980s, even with the tentacles of neoliberalism taking hold amid the Reagan Recession.

Undoubtedly we were naive. Look we were are now with money power all but completely victorious.

But for that moment there appeared to be enough time and space where racial harmony was possible.