Music I Didn't Grow Out Of

Worth breaking the silence for: new Cometbus/Schwartzenbach band forms in Brooklyn.

2008-11-16T20:24:00.004-05:00

No excuses: I've been busy. Like Fugazi and Electrelane, this blog has been on indefinite hiatus, but I'll pick it up again someday soon. For the moment, however:

Blake Schwartzenbach (Jawbreaker) and Aaron Cometbus (Crimpshrine) have teamed up with someone who's on the television show The L Word who also plays bass and have determined that now is a good time to play melodic punk again. I concur.

(Photo from the Brooklyn DIY blog. Thanks!)

The project is called "Thorns of Life," after Percy Shelley (about whom Schwartzenbach is presently writing a doctoral dissertation). This appeals to me especially because I had a band named after a poem once too (though Irving Layton, who I think is cooler than Shelley, though not because he was a better person, or even a better poet). Should I hold my breath for them to set "Ozymanduias" to a pop-punk song (like we did to the poem of Layton's we named ourselves after)? Or should I just try and figure out how to get them to stop playing house shows in Brooklyn and instead come and play a house show in Montreal? Standing offer, Thorns of Life: get in touch and I'll put on the best show in Canada in someone's loft, basement, or whatever. No bars, no music industry, nothing: just sweaty people crammed into a small space, having a wonderful time. Seriously: this is your town for the taking.

I'm glad I didn't grow out of pop-punk.

Profile of Hazel Dickens, Matriarch of American Country & Labour Music

2008-08-30T18:35:00.002-04:00

This woman is an American national treasure. We're so lucky she's still alive and playing today, even at the age of 73.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Song appreciation: Hazel Dickens's "Won't You Come and Sing For Me?" by Jim and Jennie & the Pinetops, 1999

2008-08-01T19:15:00.002-04:00

You know that feeling that you get when you start to cry? When for a moment your whole being seems stopped up, hot and aching, and you panic deep inside, feeling like it’ll poison you? Then your eyes get hot and the pain edges its way up your throat and into your face, and slowly you open up and some of the pain comes out. However much you hurt inside, that little bit that would have overwhelmed you slips free and escapes. You let it out and though you can’t cure yourself of the pain, but you let a little bit go and it’s gone. That’s what this song sounds like to me.

Lost favourite:

2008-07-15T01:33:00.002-04:00

"True, True, True" by Ken Parker, circa late '60s. I have no idea who the woman pictured on this video is, other than that she is not Ken Parker.

I found this song on a compilation years ago and had it on a favourite spirit-lifting collection of ska, reggae, and rocksteady tracks that I employed many a grim November, but that went missing a while back. Of all the music on it, this was the track I missed the most, and I'm glad to be listening to it again.

Ali Farka Touré - The Source

2008-07-05T23:35:00.004-04:00

The first really, really hot Monday morning in June, 2001, I awoke in my apartment from one of those slumbers that seems like it's set to smother you. That summer I was subletting an apartment mostly furnished from a friend of a friend--living with a handful of my belongings in the middle of another person's life-- and while most of the time I was very comfortable there, some days I'd feel sharply aware of how out of place I was. Spat up from sleep, tangled in sweaty sheets and blankets on my thin, hard mattress on the warm hardwood floor of the apartment, I found myself facing one such morning. I kicked off the covers and felt no cooler than I'd been wrapped in fabric. Everything was hot.

I made a pot of stovetop espresso, drank it sitting on the shade-warm fire escape, then rode my bicycle down St Urbain to downtown, where I was working in a video store on Ste Catherine West. By the time I'd ridden ten minutes there, I was slathered in sweat that was soaking its way down from the collar of my shirt. It was overcast, but the sun raged behind the clouds like a blind pimple. I opened the door to the store, took my first sips of air-conditioned air and breathed deeply, feeling the air cool my mouth and nose and lungs.

Anthony was behind the counter, checking in returns and looking haggard. I asked how he was and he groaned that he was hungover. He'd chosen a poor day for that. We processed the returns, shelved them, and put the tags away, before I went across the street to fetch us coffee and croissants. Then we sat at down by the cash. It was 10:30 at the store was quiet; Anthony folded his arms on the counter and rested his head on them. I watched the steam wandering up out of my styrofoam coffee cup, the hot scene of Ste Catherine Street in the window behind me, and reflected that the steam was probably as hot as it was outside. People were moving past in various states of dress and comfortable undress, sweating and self-conscious with the heat. Inside the air was cool and still. I put my head down on the counter too. Nobody came in for a long time and Anthony and I just stayed the way we were, celebrating stillness, both so glad to have a reason to spend eight hours in air-conditioned comfort before having to slink home to stifling apartments.

Somewhere during that chronology, Anthony had put on this Ali Farka Touré album. The quieter we got, the less we moved, the more it insinuated its stillness upon us, gently nodding at us as we relaxed more, soothing us by putting into music the ease and calm we felt in that moment.

Ever since then, this album makes me still, calm, and cool. Tonight, sitting with the cat between the window breeze and the gently ticking ceiling fan, I can't think of a better sound for the end of a sunny Saturday in June.

Not dead, but dead-set on getting a zillion things done.

2008-07-02T11:36:00.003-04:00

It's been a crazy couple of months. I'm sorry for the long period without an update. I've had a bit of a rough spring and early summer, but things are looking up, for real. No time to expand on that, but I want to know what I've been crazy about the last little while:

The Kids s/t 1st LP (apparently they'll be playing here in October?!). Perfect rock and roll.

The first Clash album, this time the US release with the ungodly beautiful single-version of "White Riot" and the masterful "(White Man) in the Hammersmith Palais." A perennial favourite, with all the energy and rebellious joy of summer held within it.

John Fahey's Legend of Blind Joe Death, a gentle and soulful folk album that's carried me through some rough times of late.

Oh wow, there's a bunch more but I'm late for work. My apologies for such a rushed post. This is just to say that I'm here, I'm thriving, I've got good music to keep me company, and I hope you're doing well too.

The Cramps: Live At Napa State Mental Hospital, 1978

2008-04-25T14:38:00.003-04:00

In 1978, the Cramps played a free show for patients at the Napa State Mental Hospital in California. Someone filmed it; it became legendary. What I like so much about it is that the band is intent on showing the folks at the hospital a great time, and it looks to be a pretty sweet party, the likes of which I imagine they didn't get often enough. I've been hearing about this video for years, but have never seen it. Before now!

Part 1/2

Part 2/2

The Deadly Snakes II: I'm Not Your Soldier Anymore (In The Red, 2001)

2008-04-23T14:34:00.009-04:00

Every member of the Deadly Snakes that I’ve talked to has agreed that I’m Not Your Soldier Anymore, their sophomore outing, is their weakest record. For all its shortcomings, however, had I’m Not Your Soldier been recorded by another band, it would stand out as a point of quality in nearly any back catalogue. Yet considered against the three other releases in the Snakes’ career, it’s is obviously their least powerful album. It lacks cohesion and direction, and despite boasting more inventive and intricate songwriting than its predecessor (whose garage-soul simplicity was less a statement of obedience to form than the mark of a young band, their average age below 20, getting its artistic bearings), the album’s thrust is too indecisive to sustain Love Undone’s elated forward drive.

Second albums are traditionally risky for precisely this reason: many great bands record debuts with one idea in mind (on Love Undone, the idea is clearly to have a serious good time), but having succeeded at that, they discover they don’t have a consistent notion of where to go next. Maybe they’ve spent years honing their style and songbook into what they record for their first album, only to succumb to pressure for a quick follow up; sometimes it’s only that, having accomplished what they first agreed to set out to do, band members discover that their secondary sets of ambitions do not interlock as well as whatever singular drive got them over the hurdle of the first album.

Luckily, the Deadly Snakes have enough talent and creativity to avoid letting those tensions ruin their second record, but they’re not so unified in vision as to escape internal artistic conflict entirely unscathed. What marks I’m Not Your Soldier more than anything else is the three-way tension between songs fronted by Andre Ethier, those by organist Max “Age of Danger” McCabe-Lokos, and those by producer and new member Greg “Obvlivian” Cartright.

I’m Not Your Soldier features the introduction of McCabe-Lokos, who co-wrote two tracks on Love Undone, to lead-singing with “Pirate Cowboy,” easily the most fun the album (and, I think, the band) ever gets. That track blends Toronto-pride regionalism with gay-party-pirate iconography (smartly summed up in the line, “I was born in Parkdale, but my heart is in Penzance”) into a guaranteed singalong even before you factor in its musical merit—a swinging, percussive mix of all the Snakes at their best, with ample bluesy guitar and harmonica, thundering drums, and blaring good-time horns. McCabe-Lokos also sings a verse of “Talkin’ Down” (one of the album’s lesser tracks) and significant call-and-response parts of the swaggering “I Can Take It.”

The addition of a single new voice to the front of the band might have been manageable without conflict of sound or direction, but the record runs into trouble by also introducing Greg Cartright as a member, singing four songs of his own (which several band members reported he brought fully-formed to the recording session, unlike the rest of the band’s songs that were generally arranged by several or all members together). Cartright’s songs are by no measure poor—they’re solid and powerful enough, but there’s something about them that sounds out of alignment on the record. Perhaps it’s simply that they sound, in mood and tempo and arrangement, like they belong on an Oblivians album—supporting the implication in claims by Snakes members that Cartright didn’t allow his songs to take shape in the usual Snakes manner. In particular, the use of horns on the Cartright-fronted songs seems inefficient, suggesting they were arranged after the fact for less than maximum effect.

I’ve been an Oblivians fan for years and still think that Popular Favourites is a masterpiece of a rock and roll record, but here, for some reason, the Oblivians sound doesn’t fit. Cartright’s seething-nutjob delivery, which worked to the Oblivians' advantage on great tracks like "I'm Not A Sicko, There's A Plate In My Head," is out of place in the careful balance of the Snakes' voices and instruments. Cartright sounds decidedly older, even though he was only a few years in age above most of the Snakes, and next to youthful party jams like “Pirate Cowboy” and young-man’s-angst like “Twice As Dead,” that quality is ill fitting. It shouldn’t be—Andre Ethier certainly allows Cartright’s style to influence his delivery on several tracks, including the latter and “Graveyard Shake,” the album’s opening stomp and a strong contender for its best track. But a careful listening to I’m Not Your Soldier Anymore reveals that most of its weaker tracks (“Talkin’ Down” excepted) are Greg Cartright’s numbers, none of which are even bad—they just don’t work here.

By comparison, there’s pleasant cohesion among the tracks that Andre Ethier fronts. “Early Bird” shows early direction towards the even greater influence of soul arrangement that would become dominant in the band’s next effort, the majestic Ode To Joy. As a duet between Ethier and McCabe-Lokos, the attitudinal “I Can Take It” is perfect, a pleasant omen of creative catalysis to come, accentuated by McCabe-Lokos’s panting organ solo. The down tempo “I Don’t Mind” is a more obvious nod to the Sticky Fingers/Exile-era Rolling Stones than the slighter Stones references sprinkled throughout Love Undone. It anticipates the delightfully loose “Trigger,” an even slower Stones homage that holds more confidently together than Love Undone’s teetering slow numbers, though I can’t make up my mind if that confidence has more charm than the wobbly uncertainty of, say, “Sweet Sixteen” or “Cotton Stained Red” on that album.

I'm Not Your Soldier Anymore closes with the high-test honky-tonk of “Say Hello,” which starts quiet and still and builds gradually into a surprisingly electrifying climax that ably matches the wild power of Love Undone’s best numbers. Ethier wails over the din of the band sweating hard and crashing about about behind Andrew Gunn’s hammering drums. Despite its unfortunate fade-out, “Say Hello” is the perfect closure to an album that at times seems too hesitant, and its controlled mayhem reassures the listener of the Snakes’ developing direction toward a more poised combination of careful R&B-arrangement and joyful tent-revival frenzy.

More than anything, this enjoyable but imperfect album is a document of conflicting forces—both powerful and talented—at work in deciding the Deadly Snakes’ direction. Obviously the creative tangle that binds this album up comes from the presence of Greg Cartright—his songs move in one direction while those sung by Ethier and McCabe-Lokos move in two (albeit negotiable) others; his songs are his own while the others are the combined product of the band. Talented and composed as he is, Cartright just doesn’t work here—thus his disappearance from the Snakes (and from their album production), making way for the band to begin work on what would become their greatest album, Ode To Joy.

The Deadly Snakes I: Love Undone (Sympathy For The Record Industry, 1999)

2008-04-21T17:43:00.003-04:00

Rock and roll had gotten boring by 1999, both in the popular consciousness and in the underground. With the chart breakthroughs of the Strokes, the White Stripes, and the Hives still a few years off, mainstream music was dominated by rap-metal and lifeless pop rock. Underground music, meanwhile, had tried to embrace rock and roll in the wake of a few exciting garage-punk bands like the New Bomb Turks, the Oblivians, and the Spaceshits, but had been quick to accept attitude and posture in the place of solid records or raging live shows. Magazines like Hit List seemed willing to celebrate, without an honest and critical assessment, any tattoo-spackled group that announced it was the New York Dolls incarnate, which resulted in a flood of watery also-rans saturating the touring circuit, and left adrift the handful of electrifying bands still in existence.

So I was wary of the first few, then the first bunch, then the multitude of positive reviews I heard of Love Undone by the Deadly Snakes. It had gotten hard to trust any recommendation of a new rock and roll band, and I had accumulated, on bad advice, enough unlistenable records decorated with devils, hot rods, and pin-up girls to be suspicious of hype. Thus, when I finally gave in and picked up Love Undone a while later, I expected only mediocrity, and was totally flattened by what I heard.

Nearly ten years on, Love Undone remains a fresh and exciting record, but on its release it was as important as it was great. In 1999, Love Undone was a youthful exclamation in a room full of weary voices, and a breath of life into the still corpse of a genre many had given up for dead. More than anything it was a lot of fun. While their tired garage-rock peers aped the Stooges and the MC5 because that’s where the money was, the Deadly Snakes played rock and roll because it felt good, and listening to their record you consequently feel good too.

Love Undone’s liner notes state it plainly: the album, they say, “is a rally call to abandon irony and play from your soul – to be young and to be bold,” and that captures perfectly the album’s point of view. This record does not want you to dress in ugly clothes and coolly bob your head to shitty music as a way of implying you have style and like to rock and roll. Instead, this record wants you, as whoever you are, to play it loud and fly off the handle dancing to it. You’re supposed to bump into people, knock things over, break stuff, get someone’s drink down your shirt, and wear it all with a grin—because it sounds that good.

From the cacophony of drums and cymbals, guitar, and smashed sloppy piano that begins “Bone Dry,” the album’s brazen two-chord opener, to the sudden arrival of a horn section actually used to punctuate and underline as horns should be, Love Undone begins clearly in pursuit of a good time. But it’s the second song, the album’s title track, that serves as the record’s statement of purpose, the centre to which each song will return, in different ways and from different angles. The torrent of guitar, harmonica, and drums that begins “Love Undone” blasts the listener like a firehouse of sound before tumbling into verses defined by a drum line of loosely rocking rolls, around which the guitar and harmonica and saxophone circle each other, occasionally colliding in feedback. You could call this garage-rock and in a sense you’d be right, but if it sounds like The Sonics or the Count Five at their best, it’s because the Snakes are, like their garage forbears, snotty white kids who want to play wild blues and soul, and are doing what they can to serve that purpose with what they have. Love Undone is respectful only to its R&B influences, and everyone else can go to hell.

The sound of Love Undone is hard to explain—most people would call it a lo-fi album, which it is, but not in the sense that it’s as poorly or lackadaisically played as many “lo-fi” records. It sounds, rather, like it was recorded on ancient equipment that it totally overwhelmed, but the extent to which it surpasses its recording technology is also a measure of exhilaration. Something about the tinny, grimy recording demands that you turn it up— maybe, at first, because you’re trying to hear it better— but the louder it gets, the more you feel like knocking over tables. Love Undone, from start to finish, is as much an enabler as it is an album —it quickly becomes a rowdy friend who inspires you to behave just as badly as he does.

Like all subsequent Snakes records, Love Undone features no instrument effects and a minimum of production interference. It was recorded almost entirely live. The band, as I understand it, sought to capture as plainly as possible what they sounded like playing their instruments together, and did nothing to varnish any part of that. Their “we-are-what-we-are” stance is reflected in the album’s cover photo, a hideous portrait of the band looking gawky and unhealthy, their mouths hanging oafishly open, which seems to suggest they were too busy playing music to pose for a retake. Many people, myself included, may find this approach to be achingly sincere, but it is, in equal measure, also incredibly cocky (from a band already cocky enough to open their debut album with a two-chord song). It passes unspoken judgment on the entirety of the rest of the music industry by suggesting that careful record production is the refuge of those who can’t play well enough to sell their product straight.

Raucous and unadulterated, this record twitches with energy. Every member of the band plays his instrument as though he’s trying to damage it, and Andre “St Clair” Ethier wails and howls every lyric. The quiet songs (the sobering-up “Sweet Sixteen” and the achingly ominous “Cotton Stained Red”) are loud, so the loud songs are even louder, rollicking at least, and frenzied mayhem at their best. Perhaps surprisingly, the album’s best number is a riotous reworking of the spiritual “Down By The Riverside” into “Shake By The Riverside,” a call and response dance number driven by handclaps, restless organ, and a positively throbbing rhythm section, over which the horns and fierce guitar clamour into prominence. It takes significant effort to sit still when this song is playing, and more than any of the many high points on Love Undone, “Shake By The Riverside” fulfils D. Boon’s dictum that a record be a flyer for the band’s live show. It’s hard, listening to music this hot and good, not to want to be at the front of a room full of friends losing their minds together while the band goes crazy before you.

That’s what this album is about, after all. As the liner notes explain, the 12 songs that compose Love Undone “reflect the loyalties, grudges, wild nights, and heartbreaks of six longtime friends.” It’s natural to listen to this album and think of your own friends, because it’s good time music, and who would you rather have beside you for the good times? The Deadly Snakes had one another, and as a result, we get an uncommonly fine album as a record of their friendship. Thank god.

2008-04-04T12:39:00.003-04:00

Hot damn, if you have any blood in your veins, you need to watch this right away:

Barbara Lynn Ozen in 1966, which Ted Leo posted on his page. I'm practically going to cry listening to this-- it's that good.

Not yet a national holiday. Maybe next year?

2008-04-01T23:53:00.004-04:00

D. Boon would have been 50 years old today. His work, his energy, and his integrity are still an almost daily inspiration to me. Happy birthday, big guy. There are still a lot of folks who miss you something fierce.

An aside, re: Replacements and getting older

2008-04-01T13:46:00.009-04:00

I seriously got into a discussion with a sensible person (John, who lives with my friend Anna) the other night in which he told me that the best Replacements records were obviously Tim and Pleased To Meet Me.

I nodded, then said, "Wait a second. Did you just call Pleased to Meet Me possibly one of the best Replacements records? Really? What about Let It Be? I thought that was everybody's favourite."

"Well sure," he said. "But Pleased to Meet Me's got 'Alex Chilton' on it! That's one of their prettiest songs."

I said, "Okay, I guess. I shouldn't talk-- I always appreciated them playing hardcore a lot more."

"Stink, you mean?" John said.

"Well yeah, but more so Sorry Ma... That's the one record of theirs that I feel like I understand perfectly."

"Huh," John said.

"Yeah, huh," I agreed.

"You gotta admit that 'Alex Chilton' is a real pretty song," he said.

"Sure," I said. "Yeah, of course. I even like All Shook Down.

John said, "Oh yeah! There are some nice songs on that, too."

Truth is, of course, I got All Shook Down first, when I was 15, then got Pleased To Meet Me and Don't Tell A Soul, wondering more and more why people were so crazy about the 'Mats. It was good, sure, but at that point in my life I wanted music that went really, really fast, and anything less sounded like music for old people, the sort of thing I needed to push away with all force. A couple of years later, when I got Stink and Sorry Ma, I finally felt I was hearing music I could relate to and wondered how a band that fiery ended up playing such slow, introspective music.

Now that I am, more or less, old people, I see the sense in it a lot more, but there's a fundamental spasm of rejection that I still get listening to those records born of my initial relationship to them at age 15. It's not at all that I'm unwilling to listen to gentler, slower music, or that I'm opposed to introspection, but rather that I see the things I accept as indicative of something I was afraid, years ago, of becoming, and wonder which part of me, if any, was right.

Larry Livermore (an across-the-board detractor of the Replacements, if I remember correctly), in his usual deliberately reactionary manner, nails some form of this phenomenon in a recent blog post when he says, I've come to notice that one of the surest predictors of records I don't want to listen to, movies I don't want to see, etc., is its popularity with the beard and/or chin-stroking 20-something "artistic" crowd. You know the type, no doubt: the ones who shortly after leaving their teens begin denouncing the catchy, fun pop-punk music they used to love as "puerile" and "simplistic," replacing it with "more complex" varieties, the more obscure, atonal and unlikely to become popular, the better.

There's a lot more truth in this than I think a lot of people would like to admit-- we like things, as generations of cultural critics have been screaming for ages, as much for what we feel they say about us as for what they are, objectively. Thus, there must be some part of me that, in spite of having sensibly abandoned having a mohawk nearly a decade ago, of crossing the threshold of 30 as a college teacher in the same city I've lived in for the past 11 years, still wants to define myself by whatever I heard in punk rock at the age of 15. This is more or less obvious most of the time, but I puzzle frequently over the reasons behind it. Do I enjoy the music I do because I want to forestall the inevitable, or do I enjoy it anachronistically and to my own detriment somehow? Sure, I feel absurd and anomalous sometimes listening to, say, Crimpshrine or Sicko or Hickey or Witches With Dicks, but only really because I know that (as a friend who sold me Crimshrine's Duct Tape Soup ten years ago told me) "I really should have grown out of this stuff by now" (the inspiration, after all, for the blog title). In the moment, my relationship with the music, the exhilaration of its energy and the the ease of its melody, feels the same as it always has been, save perhaps for an added thrill of defiance in enjoying what I'm clear I'm supposed to be ashamed of.

But again, do I only enjoy this as I do because it sets me apart from my college-teaching colleagues who make car and mortgage payments and have mostly abandoned their literary aspirations, as though the difficult pride in holding onto the thrills of youth can help assuage the nearly incessant stress of the life I've insisted upon?

Generally, when I encounter this question, I put a record on and eventually forget about it, as I'm going to do now.

Quasi-Podcast - Venus, Thus March 27 / 2k8

2008-03-29T14:09:00.004-04:00

Some folks may be aware that Ang is part of a collective radio show called Venus, broadcasting every Thursday from noon to 2pm on CKUT 90.3 FM here in Montréal. The mandate of the collective is to play the somewhat problematic category of “women’s music”— for many, the term brings to mind primarily the Indigo Girls. Venus, however, defines “women’s music” as any music played, in whole or in part, by a woman or women. Thus, any band of any genre containing at least one woman can be played on Venus.

Over the decade-plus since its founding by my CEGEP colleague Erin MacLeod, the majority of Venus members and hosts have been friends of mine, or have become friends as a result of their working with Ang. As a result, once a year or year and a half, I get asked to do a last-minute fill-in on the show when it turns out that everyone else has gotten sick. Yes, to answer the half-dozen questions I get (even from other DJs and people at the station) every time this occurs, there's no law against "a dude" doing Venus when the entire crew has been wiped out by, say, the Norwalk virus. Men can also major in women's studies too. Amazing, huh?

Ang was feeling ill on Wednesday night, and I mentioned in passing that I could cover for her if she was a wreck the next morning and for some reason no one else could do it, which seemed an unlikely event. I didn’t think about it again until Ang woke me up the next morning looking bleary and awful and said, “So you can do the show, right?” Thus, Thursday I did Venus and today I'm putting it up for you to listen to. I pulled music for the show in a bit of a hurry, but having not done radio in over a year my set seemed fresh enough to me. You can download the show in two parts, for as long as Sendspace keeps the links open, and later on in a lower bitrate off of the CKUT-FM station archives (at www.ckut.ca).

Part one (Skip ahead to 2:10, unless you want to listen to the tail end of the previous show about freeing Palestine)
Part two (cuts off amid my rundown of last tracks, which you can read below)

Playlist:

Lullabye Arkestra - "Y'make Me Shake"
Mekons - "Club Mekon"

One Reason – “The End Never Mattered”
Mika Miko – “Wild Bore”
Conversions (ex-Crucial Unit! Drumming by Chris Strunk) – “Give Up”
Loli & the Chones – “Pendejo”
Nymphets – “Borstal Breakout”
Brutal Knights – “Living By Yourself”
The Trashwomen – “Date’s On Me”
Shitbirds (early April March) – “Oh Joy!”

Thee Headcoatees – “Davey Crockett”
Doers – “Wicked World”
Gories – “Feral”
The Frumpies (ex-Bikini Kill) – “Wrong Way Round”
The Bell-Rays – “Changing Color”
The Cramps – “Human Fly”
The Kills – “Cheap and Cheerful”

Discount – “Accident Waiting to Happen”
Discount – “Pocket Bomb”
Epoxies – “We’re So Small”
Apples in Stereo – “Mystery”
Superchunk – “Detroit Has a Skyline”
Audrey Ryan – “Dishes and Pills” **(cuts off-- see note)
Millie Croche – “Careful With Guys”

Veda Hille – “This Spring”
Patti Smith – “Gloria”
Electrelane – “To The East”
Gravy Train!!! – “Hella Nervous”
The Gossip – “Red Hott”

Team Dresch – “Freewheel”
Cub – “Go Fish”
The Dagons – “Teeth for Pearls”
Thundrah – “Sinking Ship”
Hrsta – “And We Climb”
Sleater-Kinney – “Jumpers”

** - [I cut this off by accident, but subconsciously perhaps not so, because a publicist on behalf of Ms. Ryan called me directly to ask that I play this and talk about her upcoming show. He namechecked Venus member Catherine, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt and played it on her behalf. I’m very proud that community radio in Canada is DJ-programmed, without interference from music industry people, and I was none too thrilled to have some guy call me up on air to pull on my coat about playing his artist instead of going to the music dept where he’s supposed to (and where they’ll tell him it’s up to DJs to play what they wish). Jerk then called back afterwards just as I was going on the air and said, “So you kind of fumbled that one, huh?” Nice. Catherine called to say hi a little later and I told her about it. She had no idea who the dude was and was none too thrilled.]

Discount: Half Fiction vs. Crash Diagnostic, vs. the Kills

2008-03-21T10:47:00.016-04:00

I was in Florida recently, visiting family who rented a condo by the beach near Melbourne. It was a fine vacation for the most part, except for the touchiness that comes of various branches of the family tree in closer confines than usual for a longer period of time than anyone's accustomed to. So Ang and I took breaks some days with trips into town and farther-- and most of the time we listened to Discount, Vero Beach's teenage pop-punk would-have-beens whose breakup made way for their seemingly demon-possessed singer Alison Mosshart to form The Kills with British 90s-emo-boy turned paparazzi-bait Jamie Hince.

I've never liked the Kills-- I saw them at Montreal's Sala Rossa on their first tour in 2003 and found their late arrival to smacked-out garage blues totally unremarkable. They were doing little more than aping the equally tiresome Royal Trux, whose skag-rock usually forgot that Johnny Thunders wrote great songs in addition to being a dashing junkie. I watched unconvinced as Mosshart and Hince (or VV and Hotel, as they'd cringingly rechristened themselves) gambolled about the stage playing rawk gawds, and amping up some role-play routine where they pretended to have a creepy abusive relationship. They primped, attitudinal and devil-may-care, but the substandard garage rock they squeezed out was flat and rehearsed and lacking totally in danger or surprise--hardly worth copping attitude over. It hurt the most, though, because I'd loved Discount, and though prior to the live Kills set I'd found their debut EP uninspired and pretentious, I was convinced that seeing Alison (uh, VV?) on stage again would redeem everything.

The first time I saw Discount was at the old Café Chaos on St Denis, across from the Cartier-Latin theatre, in October of 1999. They played a more-than-sold out show with Born Dead Icons and Fifth Hour Hero, both still in the relatively early stages of their trajectories. Jeff "Ghost Pine" Miller insisted I come, though at the time I was still listening largely to dumb garage punk and looked down on pop-punk for not being, er, genuine enough (an absurd thought from the point of view of garage rock, but I was in my early 20s). Jeff kept telling me it would be worth it, first when he convinced me to meet up with him, then when we got turned away at the door of the sold out show, then at the coffee shop where we waited through the opening bands, and finally before sneaking in with the crowd before the headline set.

We nudged our way to the front through the morass as Discount careened into their first song, and my first impression was that they were fronted by a young girl on a lot of drugs. It took me a few minutes to recognize that the stupourous trance that gripped Mosshart disappeared at the end of each song, when she'd suddenly become a shy girl in her late teens, eyes downcast and chin shrugged into her chest, quietly saying a few words about the band and their tour or thanking people for clapping. Then a new song'd start and she'd be once more gripped with musical fits. It could have been pretentious, were it not simply so weird-- there was nothing cool about her comportment, which suggested equal parts spiritual possession, traumatic shock, and grand-mal seizure. Mosshart looked crazed, her eyes fixing at random on the floor and ceiling and speakers, mouth muttering and contorting and hanging open when she wasn't singing, as she snapped at herself totally out of time with the music, contracting, expanding, shaking uncontrollably and apparently surprising herself. Utterly awkward in the most refreshing way, it appeared to be happening beyond her control, and while there were moments when she looked embarrassed by it, these were always overtaken and distracted by her own performance.

The greatest contrast was, however, her singing-- she sang sweetly, in a young, pure voice, with high melody and yearning earnestness. The band behind this was tight and loud and they played what would probably be called, derisively, pop-punk. It was melodious, and it was punk too-- loud and exhilarating rock and roll that you could shake to, which I was doing, startled by how good the music was and totally focused on the band, hoping as one hopes amidst all great sets that they would never stop playing and that time would instead stop and leave me suspended aloft in the feeling of joy that I felt hearing and watching them play.

It would be a shame to write Discount off as pop-punk the same way one sweeps aside the army of overproduced boy bands begging meal tickets from the extreme-sport-energy-drink demographic. Jawbreaker influence aside, Discount didn't quite sound like anyone else at the time, and if they did it was only because they sounded young. They sounded mainly like themselves, and expressed the emotions and concerns of young people in precisely the manner as punk rock is supposed to. They'd been booked, I recall, by local kids in an anarchist collective venue, and were touring across North America playing shows in houses and basements, bookstores, cafes, bars, whatever, at what might have been a post-internet but pre-file sharing, pre-Myspace height of actually independent music. They were young and they made music about being young for young people. As many problems are inherent in that aside, they did it perfectly and their records today resonate with that youth above all.

Last week in Florida, Ang and I listened to Half Fiction and the second disc of the band's Singles collection, featuring mostly tracks from the later years. Because we were staying less than an hour from Vero Beach, Discount's hometown, it seemed appropriate, but there's something doubly satisfying about complementing the sun and warm salt-seasoned air with youthfully exhuberant songs played hard and and melodic and loud. We gave both albums plenty of play, which I supplemented by listening to the Love, Billy EP of Billy Bragg covers on the beach, and concluded that Discount was still a great band.

But I came to the following conclusion too-- the band was really at its apex when they recorded Half-Fiction. It's the best Discount album-- their debut, Ataxia's Alright Tonight, is good but uncertain juvenalia, and their final album, Crash Diagnostic is ambitious, but occasionally too much so. In the middle, Half-Fiction is the perfect balance. It's achingly well-played, tight, and full of driving momentum, and Mosshart's voice is sweet and plaintive, but more than that she sounds frank. Half-Fiction as an album sounds like someone trying to tell you something about themselves, including the uncomfortable things, but not dwelling on them. At no point does the record sound like it cares or even knows that anyone's listening. Instead, it records a band lost in trying to play as well as they can to say what they want to say about what they feel. No one could sensibly apply Negative Approach's accusation to Half-Fiction-era Discount-- they may not have been for everyone, but they're weren't trying to be something they were not. There's almost an utter lack of posture in this record (particularly when considered in hindsight against The Kills, for whom posturing is central and actual expression sounds almost tertiary), and I'm not entirely sure who to blame for that, except perhaps that the band was young enough to have believed in punk's ethos that it's enough to say what you feel.

By contrast, Crash Diagnostic is the sound of a band aware of how many people are listening, and trying to rise to the demand of that. Interviews prior to the release of that album found Mosshart and other members of the band sensibly pointing out that they didn't want to go on making the same records forever, they wanted to develop, try new things, and grow. These are obviously important and worthy pursuits for musicians, especially musicians finding themselves acclaimed at an early age. Yet from a listener's perspective, too much of Crash Diagnostic is agonizingly self-aware-- it's an album played for an audience, in direct contrast to Half-Fiction which sounds like a band playing only for themselves. They play with post-rock, pay homage to Fugazi and the DC/Dischord sound in general (drummer Bill Nesper now lives in DC and plays in Dischord band Routineers with former Fort Reno promoter Amanda MacKaye), make the music more difficult, challenging, less direct, all things that were considered important in 2000. There are those little 37-second non-songs of noise and feedback and tape loops; there are spaces left silent and great attention to the dynamic between loud and quiet; there are mysterious lyrics that border equally on the poetic and the unintelligible; there's album design borrowed heavily from Fugazi's graphic style. And there's the album's most obvious lapse, Mosshart's affectation in some songs of a quasi-English accent (now a constant, judging from her interviews as member of the Kills), which can be only partly explained away by recalling that she was 17 when the previous album came out and, at 20 when she made Crash Diagnostic, and was still discovering her voice.

Even then, it's not a bad album by any stretch, and its best songs are just great. Those are the moments when it sounds like Discount forgets, briefly, who they're playing for-- and they sound once more like kids expressing themselves through music, instead of an acclaimed band working on more challenging material. As a whole, Crash Diagnostic ends up sounding like a solid entry into a wide field of competitors, whereas with Half-Fiction, Discount was far and away the best band out there playing young songs for young people. I still quite like Crash Diagnostic and listen to it from time to time (each time remarking, "This is so much better than I remember it being"), but not half as often as I play Half-Fiction, which remains a flawless document-in-song of being young.

The Mountain Goats: We Shall All Be Healed (4AD, 2004)

2008-03-12T12:02:00.006-04:00

When I was doing my MA research on literature of the First World War, there was a controversial critical division between the so-called "combat gnostic" literature (that at least written by those who experienced the war, if not actually written in the trenches, as the classic image of the "war poet" implies) and literature about the war written by those who didn't experience it. And while I very much understand and support the attacks on combat gnosticism--that it unjustly glorifies military service, places soldiers in a position beyond civilian criticism, demands that critics prove their manhood in battle, and if not, shut up about things they don't understand--I also understand why some of its proponents stand by it.

The First World War was, after all, a completely new thing, a 4-year non-stop orgy of mass-murder, mass-maiming, and miscellaneous brutality so destructive to the individual psyche that soldiers had to be constantly rotated out of it to keep them from mental collapse. Its continual shelling, gassing, mining, gunfire, and attacks (as well as long stretches of tense boredom) bore utterly no resemblance to anything--even the terrifically brutal things--that had happened before, and it was endured en masse by millions of people, largely men, who returned home to a public that felt it understood what they'd been through because it had read about the heroic exploits of "our Tommies" in propaganda cartoon reports of the war.

Many, like poet Siegfried Sassoon, were justified in arguing that it was nearly impossible to understand the war without having been in it, and others sensibly argued that to attempt to represent the war in words or pictures--even by those who were there-- was necessarily to encourage misunderstanding by placing it in a narrative whereby the public felt they could understand it. Thus, depictions of the war by those who did not see or experience it seem especially suspect. Sure, artists or authors are free to write or draw what the feel they should, but, in the opinion of those who've endured such a particular experience, how are we to trust the creative product of one who represents something of which he or she has not seen?

This is not to say that no one should have an opinion about war who has not experienced it, nor that one should defer ones feelings about war to those who've seen it. It's simply to say that we must understand that war, like so many things in the realm of human experience (eg, forms of violence, illness, pain, discrimination, etc.), may not be fully understood unless one has endured it, and that therefore a description of war by a veteran or civilian who was there--though incapable of approximating or representing the experience-- is probably more trustworthy than one created by an author's imagination.

Likewise, a description of any extreme experience endured by an individual is likely more believable than the same experience described as imagined. For that reason, I'm fascinated by John Darnielle's use of We Shall All Be Healed to tell the story of his addiction to methamphetamine and of the circle of addicts he was a part of. I fancy myself a pretty creative person, but I really can't tell you what the emotions and interactions of a group of people in the third week of a crystal meth bender are like. I just don't have any idea, and I appreciate having a storyteller as careful as Darnielle recall it to the best of his memory.

Darnielle, with his gawky lo-fi folk-rock, is an unlikely narrator of that sort of story, but that judgement betrays my own prejudices. I'm sure anyone from as shitty a family life as Darnielle's is not unlikely to encounter self-medication and addiction-- as he says (in "The Young Thousands"), "The dull pain that you live with isn't getting any duller." I'm as guilty as any other idiot in imagining for a moment that crystal meth addicts are probably trailer-dwelling illiterates, and this album is a deserved slap and continual reminder that addiction welcomes all classes and levels of education.

But that said, Darnielle's nebbish acoustic folk and indie rock nods to "all you tweakers with your hands out" are startling. His voice and music suggests the usual array of harmless "indie" subjects (love, sadness, self-absorption, dissatisfaction with the world, postmodernism), and thus snaps one to attention when he remembers a meth-binge in a Travelodge (in "Palmcorder Yajna," whose chorus foresees the eventual end to this social circle: "the headstones climbed up the hills") or killing in self-defence ("When I worked down at the liquor store, guy with a shotgun came raging through the place / Muscled his way behind the counter, I shot him in the face").

I've been a Mountain Goats fan for a while, thanks to the efforts of my old friend Bobby Lotz to interest me in the band/guy, and at first I was most enamoured of the early ultra-lo-fi records, each beginning with the hum of the boom box on which he recorded them. When Darnielle moved to 4AD and began recording in a studio with (gah!) other musicians, I was wary, but soon fell in love with Tallahassee, the last of the "non-fiction" (?) records. I didn't hear Healed immediately-- I first heard The Sunset Tree, the subsequent album chronicling childhood abuse at the hands of his alcoholic stepfather. Having heard the songs live and lo-fi before hearing the smoothly produced record, it took much longer to interest me, but eventually I grew fascinated with the storytelling and warmed up to the album itself.

At this point, though, Darnielle is like a lot of musicians and writers whose work I've loved long enough that I'm now just interested in them. I will listen to or read everything by, say, Mike Watt, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, Ted Leo, or Primo Levi not because of what they write about, but because I feel that I've developed a relationship with them through their work (and, in some cases, in person) and I just want to enjoy the things they make. This has allowed me to, in some cases, forgive lapses in quality by artists I love and respect.

However, in spite of its smooth production, I was startled by the candour and quality of We Shall All Be Healed. There's an atmosphere of personal apocalypse all through this record, as sensibly one supposes there must be in a circle of people engaged in progressive self-destruction. Little details make the stories on this album resound with elegiac believability-- the contents of one addict's notebook ("free-hand drawings of Lon Cheney, blueprints for geodesic domes, recipes for cake") or the image of "guys in biohazard suits, mud caking on their rubber boots" arriving to (assumedly) dismantle a meth lab (perhaps one that alerted the authorities because, as a previous song mentions, it was "a great big drain on the power grid"? Or do meth labs consume power?). Out of context these might be more arbitrary images in the kind of random cataloguing Darnielle's been guilty of at points in the past, but taken together they suggest a deep and ugly backstory that's only told here through implication.

"In the cold clear light of day down here, everyone's a monster," Darnielle sings (in "Letter From Belgium"), "That's cool with all of us, we've been past the point of help since early April." These songs drip with this self-hatred, whether in the narrator wishing (in "Palmcorder Yajna") that, "If anyone comes into our room while we're asleep, I hope they incinerate everybody in it" or in concluding (in "Slow West Vultures"), "We are sleek and beautiful, we are cursed." The characters in Healed are obviously doomed, "chewing [their] tongues off, waiting for the fever to break," being ordered to "wrap this bandanna around your head, don't let anyone see that you're bleeding." They're paranoid, they engage in obsessive behaviour chronicled here and there throughout the album, and they meet the doom they know is coming. Darnielle relates the addict's fatalism in "The Young Thousands," opening with an image of "suspicious cargo" delivered from arriving boats to waiting addicts before quickly pointing out that, "The things that you've got coming will consume you / There's someone waiting out there in an alley with a chain." And even though "The things that you've got coming will do things that you're afraid to," the allure of getting high is strong as well, with the "pleasure index [rising]," "the warm love of God coursing through us."

The album ends with the deceptively fun number "The Story of the Pigs that Ran Straightaway Into the Water," a deliriously cheerful rejoinder to police sending the narrator to prison with the refrain, "I come from Chino, so all your threats are empty." It's oblivious and high and the right spot to end this record-- it suggests the reason why the narrator is alive to recount it all without beginning the story of detoxing in prison, another story entirely. We Shall All Be Healed is therefore as self-contained as the society it describes, ending before the narrator can come down, before the threat of death and misery that looms throughout the album finally likewise descends upon those who've been tempting it so long.

2008-03-10T20:43:00.002-04:00

This afternoon I thought of the perfect analogy for the whistle solo in "Pink Elephants" by Oakland/Pensacola's successfully self-destructive ex-band Sexy, off their glorious LP Por Vida (see also: this post about that band from about this time last year). That moment in the song is like hearing wind chimes in the middle of a pounding thunderstorm. Amidst the amazing cacophony of the band thrashing away at its instruments, rendered even noisier through grainy, bottom-dollar production, the whistling cuts cleanly and faintly through like an instrument that only knows how to be pretty when called upon for sound, no matter by whom.

G.I.S.M., a band I'm afraid of:

2008-03-10T11:12:00.007-04:00

Here's a surprisingly tame video (from taisou.vox.com) of truly frightening Japanese hardcore legends G.I.S.M. performing "Death Exclamations," one of their better known numbers:

The first few times I heard G.I.S.M., the instrumentation and arrangement seemed far too metallic and the growled vocals didn't interest me. Stories about G.I.S.M.'s lead singer Sakevi and his comportment during their live performances, however, morbidly piqued my interest. Through various sources I heard that Sakevi was known for not just attacking audiences with fists and mic stands, but apparently graduating to brandishing flares, tear gas, chainsaws, and flamethrowers and chasing crowds with them. I assume he never actually hacked up or set anyone on fire (during a show, at least), but he was also purportedly responsible for piping nauseating gas into clubs where G.I.S.M. was playing, and for mass-poisoning audiences by spiking drinks with some mild toxin. Sakevi explained his motivation this way: "Our mission is to recall the mental tension of the people [...] and it would show as a guerilla band shooting out persistantly the fighting spirit against the collapsing world."

Hearing these rumours years after having heard and dismissed G.I.S.M., I became fascinated with the idea that an apparent sociopath would feel it necessary to form a band to "express" his opinions and feelings. How would someone given to these sorts of behaviours translate his feelings into song? That someone of Sakevi's inclination even had the patience to assemble a band and practice to perfect the art of making music to match his feelings about "the collapsing world" was intriguing on its own. Thus, I tracked down and listened to a copy of Detestation, the band's first full-length album.

While I still don't have much taste for metal or for heavily metallic music, I have developed some sort of feeling for Detestation. I don't really like it, but I respect (or, at least, am frightened by) it. In light of details about Sakevi's performances, as well as his institutionalizations and episodes of random offstage violence, the music becomes a lot more ominous. Elements that seemed absurd on first listen now seem unsettling (the same way behaviour that seems "funny" in an otherwise sensible individual becomes a red warning flag in a person with a history of psychosis), and the music itself seems to personify the mental state of the voice apparently leading it. The lyrics and song titles are in fractured, muddled English, which amplifies the feeling (in an English-speaking listener) of disconnection and breakdown. Sakevi's voice delivers with certainty frightening statements which make only partial sense, whose grey areas exacerbate the sinister implication behind them. That voice, incidentally, creeps from a standard Japanese-hardcore growl to delusional-operatic puppet vocals (for example toward the end of "Nih Nightmare") that are a good deal weirder than just growling.

But the growling is weird enough, especially when it's fanatically celebrating "Death, Agony and Screams" (pronounced "dess-uh, aguhr ee-uh scREEz!"), and the guitar-noodling that follows is likewise uneasy-- dizzy and barely in tune, it doesn't sound any more healthy than the vocals. Taken as a whole, the package of the record sounds truly evil. Unlike so many hardcore acts obsessed with toughness and violence and fighting, there's no test of strength inherent in G.I.S.M. Instead, this is music that sounds unwell, as though it lacks the strength to restrain its desire to poison your water supply or set your house on fire while you're asleep.

The video above seems filmed well after the band's mid-80s heyday, and is just the band performing the song with no apparent threat to the audience. However, I watch it with the same fascination as that with which I listen to the records, marvelling at the people responsible for this captivating and horrifying music.

2008-03-04T12:17:00.002-05:00

I've been busy, what can I say? I have something on the go now--semi-related to this blog-- that might turn out to be very interesting, but could just as likely come up nothing, so I'm not going to jinx it by discussing it here. However, I'm happy to report that my story "What's Left" is going to be appearing in a new anthology from Invisible Publishing alongside a number of other writers I admire, including among them my former undergrad schoolmate Stacey May Fowles (whose new book, Be Good has been getting solid reviews).

There'll be more writing here soon. In the meantime, behold the greatest rock video ever made:

Black Randy bio.

2008-01-11T17:52:00.001-05:00

I wrote this for LastFm before discovering that they had a separate entry for Black Randy under Black Randy & the Metrosquad:

Among the most obnoxious representatives of early Los Angeles punk in the late 1970s, possible-sociopath Black Randy released only a handful of drolly confrontational records on the legendary Dangerhouse label (which he partly owned) before his death in 1988 from HIV at the age of 36. He's often remembered more as a social antagonist, cruel prankster, drug addict, and prostitute than he is as a musician, but there's glorious and elemental punk rock in his hard-to-find records. Randy's songs are gleeful mockeries of sacred cows, cool people, and social niceties, as well as cheery celebrations of hated figures like Idi Amin and Chairman Mao, but are just as often venemous attacks on the square world and those who live according to its rules. His attitude to the world is best summed up in "Trouble at the Cup," in which he spits, "Schools and factories make me sick / I'd rather stand here and sell my dick" before offhandedly remarking, "I want to shoot a cop / I want to see him die" in the same blasé tone as the rest of his recorded output.

Funky, offensive, and scatophilic, Black Randy backed his bored, atonal vocals with the tight scribble-funk of The Metro Squad (which featured members of the Randoms, the Eyes, and the Dils). Randy drew on funk, soul, and R&B conventions even as he lovingly mocked those styles (as in his covers of "Say It Loud! (I'm Black and I'm Proud!)," sneeringly hijacked to name off and deride figures of punk rock royalty like Dee Dee Ramone and Joe Strummer, and "Theme From Shaft"). His succinct songs are punk less because they're sonically aggressive, fast, or loud, but rather by virtue of their willingness to attack and offend for fun. Black Randy was all attitude, and he sounds like it.

---

And on a semi-related note, here's a video of The Screamers doing "122 Hours of Fear" in a studio somewhere:

2008-01-05T00:10:00.000-05:00

I know, it's been an egregious wait for a new post. I just got back from a long vacation with my family and family-in-law and am at the moment decompressing, but in the interim, you should probably watch this recent video of Milo Auckerman (of the Descendents) backed by the Lemonheads doing an able cover of The Angry Samoans' "Right Side of My Mind":

Milo w/ Lemonheads

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Not quite a real post, but:

2007-12-03T19:14:00.000-05:00

Good lord, I promised myself I'd never watch these videos because it'd just break my heart, but what on earth was wrong with me that I missed the last Deadly Snakes shows in Toronto last year?

"Gore Veil" at the "last" show (Horseshoe Tavern)

3 songs from the actual last show the next night at the Silver Dollar. Occasional camera pans of audience reveal the presence of beloved friend and one-time community radio conconsirator Bobby Lotz. Hey Bob.

This is probably my greatest musical regret. Not missing Fugazi on their last tour-- I loved that band and saw them on tours for In On The Kill-Taker and Red Medicine, but I've never really regretted missing them that last time. I saw the Deadly Snakes a few times too, but largely when they were still the greatest garage punk band in the world, rather than when they became one of the greatest bands in the world, writing absolutely fresh songs about the ubiquitously immortal themes of fear of death and frenzied joy in life. I must have been out of my mind to miss those shows.

Life, encapsulated:

2007-11-28T16:26:00.001-05:00

Behold, the metaphorical soundtrack to my life as it is lived just now:

My life is even wearing that shirt and perplexing facial expression.

That's to say that I'm very, very busy right now. Though I'm working on a two-part retrospective look at the career of Toronto's late, lamented Deadly Snakes, Canada's greatest rock and roll band, that's going to have to wait a while. Sorry. In the meantime, I encourage you to go out and buy their entire catalogue beginning with their first two garage-stomp records before proceeding to their last two records in which the band grows up, has an existential crisis, and leaves behind it some of the most touching and emotionally raw music I've ever heard.

Less indirect self-promotion:

2007-11-20T18:46:00.000-05:00

As of tomorrow evening, I will have a whole bunch of copies of a new zine, this one comprising a new short story and a very long introduction considering the topically resonant events of the first half of this year, during which time my house caught fire, I relived the early 1990s through bad home decor, we got illegally evicted, and general hilarity ensued.

Those in Montréal, or within driving range thereof, should come by Expozine, Canada's largest zine/indie-press fair, this Saturday and Sunday to buy the new issue from me. As I have in previous years, I'll have a table from which I'll be selling copies of my zines. Along with the new one, there will also be copies of back issues: last year's Jigsaw Youth: Two New Stories (shortlisted for Best English Book at the 2006 Expozine awards), 2004's Querencia 8: Our Lady of the Harbour (the excruciatingly personal issue!), and 2001's Querencia 5: Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste (aka "the one John K Samson liked"). Each of these goes for an affordable $3, which guarantees a high ratio of carefully crafted prose to the dollar.

It's happening from 12-6pm on both Saturday and Sunday at 5035 St-Dominique (l'Église Saint-Enfant Jésus, between St-Joseph and Laurier, near Laurier Métro). You can also check out a map here.

Also very exciting: Chris Landry from Ottawa will be up to table his hotly expected new issue of Kiss Off (which I've heard is fantastic), and Jeff "Otaku" Miller will have a new issue of the mighty Ghost Pine. As well, Adam "Tops" Thomlison is coming up from Ottawa to sell goods from his 40-Watt Spotlight Press; Nic Boshart will be selling stuff (including the guaranteed brilliant new Devin Code collection of short stories: buy this!) from Invisible Publishing, of which he's a key player; talented artist Leila Peacock will have... something unidentified, probably art, possibly riddles, likely both; and gifted magic-marker portraitist Arlene Textaqueen will apparently be back from Australia to sell pictures of people I know naked. I'm hoping, too, that Warren Hill will have a new issue of $2.00 Comes With Mix-Tape, which is two dollars and (surprise!) comes with a mix tape that's alone worth about ten times the package price.

That's not to mention the usual onslaught of talented locals and mysterious out-of-towners hocking neat stuff. I strongly advise you all to drop by, if only to buy things from me.

So I'll see you there, then? Awesome.

The mighty do fall, after all, but...

2007-11-19T11:49:00.000-05:00

From time to time I get to wondering how Clarence Carter could fall so far from the mighty deep-soul melancholy of "Slip Away" to embarrassing novelty tracks like "Strokin'."

It's true the guy always played dirty novelty songs (and what compilation of listenable Xmas music is complete without "Back Door Santa"?); I'm not saying he shouldn't be allowed to have fun. But when I listen to the pounding, heart-racing chorus of "Slip Away," I find it hard not to imagine that Carter was destined for better things.

The 80s were a hard time for a lot of soul singers-- Aretha sure embarrassed herself, as did Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, and a lot of other truly great performers. The influence of cocaine and synthesizers didn't flatter anyone. But still-- it's sad to think how many of those years were wasted on empty pop and digitally reverberating drums when they could have been spent honing artistry with the wisdom of age. It's always a little disappointing to listen to a heart-wrenching song like "Slip Away" and know that was the crest, there was never any more like that. Alas.

Terrible news!

2007-11-17T18:36:00.000-05:00

I was listening to Electrelane's excellent No Shouts, No Calls this afternoon and decided to check their web page to see if they'd scheduled a make-up tour for those dates in North America that they canceled this spring when the Arcade Fire took them along as openers. All spring I waited for their scheduled May show and was totally distraught to hear it had been postponed, but an email from drummer Emma Gaze assured me that they'd be back sometime this fall. Since this fall is nearly over, I wanted to see if they were slated to be back soon. Instead, I found this message on the front page:

INDEFINITE HIATUS

We have decided that the upcoming gigs will be our last for the foreseeable future. After ten years of much fun and hard work, we have realised that we all need a break and time to do other things. This was a tough decision for us to make, but ultimately a positive one.

A big thank you to everyone who has come to our shows, put on our shows, and bought our records over the years. It means a lot to us. We're really grateful to have had the opportunity to play gigs all over the world and to meet so many lovely people. This last year has been especially enjoyable and we feel happy about moving on with all these good memories to look back on. At the moment we haven’t made any band plans for the future, but we’re going to have a break and see what happens.

Love, Electrelane

Damn. So goes one of the most interesting, exciting, and infinitely listenable bands in present-day music, and barely nine months after releasing the nearly flawless No Shouts, No Calls, easily one of 2007's finest albums. That record that will forever bring me back to this year with every repeated listen, and it's good enough that I can say without doubt that I'll be putting it on again and again, year after year, as I do all of their releases. I suppose one could say it's good they're quitting before they put out a bad album, but that's small comfort, particularly given that I don't believe they're capable of a bad album.

Mid-November's always ugly, but this is just an extra bit of disappointment.

2007-11-05T16:09:00.000-05:00

If you find the band The Doors absurd, and find the glorification of Jim Morrison even funnier, you should, by all means, read this magnificent review of Ray Manzarek's toadying memoir. That's right, he didn't just play in the doors and later ruin the production of the album Los Angeles by X with his banal, gurgling organ, but he wrote a book featuring the Doors as the most important thing that ever happened to culture.

Now when I was a pre-teen, I loved the Doors and was nearly obsessive about them, but there comes a time (usually around one's 15th birthday?) at which one must ask what, exactly, makes Jim Morrison a poet, and "An American Poet" (as the poster I had on my wall said) at that? Are we supposed to go easier on him as a poet because he was American, as though he was admittedly not Keats or Larkin, but did the best with his circumstances?

Anyway, read the review, since whoever wrote it expresses my feelings on the issue better than I possibly could.

It's a busy season.

2007-11-04T10:59:00.000-05:00

As my college rolls through the end of midterm season, picking up speed and mass like an educational snowball, my free time is being swept away in favour of marking, prep, and much more marking. I haven't had time for a decent entry in a while and apologize, but I will tell you what I'm crazy about right now:

Funky Kingston by Toots & the Maytals on the original vinyl

I'm more or less ALWAYS crazy about Funky Kingston, and it's traditionally the strongest challenge to Marquee Moon's title as my all-time favourite record. However, I lost my CD of it this summer (along with 44 other favourites) when I left my CD-booklet on the bus from Montréal to St-Jovite and have been missing it terribly since. How kind of my beloved gal Ang, then, to dig up a copy of the original vinyl to present me on my 30th birthday a week back! And just in time too, since this record has, for years, been my strongest psychic medicine against the descent of the grey misery of late fall. When it's dark at 4:30 and your fingers, toes, and nose all seem as though they're cramping up even when you're inside, you need something warm, and there's no sound warmer than "Pressure Drop," "Pomp & Pride," or the Maytals' cover of "Country Roads, Take Me Home." Nothing else sounds like comfort to me the way that Funky Kingston does.

Spirit of the Century by the Blind Boys of Alabama

I picked this up on Friday and have listened to it maybe 30 times since then. Simple blues-gospel arrangements that go miles on beautiful voices alone, the Blind Boys are unmatched in any recent gospel I've heard, and in spite of their modernizing of the sound, are fit to stand beside Mahalia Jackson, the Soul Stirrers, and the Swan Silvertones. This record is mostly traditionals with a handful of covers of Jesus-themed popular music, and all of it is from the heart and gut both. Worth buying for their cover of the Stones' "Just Want To See His Face" alone, it's a record I find hard to listen to without singing along. And it should be so-- this is gospel music that moves you with its testament to the faith of the voices singing it, and one needn't share the same views to be shaken by the very human joy and conviction celebrated here.

Death to Idealism by the Red Dons

Everything I hoped it would be, this album goes a long way to harnessing the energy of the Red Dons' live show. Well-wrought classic west-coast punk rock along the lines of the Middle Class and the Adolescents that drives forward even as it shakes from side to side, with great melodies and an earnest plead to its lyrics. Highly recommended.

s/t by the Tranzmitors

Vancouver's best band (a Smugglers/New Town Animals supergroup) merges new wave and power pop into a tight, pounding record that's loud and fast and poppy in equal measures. Blasting new-wave organ, sharp juts of guitar with licked-surface leads, and fucking HAND-CLAPS ALL OVER, man, this is a record you need to have if you like fun. It's deeply danceable (I tested this at a party recently and it held up), charmingly arranged (see the late breakdown in "Alma Blackwell"), and sounds better with every notch you turn it up. Which you must and will.

I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore: 1927-1948 - Various

An unbelievable collection of early recordings of US music that's not what you'd expect of "early US music," this mixes a mindbending array of sounds stemming from massive 20th century immigration. Thus there's calypso mixed with Asian, Cajun, and Appalachian folk and blues. At a point in my music appreciation where I've gotten used to finding early blues/folk collections predictable and homogeneous, I'm absolutely amazed by this delightful LP which stands up to multiple listening and never tires itself out. Fans of roots music will clearly have to dig this up as soon as they can.

Reunion Tour by the Weakerthans

John K Samson has a well-earned reputation for putting together gently rocking indie-pop, but he deserves to have greater attention paid to his writing as well. The songs here, strangely Canadian for a guy whose musical career began with fervent anti-nationalist hoserpinkos Propagandhi, are musical portraits of people and places: an aging band reuniting in the title track, a tired Northerner ushering yet another group of skeptics to where he saw Bigfoot, a curler dawdling at the club at the end of a bonspiel, and a Winnipeg bus driver watching the descent of December dusk ("Civil Twilight"). This last track is the opener to the record but possibly its finest song, a big, warm-sounding song about cold, a gentle portrait of the routine of driving a bus and the emotions of the driver, and a subtle punch in Burton Cummings' gut (can there ever be enough of those?). Several years ago I interviewed Samson for CKUT-FM and expressed strong agreement with his heretical Winnipeger's statement in "One Great City!" that "The Guess Who sucked." I explained that I hated the Guess Who more than any band in music history and I was glad to find someone who finally understood, but Samson said his reaction wasn't so much to the vacuousness of their lyrics or derivative music as to the exalted place they held among Winnipeg cultural history. "I was listening to that song 'Bus Rider,'" he said, "And I thought, god, the Guess Who really does just suck. Did they have to write a song mocking poor people taking the bus to work? Wasn't there something better to write about?" Samson's response of a portrait-in-song of cold commuters who "bite their mitts off to show me transfers, deposit change" and a vaguely heartsick driver facing dusk and admitting "this part of the day bewilders me" is a humane and witty rejoinder to the Guess Who, one whose release is perfectly timed to give form to the emotions of this coming fall.

By the way, you remembered to turn your clocks back last night, right?

Awe and Nordic Melancholy ("nordiskt vemod"): Jan Johansson: Jazz på Svenska (1965)

2007-10-11T22:32:00.000-04:00

I won't call this a jazz album, since that's gotten me into trouble before, but I will say that Jazz på Svenska, Jan Johansson's 1965 album of Swedish folksongs interpreted with piano and upright bass alone, is easily one of the most beautiful albums I've heard, and one of the saddest. Jazz certainly influences and to an extent determines some of the sound, style, and flourish to this record, but to describe it simply as a jazz record is to do a disservice to it and to jazz. It's something beyond jazz, but because of jazz.

This is an album of Swedish folksongs interpreted by two masterful jazz musicians, Johansson, a deft pianist and protégé of Stan Getz, and bassist Georg Riedel. The arrangement is minimal: piano and bass, the echo of ringing notes, and nothing else. While there are notes and touches throughout the album that swing, for the most part the album seems to follow a tonal scale divorced from what a lay-person (that is, I) would identify as jazz. It just doesn't sound like jazz, but it doesn't quite sound like precisely anything. Sure, it sounds like Swedish folksongs, I guess. At times it sounds almost like Glenn Gould (minus the muttering and embellishment). But it sounds less like any other music and more like a range of moods-- it drifts between generous warmth and desolate cold, between intimacy and lonesome abandon. There are tones and moments that seem to have all the deepest feeling imaginable bound up inside them; it's not hard to hear grief and despair here, helplessness and horror, but there is also faith and awe and wonder in abundance. This is a record that has given me goosebumps, over and over, which has at times chilled me with a sense of how truly alone I was, while at other times has reassured me of the unequivocal safety of the foundations of my life and relationships. It's not hard to find everything you feel expressed more precisely in this record.

As a means of explaining this, I'll offer the following story: in the spring of 2006, I felt as though I was at a point of intersection as far as my career was concerned. For several long years I had sought out one particular job, built up my qualifications so as to make myself more desirable to employers in that field, and endured several harrowing interviews. Finally, I got some work, and later, some more. By the time the third round of work came around, I was having drastic second thoughts, recognizing many of the grim faults in the job that I had not, in my dumbfounded fantasies of employment, imagined would come into play. By early winter 2006 I had begun to consider stepping away from the field of my aspirations, but when spring rolled around and it was once more time to send in applications, I dutifully filled out and faxed off my forms.

I had already been working for one particular outfit, but mid-week in late April I got word that union rules required they re-interview me for the job I'd already done. The interview was to be on Monday; on Friday I was stricken with some crisis of conscience. I couldn't bear to go on with the work, I figured. I hated it-- it was nothing like I'd imagined it would be. I hated myself, too, since I'd stupidly spent as many as seven years focused on a single goal that I now seemed to have to abandon. But between the ache of making active disappointment and the woe of letting drop my hard-won goal, disappointment still seemed the worse. On Monday morning I determined I was through, but nonetheless would still go to the interview out of courtesy for my colleagues: I put on my best suit and tie and headed out early for the 90-minute metro-bus combination that would take me to the job site.

Being late April, there was a cold rain coming down, mostly as a mist at first. I drifted over me as I followed Duluth street from my corner down to St Denis, where it thickened. As I ducked into the metro station it had begun to come down heavily, and waiting for the bus I felt it had grown dense and determined. Without an umbrella, I was soaked before my bus arrived: rain was dripping along my scalp and crawling past my tie-cinched collar. What little light there was in the sky was greyish yellow, as though passing through a grease-stained paper plate. I was miserable, beaten, and soaked, finally recognizing that the future to which I'd aspired was essentially a fiction in which I could not live comfortably, and at a loss for an alternate course. Having no future needed not, as I'd imagined it in my teenaged years, necessarily be set to punk rock. As the bus pulled away from Lionel-Groulx station, I leaned my dripping head against the window and put Jazz på Svenska on my discman, over which I could hear only the rhythm of the bus's windshield wipers and the occasional crackle of the radio. For the duration of the ride, that music was the only thing in the world, and the most beautiful thing. Then I got off.

Appreciation: "How Could I Help But Love You?" by Aaron Neville, Minit Records 1963

2007-10-09T22:39:00.001-04:00

A friend polled me recently for my favourite love song, and after only brief consideration of the many, many possibilities ("I Found A Love" by the Falcons? "Turn It On" by Sleater-Kinney? "Something's Got A Hold Of Me" by Etta James? "Baby Baby" by the Vibrators? "I've Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)" by Otis Redding? etc etc etc.), I came to one unassailable conclusion: "How Could I Help But Love You?" Aaron Neville's 1963 masterpiece of New Orleans R&B on Minit Records.*

Many may find it difficult to imagine Neville responsible for a genuine expression of feeling-- after such crimes against music as "Everybody Plays The Fool," Neville seems doomed to association with "soft rock," that form of music favoured by those who don't want to listen to anything moving, honest, or exciting, but prefer nonetheless not sit in silence. But that wasn't always the case; like a lot of musicians who defenestrated their talent and dignity during the 1980s, Neville's very early recordings are in many cases astonishingly good. In particular, Neville's earliest sides with New Orleans's famous Minit Records, which lasted only from 1961 to 1963 and released early records by Irma Thomas, Ernie K-Doe, and Eskew Reeder (aka Esquerita, strong influence on Little Richard), are all worth listening to. But chief among them is "How Could I Help But Love You?"

Every time I've described this song, the first word that's come to mind has been "ghostly": this is a song with the rare power to draw gooseflesh just by the way it sounds. A large part of this is in the brilliance of the instrumentation and arrangement-- the song progresses slowly and begins with Neville's imploring voice behind an echoing cymbal, tapped snare-rim, and gently ringing guitar which follow an almost hidden bass. The initial effect is like a faint wind rustling the last fall-dry leaves on a tree-- you're just as ready for it to die out as pick up. But lord, how it picks up: the chorus hands the melodic counterpoint from the bass to a strong piano in classic NOLA R&B form and distant backup singers (eerie and virtually unidentifiable as male or female) swell in utterly stunning harmony to Neville's vocal trills, which contain not one whit of bullshit or showboating. No part of this song is any louder or more prominent than it absolutely has to be: humility permeates it above all. The second verse doubles in length to fit in a saxophone and trumpet solo as quiet as breath and as gentle as the guitar that ebbs the melody away. The song is never agitated beyond its careful rustle by any drum-beat except the rim of the snare-- even with the intensity of the chorus, the entire song is piano, bass, and voice alone, its power in its scarcity, and when the chorus ends it returns to the quiet simplicity of that shimmering guitar.

Neville was barely out of his teen years when he recorded "How Could I Help But Love You?" and the awkward earnestness of youth permeates and defines the song. But the song is dominated by this nervous hesitance in a way that other tracks of the same era which sought to capitalize on a young man's stammering declaration of love (such as more polished songs by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Dion and the Belmonts, or the Orioles) are not. Quite simply, Neville sounds like he means what he's saying though he's terrified of saying it: he's full of the awe and reverence of falling truly in love at 20, and the song is arranged precisely so as to amplify every tremor of that emotion. When Neville sings, "You send cold chills down my spine," you don't just listen, you feel exactly what he means.

Performed by a different singer against a less deft arrangement, "How Could I Help But Love You?" might have been another hamhanded R&B throwaway, as there's nothing at the core of the words and melody to set the song apart from a dozen similar tracks. Yet between Neville's warm and tenuous voice and the perfect organization of instruments around it, this song becomes stunning. The lyrics are not, by any means, complex or witty, but they sound utterly sincere, and as a whole the song is likewise sincere in its minimalism. Where later Neville tracks would come to bury their lack of genuine emotion in an oily mountain of production, this song is structured to contain only what is absolutely necessary to get its point across. Its point is the feeling of being in love, and no song that I can think of does it better.

* - (to which I have the estimable Warren Hill, proprietor of Back Room Records and Pastries and publisher of $2.00 Comes With Mix-Tape zine, to thank for introducing me. Thanks, Warren.)

Small Favours:

2007-10-09T17:14:00.000-04:00

Still sick, and worse than before. I got a substitute for my morning class, woke up early, and went to the neighbourhood clinic, where a kind young doctor told me I should probably take the rest of the week off of work. She figures it's a sinus infection that I left too long and she gave me a prescription for antibiotics, so hopefully I'll be able to get back to work for Thursday. I'm supposed to teach the first class on "The Dead" by James Joyce, and I'd rather not leave that up to a substitute. Angie's now as sick or sicker than I am (though without the apparent sinus infection, at least), so we make quite a pair of layabouts. We've succeeded in accomplishing soup and television watching today (we're already done the first disc of Season II of The Wire and have had to resort to Buffy The Vampire Slayer) and neither of us is feeling particularly good about anything.

BUT! The doorbell rang just after 5pm today, and a courier fellow handed me a box with my name on it, which I opened to discover was an order from Deranged records that I'd almost forgotten I'd made. Inside, the Tranzmitors self-titled LP plus s/t 7", the Teen Crud Combo retrospective LP, Fucked Up's Hidden World 2xLP gatefold, and (oo! oo!) the eagerly awaited full-length LP by Portland's Red Dons (see my giddy review of their April set at L'Esco here).

Of course, said package arrived just as Ang retired to the guest bed in her office with a grinding sinus headache, so I can't very well throw any of these guaranteed rock-and-roll blowouts on just now. However, I hope the potential energy of this stack of vinyl will encourage a swift recovery, since these are the sorts of records that demand dancing sock-footed around one's kitchen.

Two notes from Pop Montreal

2007-10-04T06:27:00.000-04:00

(photo by unknown party, posted on montrealshows.com)

Things have been quiet on this blog lately for a number of reasons, chief among them the amount of preparation and marking that I've been facing as we move toward mid-term season. As well, I spent much of the last week done in by a nasty cold that I hope I've finally bested. There will be more to come, and soon, I hope. For the time being, however, let me say that for all my mixed feelings about the Pop Montréal festival, seeing Patti Smith read in front of and sing with A Silver Mt. Zion last night at the Ukranian Federation Hall on Hutchison was pretty amazing, and paying only $5 for the show about tripled my amazement. The show had strong points and weak points-- it was, by and large, exactly what I expected it would be, but by the end I'd have paid ten times as much just to hear their emotionally flattening version of "Pissing In A River." Their treatment made the song new again and gave it more power and immediacy than when I first heard it on record ten years ago. It was the first of two encores at the end of a two hour show, for which I paid five dollars. Amazing.

Addendum (Saturday afternoon): Patti Smith played again on Friday night with "Her Band" at the St Jean Baptiste church on Rachel near St Denis. Tickets were $35-- 7 times what we paid to see her play a tiny hall with Silver Mt Zion. My partner Angie (who's a member of CKUT-FM's Venus Collective and had been taping Smith's keynote address at the Pop & Politics conference earlier in the afternoon) had a guest-list spot, so we could have split the price of a single ticket, but we both agreed to forego the show and Ang handed the guest-list spot off to a friend. It wasn't the price, nor even the fact that I've taken poor care of myself this week and been once more routed my a resurgence of my cold just as Angie's finally caught it from me. Instead, we concluded that a show in a larger venue with a practiced band couldn't possible top the intimacy and urgency of a palpably nervous Smith in a tiny hall, backed by a band with whom she'd had a single afternoon to practice. So much could have gone thoroughly wrong with that show, and I'm sure everyone in the audience was aware of that-- the tenuous, feverish atmosphere in the choking-hot room drove the band as much as the music stoked the room. Five fucking dollars-- it wasn't just the price, or the size of the room, the gamble of the band and singer united at last, but all of it at once coming together perfectly and powerfully. It wasn't worth trying to repeat it-- we knew it wouldn't be as good again two nights later.

Instead, we caught an exhilarating 90-minute set by the mighty Ted Leo & the Pharmacists at the Gymnase, their second show in the last six months. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen Ted since the first Pharmacists show in Montréal at Barfly in May of 2001, but never have I seen give less than everything to the room. Last night was absolutely not an exception. The set list covered the last four records (though nothing off the early Treble In Trouble EP, which I'm always holding out for) as well as a long jam while awaiting a replacement bass-head that developed slowly into an cheerily improvised cover of Thin Lizzy's "The Boys Are Back In Town" with mostly-remembered lyrics and mostly the right chords. I'm happy to see James Canty playing second guitar with Ted again after several years away from the band-- he's got as much energy as Ted and drummer Chris, and between the three of them the band's live impact is staggering (for reasons I didn't get to hear, the more retiring bassist Dave is not playing on this tour; his shoes are being filled by a capable fellow whose name I didn't catch). By the end of the show both Angie and I were nearly catatonic with illness, but as we staggered down the stairs we determined it was, in fact, worth it. Even as I've spent all day today coughing up lung articles of ominous colour and feeling utterly destroyed, I remain convinced of that.

I will not, however, be seeing Tyvek, Fucked Up, Career Suicide, Jay Reatard, Kickers, Spy Machine 16, or any of the other bands I was hoping to get in tonight. I can tell when it's time to take it easy or do myself some serious damage, and the eighty minutes between waking and being able to get out of bed this morning were a clear indicator of what I must choose. Tonight will be about watching movies on the sofa with the cat and not feeling regretful for missing however many shows I wanted to go to.

Husker Du at Maxwell's, Hoboken NJ 06/84

2007-09-17T22:32:00.001-04:00

Fans of Husker Du should check out this blog page, which has put up a complete set of the band playing Maxwell's in 1984, a month before the release of Zen Arcade. The sound is patchy, but the set is breathtakingly powerful.

My favourite Husker Du record has always been Land Speed Record, which most people I know seem to find unlistenable. For me, it works because it holds together breakneck speed and absurd noise with just enough melody for the whole thing to function. It's raw and rough and crazy, but its best songs are almost sweet as well.

The songs available on the above page are a great example of the band at their best doing essentially the same thing-- they plough through 15 songs virtually without pause, addressing the audience only at the beginning and then again well into the set when Bob Mould tells them to stay on their side of the stage since someone's already given him a bloody lip. The closing cover of Roger McGuinn's "8 Miles High" (originally released on a 7" and on SST's Duck and Cover! compilation, also arguably one of their many finest moments) is heartbreaking and worth the album's download alone. The set covers songs from almost the entire breadth of their career to date and play everything tight and fierce, but desperately lovely. In its own loud, abrasive way, this is a very pretty set of songs.

The right time.

2007-09-11T21:19:00.000-04:00

For me, there was only one truly perfect moment in the summer of 2000.

It wasn't seeing Neko Case at the old Jailhouse Rock Café, where monitor problems meant that she delivered a command performance in the middle of the crowd in front of the stage-- that show was breathtaking and profound, but it was a show. I was, just then, working a job I hated and having no luck finding something else, and living in a friend's spare room for the summer while she was out of town but having no luck finding an apartment for August 1, and even experiencing Case's astonishing voice from a foot and a half away didn't make me feel the hope that had been for some time lacking. There were a few other amazing shows that summer as well-- the Dillinger Four at L'X and Alex Soria's Chino playing to a crowd of 15 at Barfly are both nights I'll fondly remember, but like the Neko Case show, even the best nights had difficulty penetrating my feeling of gloom and uselessness.

There was, however, one moment that was totally essential, at which I felt myself in the midst of all my desperation and depression and dread to be perfectly at peace. One afternoon in the middle of a hot week in June, I was at home doing nothing, as usual. That day I had already checked the want-ads and read through the apartment listings, from which it was becoming clear to me that I wouldn't find an apartment for July and would have to try to move in August instead, a change of plan that led to a variety of inconveniences.

The previous evening, I had been to bed absurdly late. I worked evenings at a busy café where the only free drink was coffee, so between my idiot caffeine consumption (I frequently drank five or six cups of coffee in the first two hours of my shift, yet remained perplexed as to why the remaining four hours were riddled with anxiety attacks) and the tension of constant, fast-paced work, it usually took me until nearly dawn to wind down after I got home.

So by 2pm I had eaten breakfast and drunk a pot of coffee, failed yet again to find better work and a stable place to live, and had lapsed into a bruxating state of self-loathing which I knew would keep me occupied until the beginning of my shift at 7pm.

I was sitting on the floral-print sofa trying unsuccessfully to concentrate on reading a book when I heard thunder outside. It wasn't easy to see the sky, as the building where I was staying was wedged between three poured-concrete apartment monstrosities, but by craning my neck out the window I could tell that the clouds had gotten so dark they looked as though they'd been beaten bruised. It was about to rain a lot.

At that moment I had an LP from the Atlantic R&B box set on the turntable and for some reason I felt at last as though I had broken through my grim feeling of failure as I listened to Ray Charles belting away. Outside a skull-splitting thundercrack announced instantaneous hissing rain, and I understood precisely what I must do: I threw the twin living room windows all the way open, ran to the stereo, picked up its two speakers, and wedged one against each screen. Then I brought the needle back to the beginning of the song, dropped it again, and turned the volume up as far as it would go. With a staggering saxophone squeal, "The Right Time" began again at thunderous volume. I gently walked to the window, stood behind the quaking speakers, and looked out over the street.

Rain was whisking past in white waves, prodding and smacking with thousands of drops the size of fingerprints. Several people were rushing up and down the sidewalk on St Marc street, running, hiding, and covering themselves with newspapers, jackets, and bags, but one person had given up and was allowing herself to be soaked. She didn't look too dejected. I didn't feel, suddenly, all that dejected either. I was inside, but I'd just as happily have been outside at that moment. Getting drenched to Ray Charles at earth-shattering volume, I wagered, would feel fine-- it would feel like something. I was, then, entirely at ease. I didn't know if I'd given up, or if I could give up, but like the woman in the street below I suddenly knew the sense in letting it come pounding down on me and not trying to run. I wanted her to know it was fine-- I wanted her to hear how beautiful Ray Charles was, how everything didn't amount to that much after all, and that while the night time was, indeed, the right time to be with the one you loved, there was so much freedom in being stuck in the rain in the middle of a summer afternoon. Charles's tenor call was sweet and rich as a butterscotch candy, and his slowly pounded piano as insistent as the rain. It didn't make sense to keep anything that good quiet, to keep it indoors.

My plan was that, when the song ended, I'd swap the record for another from the collection and lay into Ray Charles doing "The Mess Around" next, but the rain lasted only as long as the first song, then blew itself out. Soon enough there was a bit of hot sun jabbing through a crack in the clouds. Later that summer, I encountered the following perfectly valid algebraic notation: God = Love. Love = Blind. Ray Charles = Blind. Therefore, Ray Charles = God.

Appreciation: "When The Innocent Die" by Anti-Cimex (1982)

2007-09-06T19:37:00.000-04:00

(download the song here while it lasts)

There are some fans of thrash and hardcore that positively worship at the altar of Sweden's Anti-Cimex. I'm not really one of them-- as far as hard, fast music goes, my only true allegiance is always and forever to the first two Bad Brains records. By and large I never had great interest in the nails-on-blackboard treble attack of Scandinavian thrash monsters like Anti-Cimex, Mob-47, or Terveet Kädet. At one point I found the speed of Swede/Finn thrash, coupled with its ultra-low production sound, totally overwhelming. I could hardly find the drums, but when I could make them out I couldn't keep up with them, particularly with the paper-shredder din of the cymbals and the rest of the instruments raging around them.

Times change, however, and for some reason the older I get the more sense this music makes to me. Lord knows why that should be so-- by all assumptions this should be the soundtrack to demented, spike-haired, angel-dusted youth-- but I enjoy it now in a way I never used to. Not all the time, but as a treat once in a while. As the esteemed Simon Harvey once said of S.O.A.'s No Policy 7", it's like double-chocolate cake: delectable, but you couldn't possibly eat it every day (Simon later reported a period of listening almost exclusively to d-beat thrash, during which he said he was afraid that he had cauterized his sense of taste and would be unable to listen to "actual music" ever again. These fears were ungrounded-- he's been lately obsessed with the Pipettes and Camera Obscura [the Scottish pop band, not the San Diego emo band]).

Thus I recently downloaded copies of Anti-Cimex's legendary and hard-to-find Raped Ass and Victims of a Bomb Raid 7" EPs and discovered myself with some surprise truly savouring their blistering speed and sore-throat barking. And I was reminded that deep inside I've always had great affection for Raped Ass's opening track, "When The Innocent Die." It is, of course, textbook Scandinavian d-beat of absurd speed and gruelling production, and if you're not listening to it carefully enough you may mistake it for pure white noise. However, what thrills me to no end about this track of the most stripped-down Scandi-thrash is that 50% of its two minutes are composed of a shrill, brilliant, and utterly simple guitar solo. I decided this afternoon to count how many bars of the song the solo actually comprised before stopping at 16 and realizing that it is, in fact, a minute long and comprises half the song's entirety.

Initially it struck me funny that as a band as defiantly and perhaps unlistenably "hardcore" (in several senses of the term) would brandish such an absurdly long solo, that most disdained product of rock stars. But after several listens I got it, and thus realized why the song had always stuck out in my memory: the first half of the song is shrill, murky, and pummeling, but the guitar solo, composed primarily of simply repeated single notes that don't move around the neck much, cuts through all the mangled noise that precedes it, providing a guiding point that leads you over the bristling wreck of the rest of the song. It's a light in fog, a howl in the night, a knife through the dough. In the blinding focus of the guitar line, the rest of the song seems to rage and rumble away in the background, pounding now the subconscious and seeming less like a blasting wind as heavy, fluid wave. It makes perfect sense to me now.

Late-Summer Picks

2007-09-03T00:11:00.000-04:00

It's been a busy time of late-- I'm a full time college teacher all of a sudden and have devoted most of my waking energy to coming to terms with that. So in lieu of a post of any significance, let me tell you what I've been enjoying over the last week or so:

Various - London is the Place For Me Trinidadian Calypso in London, 1950-1956 (Vols. 1 & 2). Phenomenal Calypso compilations with a fine variety of sounds and rhythms, really showcasing the genre's lyrical wit and depth alongside its totally hip-swinging best rhythms. Essential.

Sneaky Pinks - s/t EP. Muddy, snotty, catchy, and dumb as shit, there's more fun in the four and a half total minutes of this record than in the rest of everything I've listened to this summer. "Life Stupid, I Stupid" ably sums up the total achievement of recent months in a minute and ten seconds and the perfect couplet, "I want a blowjob / I want a hot dog."

Mary Weiss & Reigning Sound - Dangerous Game. Remember how amazing the Detroit Cobras were when their first record came out, how breathtaking it was to hear smoky girl-group vocals driven by grimy garage punk? Then remember how, no matter how good that first record was and remains, their later releases just didn't measure up, and you started to realize that they were basically just a really, really good cover band with a live set that was spotty at best? I can't have been alone in those feelings, because someone finally had the bright idea of pairing Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las (they of "Leader of the Pack" fame) with Reigning Sound, latest project by Greg Cartwright (he of the Oblivians, the second best garage punk band of the 1990s) and having them perform originals, thereby instantly and thunderously rendering the Detroit Cobras obsolete.

"Oh! Sombra!" by Electrelane. I'm a perennial Electrelane listener and play at least one of their records on a weekly basis. They're easily one of the best bands in the world right now and their records are brilliant. "Oh! Sombra!", off of their second LP (and redone on their B-Sides/Rarities disc) however, is something above and beyond everything else they've done. Absolutely spine-tingling and transcendent, it's a human cry of awe, sadness, and vulnerability. Seriously. Also: entirely in Spanish.

Demon's Claws - Satan's Little Pet Pig. I saw this band at what might have been its first show several years ago and was put off by what was, at the time, their uninspired Gun Club impersonation. I didn't see them again and didn't pay any attention to them until the wise young Shaun Anderson insisted I check out their new record, which it turns out is the best piece of country-blues based garage rock to come out of Montreal since the era of It Came From Canada... comps. "Hunting on 49" stands out as the best track, a sad and soulful wail-n-stomp number that's actually sincere. I'll be seeing this band live soon, I hope.

The Dream Syndicate - The Days of Wine and Roses. I avoided this band for years due to its unfair inclusion under the "Paisley Underground" moniker, but I'm glad I've finally found them. Mixing protopunk sounds with American Roots melodies, this record seems tailor-made for me. The 7+ minute title track album-closer sounds like "I Hear Her Call My Name" by the Velvet Underground folded into "Tombstone Blues" by Bob Dylan, and how could there be anything wrong with that?

That isn't all I've been listening to, but that's what's worth mentioning most just now. There'll be more later.

Hey, Montreal--

2007-08-21T19:20:00.000-04:00

This weekend two of my favourite bands going will be playing shows back to back!

This Saturday evening, August 25th, Allston MA's mighty situationist bluegrass ensemble Bread & Roses will be playing a house show in Point St Charles (Metro Charlevoix) at 1981 Wellington Street. This is the first time they've played in Montreal since October of 2004, when my band (The Improved Binoculars, defunct) played our first show opening for them only to be shortly thereafter blown off stage by their performance at the back of the room. Those who've been following this blog for a while will recall my beaming review of a B&R show in Massachusetts back in the spring. If that show was any indication, the band is in fit and fighting form and will play a hell of a show on Saturday. Two local hardcore bands (?... don't ask me. Joan grabbed the show out from under me and set up the bill herself, saving me a whole lot of trouble) will open. Show starts 7pm sharp and costs a paltry five bucks.

The very next night, LA's danceable old school hardcore sensations Mika Miko will be playing at the Casa Del Popolo with local favourites Thundrah (at the beginning of their Eastern Canada tour), supporting the interminable hippie noise of USAISAMONSTER (mercifully, I believe, going on last). I glowed with joy over their debut LP on Kill Rock Stars, and all reports suggest Sunday night will be a heartstoppingly good set. There's one other band opening as well, and the show starts at 9pm.

I'm thrilled at the prospect of both of these! Hope you all can come out too!

In a garbage bag with Latin written on it that says, "It's hard to give a shit these days."

2007-08-14T18:24:00.000-04:00

God willing, I find myself saying with certain frequency, I want to look as damned good as Lou Reed does when I'm his age:

(Photo from some stranger on the internet; thanks, stranger!)

Not necessarily because he looks good-- at least, in any sort of objective or quantifiable sense. I suppose there are people his age (65) who look a lot better, but when I get to 65 I want to look as much like Lou Reed looks right now as I can possibly manage. Because here's a guy who's been through more than enough, who has done what would seem immeasurable injury to himself through years of self-abuse subsequent to being abused by his family and electrocuted, like Carl Solomon, at Rockland, yet he looks... fine. He doesn't look great, but who wants to? Instead, he looks like a shrug, a smirk, and a snort, and it's glorious. He looks the way the best songs on his record New York (1988) sound-- wise, wry, and unconquerable.

I don't usually pay very much attention to anything he's done since 1973, but I grew up on Transformer and virtually everything the Velvet Underground ever recorded; I have much love and respect for that band and that particular solo record. I've never had much affection for Reed as a person-- until recently my feelings for him have been closer to contempt and dismissal. As I get older, though, I find I have a grudging respect for his utter unwillingness to endure what he feels to be bullshit, even if it does manifest itself in self-aggrandized arrogance. To paraphrase John Cale in a recent issue of Mojo, you can't really expect anyone to live the life that Reed has endured and turn out nice, even if that means you have to live with the fact that he's a jerk.

New York is, in a lot of ways, a jerk record, but in no way devoid of real, if scaly, emotion. It's arrogant and disdainful but largely of those things most deserving of disdain. The attitude of the record is akin to that of Hunter Thompson, who said of the Bush administration in one of his last writings (the first, however, to be relevant in some years), "I piss down the throats of these Nazis, and I'm too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them.” As many have said before, New York is a grown up record, marked by the cynicism and wrath of years of resentment. Thank god-- it provides dose of real feeling generally absent among the later output of rock-and-rollers of yore. As a document of aging, New York is phenomenal. Tracks like "Romeo Had Juliet" and "Dirty Blvd." are expressions of perspective from a personality sharpened, not daunted, by age.

I spend a lot of time thinking about getting older, and too often my feelings are grounded in dread. From time to time, I need to be reminded that there's more than one way to get old, and that it's entirely possible to be on your way to 70 and still look as cool as you sound. I will count myself lucky if I get to the age of 65 and wear my years so well without varnish or apology.

(Photo from Reed's website; don't sue, I'm broke!)

My all-time favourite record:

2007-08-11T13:43:00.000-04:00

It took me 11 months to find a copy of Television's Marquee Moon in 1998. Someone (Joel Taylor? Darren Peacock?) brought it over to my house and played it for me in the fall of 1997 and from that point on I was obsessed with finding it, but it had been out of print for years and required a lengthy search. I could, perhaps, have ordered it, but at that point mint copies were going for $50-$60 on collector websites, and besides, I wanted to seek it out until I had it in my hand. There's a thrill in that you can't find through mail-order.

Like a lot of bands for whom I searched obsessively at one point, I had always been aware of Television and had a couple of tracks that I liked on compilations. They were a band I knew I'd eventually get a record by and like, but I was never driven to seek them out, at least not until whoever it was stopped by my apartment one afternoon after shopping at (Montreal's late) Disquivel and dropped the platter on my turntable. In about twenty minutes they went instantly from a band that seemed promising to the greatest music I'd ever heard. Over the next year, I made weekly trips to every used-vinyl store in town looking for the record and turned up nothing, growing gradually ever more frustrated and conversely convincing myself that the more I worked to find it, the harder it would be for it to live up to my expectations (as certain other highly sought-after records had likewise failed). Finally after ten months of searching, the venerable Simon Harvey found a copy for me in Toronto and handed it off to me as I passed through town en route someplace else. Unfortunately, I squirreled it away so safely that I neglected to bring it with me on my departure and left it at my pal Zoe's house. I could have had her (or Simon in the first place) mail it to me, but that took away part of the quest element of it all. Two months after that, Darren alerted me that he'd seen a copy at Disquivel and I rushed over post-haste to snap it up.

I can't say anything critically about this record that hasn't already been said, and I can't give it more praise than it already has. Everyone who's serious about art rock, NY punk, guitar rock, or "alternative" music agrees it's a masterpiece and that's for good reason. It's hard to say anything worthwhile about something great that everyone likes, and truly the only statement about the album (beyond Nick Kent's famous NME review) that still bears repeating is Patti Smith's description of Tom Verlaine's guitar playing as "sounding like a thousand bluebirds screaming."

But I will tell you this: I'm not one of those vinyl people, really. I like getting records on vinyl when I can and at times it seems like they sound better than CDs, but I'm relatively easygoing about format (I still have 200+ cassettes) so long as I can hear the song I want to. Even so, Marquee Moon makes the most sense as a vinyl LP, and the day it makes the most sense is a day like today, a sunny but breezy Saturday afternoon in late summer upon which you might go out for breakfast or might stay in and read the Globe & Mail but either way you have a good strong cup of coffee, probably espresso, and when breakfast is done you make a second and you put this record on and lie down on the sofa. This sofa should be near the window and there should be enough air coming it that it's not too hot and you can smell the world outside, hear the various things that are happening (whether you live downtown like I used to when I got this album or outside of downtown or in the suburbs or the country, whatever incidental sound around you will be made perfect by the music), and taste your coffee with the freshness of late summer air. Then you turn the stereo up and you listen to the first side, then the second side, then the first side again, then the second once more, then you flip and continue until some sort of obligation forces you to finally (and regretfully) leave the house. You can read--something you feel good about, not just the paper or anything for work or school--or you can not. You can stare at the record with its famous Robert Mapplethorpe cover photo of the band, and wonder at great length about the intensity of their veins and whether any of them were close to healthy when the photograph was taken, and you can wonder whether the album is expressing something about the state of their health, or whether it's a statement against health. You can stare and wonder about all kinds of things; you can even start to drift off for a while, and then drift on again. But you must listen-- after nearly ten years of consistent enjoyment of Marquee Moon, this is the best means I have found of enjoying it absolutely. And the most amazing thing is that it's never gotten tired, never boring. Despite having played this record more than anything else I own, it still manages to thrill and surprise me, every time. A record this good demands a certain purity of enjoyment, so I strongly advise you to listen to it at least once in the manner described above. It won't ever disappoint you.

The under-appreciated: The Old Noise (2001) and Pyrokinesis (2003) by Jerk With A Bomb

2007-08-09T02:17:00.001-04:00

The related bands Black Mountain and the Pink Mountaintops have received a great deal of acclaim from critics and fans alike-- that's fine. I haven't been totally taken with either band, and though I'd never say I disliked what they're doing, each plays too much in the mould of 70s rock and 60s psych for my tastes. However, I have nothing but love for their shared predecessor, Jerk With A Bomb, who released their last album in 2003 before regrouping into their two better-known progeny.

When JWAB passed through Montreal in May of 2001, I had no idea what to expect from them beyond a glowing recommendation from a friend recently transplanted from out West. We crowded into the tiny Barfly along with seemingly every other Victoria/Vancouver expat in the city and I was surprised to discover the band that had come so highly recommended was only a two-piece consisting of one guy with a guitar and another who simultaneously played organ with his left hand and drums with his right hand and feet. I'd seen my share of two-piece bands and generally found them acceptable but lacking--either they played two instruments well but left the absence of a third apparent, or they played more than two instruments at once, got confused, and sacrificed proficiency for the gimmickry of multi-instrumentalism. I wasn't, therefore, expecting to be blown away, which made my astonishment when the band began to play that much more acute. As a two-piece, Jerk With A Bomb was technically proficient enough that they sounded convincingly like three musicians, but more than that, the songs were great. They worked hard through their set, played encores to the wildly applauding crowd, and demurred to insistent demands for more that they were out of songs. A voice from the back of the room shouted, "You can't leave. We'll kill you." Chuckling, they bowed to audience pressure and repeated some of their earlier songs before the crowd would finally let them go home.

Live, JWAB was dense and intense. Their songs fit together perfectly and they played them with awe-inspiring skill, so much so that the whole crowd seemed to be watching carefully with consistent amazement that the band kept pulling it off. There were danceable numbers and the room shook for them, and slow mournful numbers to which we swayed, and thus the audience seemed to be in profound unity with the band. It would have been hard, at that point, to imagine JWAB outside of the setting of a tiny grimy bar filled with adoring fans hanging from every note.

On record, however, JWAB makes different use of space-- their arrangements are looser, sparser, sadder, but while their live performance was humble, in JWAB's recorded work there's a delicious contrast between lurching misery and the nihilistic cockiness of its delivery. This friction certainly gives the records their distinctive character. The debut JWAB LP, Death To False Metal (1999?), has some of this charm and is a thoroughly enjoyable record that borders at moments on pop and stands up well to repeated playing, but the band really grows into itself on their second record, The Old Noise, and their final release, Pyrokinesis, both of which hum with a distinct sound which would not be mistaken for another band.

Jerk With A Bomb got compared to a variety of other artists (Nick Cave, Smog, Calexico, etc.), most of whom they didn't really sound like, but while they share sonic qualities with other dark and rootsy bands, JWAB's sound is particular enough to be almost always recognizable. While there's enough range among the songs to prevent them from being boring or repetitive, they all roll out at a pace between a dirge and a shuffle, sounding funereal at either speed. The instruments are simple guitar and drums and organ with little embellishment beyond some echo and tremolo, and they play along a very particular line between country/folk and rock and roll. The sound is warm and organic and feels very intimate-- The Old Noise sounds convincingly like the band is playing in the listener's living room.

Thus there's a certain frankness as singer Steve McBean gasps, groans, whispers, and wails his lamentations, all of which sound wholly sick with grief, a sadness echoed all throughout the arrangement. The Old Noise is a heavily recorded record, with drums that sound cavernous, an organ like an open wound, and guitar that holds it back like gauze. The chord progressions seal the gloom-- the songs don't just flirt with minor keys, they writhe in them. Even a more upbeat number like "No Amount of Pills" is almost dreamlike in the depth of its helplessness, despair, and surrender. But rather than being overwhelming, there's a delicate balance between the anguish and the danceable that makes The Old Noise infinitely listenable. Every song sounds great, no matter how sad, and between engaging intimacy and fascinating emotional hollowness it practically begs for close attention.

Pyrokinesis adds a perhaps unnecessary third member, whose presence is not so obvious but probably contributes to the incredible murk that colours the record. More carefully recorded, the last JWAB album is louder and clearer and consequently runs between being more distinct and sparse than its predecessor and far muddier when the instruments all blend in at once. A few critics have recognized a "stoner rock" influence in Pyrokinesis, but to me that seems unfair-- so much stoner rock predisposes a stoner listenership by providing repetitive and derivative riffage wound around tired buttrock cliche, but this record remains fresh and true and sad. Even where the stoner sound is most evident, with tracks like "On the Rails," JWAB maintains its originality, toying here and there with elements of the genre rather than simply taking the mantle on and playing by the rules. Though it has several of rave-up numbers, Pyrokinesis seems like a slower album, and is even darker than The Old Noise. The album's key track is the six-minute trudge "Among Thieves," a song almost otherworldly in its despair, heightened by the power of its smudging, suffocating organ and the play between sparsity and density in its sound. It's never quiet-- like the whole album, even its quiet moments are quietly crushing-- but as it moves from the gentle spaces between notes to the huge warm waves of sound at its chorus, the interplay is just delicious. With this song JWAB perfect everything they had been working towards. They're in absolute top form here,-- "Among Thieves" is a perfect expression of sadness, disillusionment, and surrender that's uniformly strong and moving both in its construction and in the way it's played. It's a fantastic song on what is already a fine album.

"Those Hard Wrecks," the second last track on Pyrokinesis, is refreshing as a simple rock song that sounds almost like The Band or the Stones without ever forgetting the inherent gloom of the rest of the record (and the record before). It works here as a palate cleanser and should have been followed by a rich dessert of a final track. However, the title track which ends the album is its only minor misstep-- a short and halfway silly song, it seems unfinished and leaves the record on an uneven note. However, given the strength of everything that comes before it, this seems almost calculated to inspire the listener to put it on from the beginning once more.

I was disappointed to hear that Jerk With A Bomb were nominally breaking up, and doubly disappointed to discover their two offshoots were pursuing sounds that didn't entirely interest me, but it makes sense-- after Pyrokinesis it would have been hard for the band to continue putting out records without retreading material they'd already perfected. As such, Jerk With A Bomb's three records, and particularly their last two, are a complete package. They did very well what they set out to do, and they then moved on to other things. For that, I can only salute them.

Diary entry: Aug 1-3, 2006: America (Part One)

2007-08-03T13:18:00.000-04:00

The massive heat of the past couple of days has been reminding me of exactly one year ago, when it was just as hot (if not hotter), and Ang and I, plus our friends Anne and Victoria, drove to Washington DC to see one of the last 3 Sleater-Kinney shows. I originally posted this account of the trip elsewhere, but it seems worth reposting if only in honour of the amazing heat (42c/106f humidex in Montreal yesterday afternoon). It's really long, so I'm posting it in two parts. Here:

----

So Tuesday morning, after too few hours of uneasy slumber, Angie and I wake to the alarm at 6am. We'd been stressed out the previous night trying to help get Greg ready to depart Montreal for indefinite travel and then dealing with a bunch of organizational stuff for the trip. We eat our breakfast and I have a cup of coffee and we take a taxi to the rental place with our huge bag of food, bag of pillows (thanks for the suggestion, Katie!), knapsacks, and sleeping bags. Anne arrives after us and we findout the car we were getting is not the inconspicuous sedan she'd booked, but an electric blue PT-Cruiser. Huh. Victo hasto run an errand for Anne, so she arrives last to find us sitting outside the rental spot in this absurd vehicle. Off we go-- first to drive around the city to run another errand, then slightly lost with the highways, and finally over the Champlain bridge.

Waiting in the huge lines for the border some woman in a minivan then hits our spotless PT-Cruiser at low speed trying to bud in line. She dents and scrapes the back but not too badly. As I'm getting her name and number and license plate info, she said, "I... I just couldn't believe that no one was in that centre lane." I said, "Guess they could tell there wasn't enough room, huh?" Border crossing is easy and then we're in America.

The driving isokay. I do it all myself because Anne hasbeen up all night the night before and she and Victo are sleeping comfortably in the back seats. Then Ang is also sleeping. There are a couple of moments when I am almost sleeping too, but rest stops and exciting US sodas and caustic snacks kept me alert. The farther south we get the hotter it becomes. I didn't realize it's this east-coast heatwave-- I just thought it was always like that down there. When we get out at the Kingston rest stop in NY, or the Walt Whitman rest stop (!) in New Jersey, the heat radiating off of the largely empty parking lot is like nothing else I've ever felt. Interesting set-up, I find myself thinking.

We arrive in DC just after 8pm. Mapquest gets us right to the club. By that point we've noticed that DC seemed kind of different than other places we've been-- the buildings aredifferent, for one, but there are also a lot of them boarded up, and the streets seem to go from looking really nice to really rough back to really nice in the same block or two. I've been warned by a couple of people that DC is a really heavy place and that I should watch my back, but what do you do with advice like that other than to feel a little more nervous than usual? We pull around the club and pass a bunch of enthusiastic fellows wearing fluorescent "SECURE PARKING" t-shirts trying to block the street and wave us into an old warehouse. "If they have to say 'secure' on their t-shirts," says Victo, "does that make you feel that secure?" The presence of "secure parking," however, convinces us that maybe we shouldn't park the shiny blue PT-cruiser on the street, so we see dudes in 9:30 Club t-shirts waving towards a parking lot (fenced in with barbed wire on top) and park there for $10. We ask the friendly lot guy ("You drove from CANADA? Welcome! Welcome!") about parking safely. He says, "In DC?" I say, "Yeah...?" He says, "Well, there isn't any place in DC where you can park safely on the street, so you'd probably want to park over night in a lot. If you can't, well, take your chances. There's a pretty good chance your car'll be left alone, but if not it might just be kids scratching it up or smashing the headlights or the windows." Huh.

We get inside and discover the 9:30 club has a kitchen with food, which we eat with the kind of gusto only possible when you've had nothing but peanut butter sandwiches and rest stop snacks for 14 hours. The Rogers Sisters go on and we watch-- they're better than when I saw them in Montreal, but I'm not that interested. Far more interesting is my looking around the crowd and realizing that as far as I can tell, there are no black people in the room. On our way in, we've seen almost entirely black people, and I recalled hearing that DC is black by a pretty large majority. Why, then, is the show crowd almost entirely white? What is it about this music that determines it wouldn't appeal to black people? I'd wondered that kind of thing before (like when I was at the Loud House with Teacher Mike and he saw a black dude in one of the bands and said, "Hey, cool, for once I'm not the only black guy in the room!") but it never seemed as predominant a consideration as in DC, where we've seen hardly any white people until we get to the venue, at which point we see only whites. I'm feeling distinctly uneasy about this, saying to Ang, "Do you get the feeling like we're a part of something much bigger than we understand, and that it's a bad thing? Don't you figure there's something really wrong with this?"

Gear-tech people are setting up SK's stuff and we've positioned ourselves early to the left, in front of Carrie's amps (Vox! Just like I play! Only not nearly as well!), and the techs are getting everything tuned and set. Then a guy in a 9:30 Club t-shirt who's previously been testing the mics comes on stage and says to the crowd, "How you all doing?" The crowd cheers. He says, "I suspect you're not going to be in such a good mood when I tell you what I have to say. The transformers for the club are completely overheated and overloaded and the fire marshal is here. By his order, the show tonight is cancelled. We need to evacuate the building immediately by the BACK, away from the transformers, because we need to shut down power to the whole block as soon as possible to avoid a possible explosion."

As Greg predicted when I told him this story, I kind of knew this was going to happen. You don't drive 12 hours into the worst heat you've ever experienced to have everything work out. That's not how things work. As we file outside without saying anything, I hear a fellow behind me complaining about how far he came for this. I say, "Man, I came from Montreal for this. 12 hours in a car." He says, "Montreal? That's nothing. I flew in from Calgary." I say, "Whoa, you win. Ouch."

We're dying of heat, we haven't found Angela, the person we were supposed to stay with, nor Mary Timony, who Anne needed to swap a snare stand with, so we get into the car, turn the air conditioning on, and sit a second in silence.

"That's it," said Victo. "Something really, really good had better happen. Things don't get this unlucky without something good happening. Something has to happen."

...continued in next post.

Diary entry: Aug 1-3, 2006: America (Part Two)

2007-08-03T12:47:00.000-04:00

We sit in the air-conditioned car a while as the parking lot empties and debate what we could do next. Victo wants to go to NYC the next night even the show's been sold out for months. She says we might be able to get tickets on the street for some insane markup. I'm not sure I can pay for that. She says she'll loan me the money but I'm still uncertain, more about whether it's worth the effort to forestall defeat after driving 12 hours for nothing. We get out of the car.

Though Victo has been talking over cel with Angela (guitarist of DC band Partyline; Anne and Victo opened for them a week or two ago) who we're supposed to stay with, we haven't actually met up with her yet. We file out to the area near the front of the club (though the street in front is full of firetrucks and fire marshal people directing people away) and take a seat on a curb, four of us in a row, chins in hands, looking as dejected as we feel. We see Ian MacKaye and Guy Piccioto walk by, also looking unimpressed with the situation. Then a cheery looking fellow rolls up on a bicycle.

"Hey guys," he says, "What's going on with the show? Is it over? What's with all the firetrucks?"

Victo looks up and says, "Jerry?" At this point I realize that I've seen this guy's band before-- he's in French Toast with James Canty and I recall their show at Casa in 2002 descending into an all-out dance party which they extended by improvising jams when they ran out of songs: a fine time. I find out around about 30 hours later that he was also the unofficial fifth member of Fugazi. Cool. French Toast had played earlier this winter but I skipped the show for dumb reasons-- however, Victo and Anne's band opened for them and put them up that evening. Jerry says, "Victoria?! What are you doing here?"

We're introduced. Victo tells our sad story and Jerry agrees that this is, indeed, a stone-cold bummer. He also explains that DC's built in a swamp, which guarantees that even in the evening, the crushing summer humidity never breaks ("And the winters suck too, but you should see this place in the spring and fall!" he assures us). We're noticing this. It's 11pm and it's still hotter than I've been all year. But more importantly, when Victo tells Jerry that we're considering NYC (which I, secretly, am not), he says, "Listen. Give me your cel phone numbers. I don't want to guarantee you anything at all, but I'd like to see if I can try to do something for you. I've known the band for years and years and they're great people, so I'd like to find out if there's any chance at all they could maybe put you on the guest list for the New York show. It's a shame that you'd come all this way and not even see them." We are incredibly grateful for this, but it doesn't sound like the kind of thing that'd work out. Jerry heads off and we're fully appreciative of him, but we're feeling pretty bummed.

Finally we meet Angela, who is, frankly, kind of bizarre, but in a very friendly and welcoming way. We cram her into the back seat with Anne and Victo and head back to her apartment, about five or six blocks away. It's an interesting area, and I can't get a grasp on it. There are a lot of houses and apartments that look nicely-maintained, but as I look more carefully I realize there are also a lot that are boarded up or totally overgrown and falling down. I'm always a little on edge when I'm in big US cities and I'm never sure if that's justified or not-- we talked this over in the car later and concluded that we're just not used to being places where guns may be a part of the equation, so we assume there are guns everywhere and freak out accordingly. The area looks okay, more or less, though-- there are some friendly looking folks out walking dogs and generally not seeming frightening, so I figure I'm overreacting.

We go into Angela's apartment building and I'm desperate for the relief of air conditioning. So when she opens her door and we discover her apartment's about 10 degrees hotter than outside, I'm perplexed to the point that my brain almost shuts down from the confusion. Doesn't everyone in an absurdly hot climate live in air conditioning? Even the rougher looking houses on the street all seemed to have air conditioners in the windows. Angela, it turns out, has an air conditioner after all-- it's just cheap and doesn't work, but in honour of helping it try, she's shut all the windows (or they may be sealed-- we're not sure). She doesn't have ANY OTHER FANS. All she's got is one air conditioner dribbling lukewarm air that is indeed colder than the air in her 4-room apartment, but then most things would be.

We decide to go to the Black Cat club to have something to do, but when we get there our mood does not improve, particularly since some jerk figures it's funny to put all of Dig Me Out on the jukebox. Angela's off talking to friends and the four of us are glumly staring at the wall, so we decide to head back. Walking back up some large street that looks like it'd be pretty safe during the daytime, we're unsure of how safe we actually are. A family of six or seven is making their way towards us pushing shopping carts and carrying bags full of belongings-- my thought is they're homeless, but Ang figures since it's the 1st, they're moving (at 1:30am). This further drives home the fact that our problems are indeed of the first-world variety: driving 13 hours to go to a concert that gets canceled seems a ridiculous concern compared to the apparent lots of some people we're seeing on the street.

There are a lot of dudes just kind of hanging around and staring what feels like aggressively and I'm not sure whether this should or shouldn't be unsettling. People seem to just hang around much more in the states than in Montreal-- it's rare to walk around a major intersection at home and see five or ten or fifteen dudes just leaning against buildings, utility posts, or mailboxes, watching people go by. It might not be threatening at all to get stared down by some of these guys, but I'm just not sure. We go to a 7-11 that's entirely out of bottled water and are walking towards Angela's place when we pass a homeless dude who's drunkenly yelling, "I'm half white! I'm not dangerous." This is half-directed at us, but the guy's kind of ranting, so Ang and Victo and Anne walk past him. As I pass him he says something to me, so I respond by asking him how he's doing. He says, "I'm homeless, I'm harmless, and you're the first person who's talked to me all day." I say, "I'm real sorry to hear that, man." He says, "I'm half white." I say, "Doesn't matter what colour you are, so long as you're a decent person." He extends his hand and we shake. "You're right. You're a nice guy. It's real nice of you to talk to me," he says. "My name's Pierre. I'm a person." He pulls out his state ID and shows me. "See," he says, "I'm just a guy. How come your friends all just walked by me?" I said, "I don't think they thought you were talking to them." He says, "That's very rude, just walk by someone like that. You're a good person, but they aren't." He's starting to be more aggressive. I say, "Hey, they're good people. We've had a real long day and things aren't going very well for us." Pierre is annoyed at this and getting more aggressive about why people might not respond to him. I try again to explain that we've had a rough day and he says, "Your day's rough? I'm homeless!" which we concede is, by all means, a great deal rougher than we've had it. Pierre starts demanding to know why Ang and Anne and Victo didn't talk to him and they say they're sorry, tired, etc. So he starts demanding that each of us give him fifty cents. I dig in my pocket and give him what little change than I have, as does everyone, just hoping we can walk away before he gets more aggressive than he's becoming. We don't have much money between us and he's not impressed with his. He starts making comments about "rating" the kindness of each person, all the while telling me, "Not you, you're a nice guy, but these people...", which makes none of us comfortable. The whole scene is bizarre. We really just want to get back to where we know where we are.

Pierre lets us go, muttering that we make him ashamed to be half-white, and we turn down the street where we're heading to discover that the smoke we've been smelling the last couple of minutes is a car on fire in the middle of the street at the end of the block. There's a group of unfriendly-looking toughs around it, tending to it somehow. Anne and Victo begin saying, "We'd better go check that our car's okay," to which I reply, "No way, man. Our car's three blocks away and around that corner. It's fine." They say, "Let's just go check." I say, "Those dudes down there don't look very welcoming and whatever the deal with the car is, whether they're starting it or putting it out, they've got it under control. They don't need our help." Ang agrees with me, and Victo and Anne decide maybe we're right, so we let ourselves back into Angela's strange apartment, the sparse decor of which has been chosen out of the absolute ugliest of Salvation Army cast-offs. There are only two chairs in the apartment and it's the least welcoming home I've ever seen. Yet it's a place to stay, generously offered by someone who's nearly a stranger, and I'm sure glad we're not sleeping in the car.

Inside, it's no cooler than it was. We're spreading sleeping bags out on small available area of the floor to give us something to lie on and lie down as Angela arrives home. She's sleeping in her bedroom with the window sealed, no fan, nothing. I can't believe it. It's very giving of her not to stick us in there, but it's not that much cooler where we are. Somehow I manage to fall asleep-- having been awake since 6am on three hours sleep helps, but within an hour I wake up, absolutely certain I'm about to throw up. There are streams of sweat all over me and I've been asleep-- I"ve never been this hot in my life. I get up and stand in front of the air conditioner, which allows me to get a full lungful of cooler air, but I still feel sick. Finally I stagger through Angela's room into the bathroom, where my body decides that maybe I don't need to puke after all. I stagger back into the room where we're sleeping, lie down, and am immediately on the edge of vomiting again. I consider my options: garbage pail in our room, the smell of which would make sleep impossible for all. Bathroom, waking Angela-- faux pas. Kitchen sink: might not be able to wash it down. These thoughts do not temper my nausea. I stand in front of the air conditioner again considering it and see that Ang's awake. I tell her I'm sick and she gives me a bottle of water that's remained hot from being in the car. It makes me feel a little better, pushes back the lump of bile-infused matter that's rising in my esophagus, but doesn't take the nausea away. I say, dramatically "This is about the worst night I've ever had." She says, "Me too." I don't say it, but all I want to do is leave, get in the car, drive to a cheap motel with air conditioning, and shovel the four of us into one room-- except I don't feel safe enough outside to walk to the car with all our knapsacks and sleeping bags and pillows. There's a police helicopter circling around and around above us, spotlight trained all over, and it doesn't make me feel any safer. It's the strangest feeling of being trapped, one that I realize at the time i was probably overstating, but nonetheless I don't't feel good choosing between fear and advanced discomfort. Finally I manage to fall asleep and miraculously sleep until after eight.

After Angela leaves in the morning (she is truly kind, after all, and she's been as helpful as she could), we unanimously decide to leave DC forever as soon as we can. Turns out we all had the motel idea; we all didn't say it both for fear of offending Angela, and fear of going outside to where hard-looking dudes were setting cars on fire. We end up arguing over whether or not we should immediately try to get money back for our tickets. I say we should wait until we're home, but Anne wants to work it out while we're there. Everybody snaps at one another, fuelled by hunger, exhaustion, crankiness, and anxiety. Finally we go out for breakfast and when we have food in us we start to feel a little better. We agree that the best thing is to go straight home to Montreal, cut our losses, not mess around with NYC, and chalk it up to an experience we can learn from.

[incidentally, three months later I notice that Partyline has filmed portions of a video in the room where we slept (the parts where they seem to be playing in a house). All of the musical equipment visible was in place when we stayed there, leaving us only a tiny portion of floor in front of it all. That's no complaint-- Angela not only gave us a place to sleep, but offered us the room with the air conditioner in it, which makes her damned kind in my book. But it did make the accommodations a little cramped.]

We finish our breakfasts and wait until noon in the sweet coffee shop that's playing some sort of classic soul radio station (I could stay there for a long ass time), hit up a drugstore so Ang can get some migraine medication we don't have at home and I can get some hard-to-find pomade, and roll over to the 9:30 club, where we do, in fact, get our ticket money back. Huh. We get in the car and away we go, on the road, heading home. We're feeling a lot better with full bellies and the knowledge we'll be home soon enough.

Just past our first rest stop (we're making pretty sweet time), my cel rings. I pick it up (I NEVER do this while i'm driving, and felt bad, but I wanted to make sure we got it). It's Jerry. He says, "Where are you guys? What's the plan?" I say, "Were somewhere in Maryland and we're heading back to Montreal." He says, "You don't feel like risking it in NYC?" I say, "Well, we didn't know what the odds were, and i have to work tomorrow afternoon, plus we have to have the car back by seven."

Jerry says, "Because I just got off the phone with Carrie, and it actually looks pretty good for New York." I said, "What? Really?" He says, "Yeah, she really wants to help you guys, but she's not sure if she can. Chances are pretty good, but it's a matter of whether she can add four extras to their guest list. They filled it up a long time ago so she needs to get in touch with club and find out whether this will mess with capacity, but she's going to try. Does that change your mind at all?" I say, "There's a good chance of that. Can I ask the car?" He says, "Sure, call me back." Two minutes later we call back and tell him we're going to New York. He says, "What about getting back tomorrow?" We say, "We'll drive all night, it's fine." We figure that if we get there at 8:00 and we're not on the list, it'll only take us until 4am to get home. He says he should know even within a couple of hours, so we could be home earlier than that if it doesn't work out. On we go.

I should mention I'm doing all the driving because Anne doesn't like to drive and I'm more comfortable in urban areas. Plus I've slept better than anyone else, miraculously. We arrive in NYC via the Holland Tunnel in rush hour-- we're right downtown, following instructions Ang's copied off of Mapquest, in the most intense traffid I've ever seen. Stuck at an intersection, we see three plainclothes security dudes holding plastic handcuffs chasing another guy out of some brand-flagship store through four lanes of traffic. They tag him in a gas station, but he somehow gets away, and they're all running, only in the heat they seem only capable of a slow jog. It's unreal: they look like they're play-chasing him or reliving a scene from memory in slow-motion. We turn the corner, make another couple of turns, jockeying for position with cabbies who make Montreal taxis look like paragons of etiquette, find the club, and finally locate a place to stop behind it. We still haven't heard from Jerry, so Victo calls him. We listen to the conversation-- it starts out kind of sad and uncertain, and she's asking if he thinks we should pay to park the car if we're not sure we'll be able to get in. Halfway through her mood lifts and suddenly she's cheery, and she ends the conversation by saying that he's doing the nicest thing anyone's done for her all year. Turns out halfway through the conversation, James, Jerry's bandmate, got a text message from Carrie saying, "You're on-- 4 peeps on list!" We don't know this yet, but everyone in the car is yelling at the phone, saying, "Thank you Jerry for whatever it is Victoria's so happy about!"

Following this we find an great parking spot, leave the car, find an auxiliary cable for Victo's ipod that allows her to connect it to the car stereo (which she's been coveting for the entire trip, and pleases her greatly), and head through Tompkins Square Park to Kate's Joint, this tremendous vegetarian diner that Philippe had told me about ages back, where I get a non-turkey club sandwich and Ang gets fried unchicken, mashed potatoes, and gravy. It's fantastic.

We walk to the venue, get to go to the head of a huge long line, and go directly to the front left of the stage in front of Carrie's amps. We could have done without the Rogers Sisters again, and the wait for SK is long, but when they come on stage it's all amazing. They open with "Start Together" and the whole floor is bouncing up and down with the crowd. We're in front of the PA, so we hear the band largely from being directly in front of the equipment, and I realize from our proximity to Carrie's amps that she's responsible for all of my favourite guitar lines in all my favourite songs. I'm in awe of her ability-- she takes risks with open strings and notes just on the edge of being in key that she pulls off masterfully. Her playing has the effortless perfect expression of Mike Watt's bass playing or Richard Lloyd when I saw him with Rocket From the Tombs. It's phenomenal. They're dying on stage with the heat and we are too-- Carrie says at one point that the whole room is like a sauna minus the flipflops and strange men in towels. It only gets hotter-- I'm wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt that I'm progressively unbuttoning and i notice toward the end that the three pieces of paper in the breast pocket have turned to pulp from my sweat. I'm dizzy and keep thinking that I have to be able to get us out of NYC and should take it easy, but the show is too damned good-- they play every single song I want to hear except for "The End of You," which I can see is actually listed on the set list for their 9-song encore, but they leave out, assumedly because it's just too fucking hot. Carrie looks like she's lost about ten pounds by the end, and it's not like she's got a lot to lose to begin with. There's an atmosphere of ecstasy in the crowd-- the spontaneous handclaps in the choruus of "Turn It On" are mindblowing and I feel high with the music and the insanity of the previous two days, thinking back to Victo saying that something good had to happen and thinking, "did it ever."

We stagger outside, and my legs and feet are cramped to the point of limping from standing for four hours. At a food market I get a bottle of "vitamin water" with caffeine, a can of Rock Star "energy drink," and a bottle of water. For some reason I don't drink the water, but gulp back the caffeine-and-flavour water and the horrible "energy drink," which is just dumb, a decision that I'll regret when I'm throwing up at dawn into a ditch behind an 18-wheeler at a Robert-Frost-picturesque rest stop in northern new york (poor diet, exhaustion, and carsick from moving to the back seat when Anne was driving). We follow mapquest directions given to us over the phone by Kate who used to live in Montreal, get a little lost, but make it out of the NYC, get significantly more lost but eventually also make it out of New Jersey. I cede the wheel to Anne sometime between four and five when I'm seeing trails off of every lit in front of me. At 8am, we arrive back in Montreal, slurring our words and staggering tired, exactly 48 hours after we left. Whoa.

Happy to be home to our cat and our lovely, welcoming house, Ang and I fall asleep around nine. The end.

Not a music post, but...

2007-07-25T16:34:00.000-04:00

I'll be making more music posts soon, but in the interim I should mention that my dear, old friend Alex, whose idea it was for me to keep a blog of music writing in the first place, will be appearing as a contestant on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire this Friday night, July 27th. I'm not sure if they tape these things well in advance or whether they play them the evening of their taping, but either way, he'll be in the studio on Friday and, being a fine gentleman and talented writer, I encourage you to wish him well at that time. Winning on a game show is, as he put it, the only effective way of saving for retirement these days. Good luck, Alex!

Appreciation: Nightmare Scenario LP by the New Bomb Turks (2000)

2007-07-06T19:37:00.001-04:00

(Photo by the venerable Shawn Scallen, from his website)

Between 1992 and 2000, Columbus Ohio’s the New Bomb Turks were the best punk rock band in the world. Fortifying the purest, most energetic rock and roll with a combination of smirking attitude and literate wit (the group members met in the English department of Ohio State University), they were more fun than hardcore, raged harder than any garage-band, and their wry wit made the pedantry of political punkers seem puerile.

The Turks’ 2000 release Nightmare Scenario is not their best record—that honour belongs easily to their first LP Destroy-Oh-Boy!!, famously described by MRR’s late Tim Yohanan as the perfect blend of 50s rock and roll, 60s garage, 70s punk, and 80s hardcore. Their second LP (Information Highway Revisited) and first singles collection (Pissin’ Out the Poison) are also very strong contenders for best-record status. But in many ways, Nightmare Scenario is their most interesting album.

The receipt I still have says I bought Nightmare Scenario on April 28th, 2000, the week it was released. I had followed the Turks religiously from the first time I saw them in spring of 1996 at Oliver’s Pub in Ottawa. It was my last year of high school and I’d bought Information Highway Revisited several months before during a visit to Montreal, where I knew I’d be moving at the end of school. I was restless to start the real life I’d been waiting my entire adolescence for and that record only further whet my appetite for growing up: it seemed to me at 18 like a very adult record, full of brash swagger, earnest confidence, and sidelong cleverness that sounded like what I wanted out of being older.

Shortly thereafter my pal Luke, who sat next to me in history class (and now fronts the mighty and very much Turks-influenced garage combo the Million Dollar Marxists), taped me Destroy-Oh-Boy!!, and that album’s wit and delivery instantly marked my attitude toward both rock and roll and growing up. On the day at the end of the summer that I moved into my first apartment and prepared to start university and adulthood, I celebrated by unwrapping a copy of the Turks’ latest LP Scared Straight, a record which anticipated many of the mixed feelings I’d soon encounter about getting older, being alone, and facing down the passage of time. Around then I began to look at the Turks as somehow channelling messages from my future. The more I listened to Scared Straight, the more I wondered how lyricist Eric Davidson could have guessed so much of what was on my mind. When At Rope’s End came out in 1998, I bought it on the day it was released (as I had its processor), arriving at the record store before they could even unpack the records from the box in which they’d been shipped. It, too, admirably caught the spirit of my day-to-day being, the uneasy comfort and experimentation of getting through school and coming into one’s self. I couldn’t wait for the band to tour, and once they’d been through on tour I couldn’t wait for their next record to drop—they were my band, and every record or frantic, fiery live show seemed to me to explain so many things or, at least, remind me that I wasn’t alone in the face of those things that couldn’t be explained.

At the beginning of the summer of 2000, I finished school and moved temporarily into an empty room in a friend’s downtown apartment left vacant for the season. It wasn’t my place and no part of it felt like home: experience has since taught me that salmon-pink décor rarely foreshadows the coming of the best of times. On the day of my last class of university, I savoured my achievement for a scant four hours before I had to show up to my job as a dishwasher/busboy at a busy dessert café. The dreams I had of instant achievement and a clear path to the future—to which I’d stupidly held on so long—seemed amputated and were remembered only as phantom pains. Very soon I would be without an apartment in a record year for housing shortage, stymied in my desperate search for a better job, and beginning the spiral of realizing my future offered nothing me in particular.

But first, I got the new Turks record—featuring ex-Gaunt drummer Sam Brown replacing Bill Randt who apparently left to get his MA and become a teacher. The album cover foretold the mood of the record—a blurry, largely dark image in black, orange, and purple of the band silhouetted by what looks like a massive column of flame on a night street. The design seemed sombre and intense, but had nothing on the music itself. Beginning with angry cymbals and insistent 16th-note bassdrum kicks that lead into the revving of Jim Weber’s jet-engine guitar, the record floors it from the first track with the breakneck-velocity rock and roll of “Point A to Point Blank.” The sheer power of the opening of this record brings to mind, more recently, the exhilirating thrust of "Colour Removal," the opening of Fucked Up's Epics In Minutes LP-- a power unsurprising in a band as as heavy Fucked Up, but startling in a band like the Turks, whom most in 2000 were expecting would follow the lucrative hip-swinging script of garage rock. Recorded almost entirely in the red (its sonic details blurred in a wash of noise that mirrors the bleak high-contrast image on the cover) and significantly louder than any previous Turks release, the album sounds destructive, and by no means in production alone. “Point A to Point Blank” is a torrent of contempt for garage-rock culture (then heading towards its MC5-worshipping apex, though still a couple of years ahead of trucker-hats), writing off that core group among the band’s fans as “playing dress-up white trash” with “all the groove and move of a full-up parking lot.”

What’s striking about that opening track, however, is that it doesn’t strut or boast in its ridicule of garage-rock culture—instead, it lunges straight into existential scorn, damning songs about “hearts done wrong” as meaningless in the face of spiralling panic and reminding the listener that “Cute Satan tattoos only hold up for so long” when “The only thing that lasts for me / dies every day.” Gone, suddenly, is the wink-nudge cynicism of previous records, or the good-time party rock of the band’s earliest releases. The speed and desperation of Nightmare Scenario sound reckless, drunk, and terrified, its music the sound of someone trying frantically to outrun the inevitable. The ominous choice of “better dread than dead” in the opening track’s chorus sums up the nausea underlining the entire record.

That’s not to say that there aren’t slower tracks, or that every song on the record is serious—they aren’t all, but even among those not sick with dread there’s an attitude of defeated pessimism very different from the cynical joshing I’d come to expect from previous Turks records. “Spanish Fly By Night,” the album’s silliest throw-away track, still sounds unsettled and ill-at-ease. Most garage-rock bands brag of being “born to lose” as though every one of them is shouldering some share of Johnny Thunders’ spiritual burden, but here even that stock pose is enriched with the reality of being horrified at the purposelessness of life. The entire world-view of the album is embodied in its title: this is all about the nightmare scenario of there being no meaning or pleasure in being alive.

The most memorable songs are the ones that confront the awful dread head-on, like “The Roof” which offers that “what comes natural to us” is “sucking up car exhaust.” Sure, the song suggests, you can “[kill] time by climbing up the roof” when you’re feeling bad, you can throw bottles if you like, but don’t ever forget that “you can look north, south, east, or west and never see anything.” Again, the thought of suicide appears: “We stand there daring to jump off, but stand still anyway” in the “late summer wind.”

Bunched together at the end of the record, the last five tracks mount to an apex of hopelessness. From “The Roof” on, the album forgets any subject it brought up after the first track and returns again to playing bleak music about feeling useless and devoid of meaning. “Your Beaten Heart” spits bile at a second-person “you” that given the rest of the lyrics on the record can only be self-directed—noting empty eyes, and lamenting the act of “gasping for breath fighting old despair” before finally demanding, “Do you even know your name anymore?” In “Turning Tricks,” Davidson admits that he can easily be both whore and pimp, but will in either case just “piss the money away.” Yet, “There’s no apology in this tramp’s pants,” even as he compares himself to both Judas and Mary Magdalene.

It’s the last two songs, “Wine and Depression” and “Quarter to Four,” though, that nail the lid down on the coffin the rest of the record has been preparing for hope, and lower it into the ground. “Wine and Depression” shakes with maracas and a head-swinging beat but celebrates “self-inflicted pain” as it admits that whatever fun a drunken stupor might offer will pass soon enough, leaving you alone to face the insurmountable foe of empty sadness that seems only to make you more aware of how little you matter. As “Quarter to Four” closes the record, it does so at the same surging velocity as the album’s highest points, elegizing “another wasted night” in an anthemic chorus that weeps, “I want to say something, I’ve got nothing to say. Close my eyes, don’t want to see the sun coming up on my history.” Summing up the entire thrust of the album so far, Davidson shrugs, “Resignation is bliss,” before confessing, “I never brake when I hit the skids on a wasted night.” The futility of any attempt to dull the pain is trumped by the impossibility—for whatever reason—of suicide, though. “We can close our eyes and let our hands pretend that we can kill this life,” says Davidson, “But for now let’s curl into this wasted night.”

Only at the last line of the record did I get, on first listen, a sense of what the reason behind it all was: in the most oblique reference, Davidson says, “Living by night in a lonely place, my father was Nicholas Ray.” Ray was the director Rebel Without A Cause among other classics of lost adolescence (notably here, They Live By Night and In A Lonely Place), but in trying to decipher the meaning of that I noticed the line at the bottom of the liner notes dedicating the record to Joseph A. Davidson, with a date of death in late summer of 1999, followed by, “Thanks Dad. –E.D.”

The dread foretold in the record caught up with me soon after and carried through as I found a new apartment, a better job, and came to realize that my problems weren’t just where I lived or worked but far deeper and more difficult to rectify. True to its promise, as much as I listened to Nightmare Scenario over those months, it did nothing to make me feel better. If anything, it reminded me that however bad I was feeling, I could only feel worse, and eventually would. At the centre of what years later I would look back on as “the crisis,” I saw the Turks play at the Jailhouse Rock café, which was my favourite venue to see them in. The show was typically incendiary and fun, with Davidson goading the audience, mocking, hugging, kissing, and sweating on whomever he picked out between charging manic back and forth in front of the band, off and on the stage. He looked like he was having a great time and I was glad, despite the fact that outside of that night’s show I wasn’t having much of a good time myself. After they finished their set, I stopped Davidson as I always did after shows to say thanks and remind them to come back to play my town again soon.

I said my usual bit as I shook his hand, but at the end of it, added, “I just want you to know how sorry I am to hear about your father.” Davidson, who was sweaty and exhausted and had previously looked distracted, looked startled, then took my hand with both of his and looked into my eyes with an expression of seriousness.

“Thank you for saying that,” he said. “It was really hard and it still is, every day.”

Never sure how handle the subject of death, I edged around asking how his father had
gone.

“Multiple sclerosis,” he said sadly, still shaking my hand and staring intently at me. “It had been downhill for years and years and it just got harder and harder. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

Maybe that explains the record’s plunge into the darkest of subject matter, or maybe it’s just one of a number of factors. What’s strangest about Nightmare Scenario, though, is that beyond all of its thematic darkness and claustrophobic noise, it’s a great rock and roll record that’s fiercely played and tight as hell. It demands to be played as loud as you can manage it and it’s easy to dance to, unless your goal is dancing to forget. The Turks released one final LP followed by a third singles collection following this one, but neither was up to their previously high standards. How could they have been? At the twilight of their career, Nightmare Scenario set a high-water mark for existential-crises-expressed-in-garage rock not reached again until 2005 with Max Danger’s tracks on the Deadly Snakes beautiful swan-song LP Porcella and finished the arc from the boastful conceit of youth to the hesitation and dread of beginning to grow up.

"All I Could Do Was Cry" by Tina and Ike Turner & the Ikettes, 1964?

2007-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

[The song is available for download here for the time being. Get it while it lasts.]

Somewhere in the fall of 2005, my friend Nic blew back into town from a summer spent treeplanting, where he'd fallen in love and, quite recently, had his heart broken. He showed up at my house with an expression of despondency and surrender.

"I have something you should listen to," I said. I put on "All I Could Do Was Cry," by Tina and Ike Turner & the Ikettes. He was silent for all of the song's five minutes; when it ended he said, "That didn't help! It made me feel ten times worse! It was like being raked over coals! ...can I have a copy of that?"

Nic's reaction to the song can't be uncommon-- the most intense soul number I've ever heard, gut wrenching where others would have made it theatrical, it's a little like having a young, muscular Tina Turner punch you over and over in the stomach, in the most desirable way possible. Turner renders physical the emotional agony she's describing, making it grueling and raw. It's real and it hurts.

With only the tiny flourish of two warmup piano chords as introduction, the song begins instantly with a lyrical suckerpunch:

I heard church bells ringing,
And I heard the choir singing.
You know I, I saw my love walk down the aisle...

...and on her finger, he placed a ring.

And it isn't sung, exactly: from the growling, breaking first note, Turner, at the beginning of her career, delivers the lines as a frantic howl of misery. What could have been a standard soul lament of watching one's true love marrying someone else--as the song was no doubt intended when Berry Gordy and Billy Davis wrote it for Joe Tex--becomes in Turner's retelling an emotionally explicit tour of despair that stares down the listener until he recoils in fear.

Instrumentally, the song is backed by a tense, sharp snare, its brittle treble counterbalanced by the electric bass that carries the majority of the song's melody around which Turner writhes, tortured, in and slightly out of tune. Elsewhere there's a piano, a little farther off, and even more distant are some horns and the lovely swell of the Ikettes singing backing fills. From time to time the instruments and singers take over in volume, rising madly to crescendo only for short, intense bursts that springboard Turner's soaring voice. The whole of the song is perfect-- the instruments are martial in their practice and execution and their timing and arrangement is almost otherworldly. Throughout Turner occasionally allows herself to drift into desperately soulful melody, but she's just as willing to scream in scorched agony. That voice--at its extremes as stinging and raw as a picked scab--is the beginning and end of the song.

Turner recounts attending the wedding of her lost love and glowering at the bride "standing there with my man," before finally concluding in breaking anguish, "All I could do was cry, because I was losing the only man I had ever loved." Swinging between resolve, gloomy capitulation, and screaming rage, she recalls with disbelief the humiliation at the end of the wedding, at which time the groom approached and benevolently informed her, "Tina darling, even though we are apart, I always reserve a certain little spot in the corner of my heart..." The feelings here are not put-on blues or affected desperation. When Turner spits, "In the corner of his heart? I want to know, what did he think was in the corner of my heart?" her bitter wrath is honestly brutal.

There is certainly something about this song that feels like being beaten, in all senses of the word-- when you get past the feeling of having been punched you're left nonetheless with a sensation of sympathetic defeat. You feel as bad as Turner does and there's nothing you can do about it. "All I Could Do Was Cry" captures, like few songs before or since, the utter frenzy of real heartache, the toxic speedball of pain and rage that tangle one another and can't help but turn inward. Each play of the song subjects the listener to the feeling of trying to help a friend through the earliest, craziest stages of a broken heart, the point at which there's nothing you can say and all you can hope to do is keep your friend from physically harming herself or the person that hurt her.

The whole point of the best soul music is that it feels genuine, organic, and true, and while no one would dispute that of such matchless figures as Otis, Ray, Aretha, and Pickett, those performers all maintain a particular professional reserve. They may sound sad, regretful, lost, lonely, pensive, and humble, but rarely do they sound like they're going to require sedation. Tina Turner, here, does. This is as deep as deep soul gets. Immediate and unhinged, she makes the song into something more than soul, more certainly than pop-- in her voice it's a fierce-eyed declaration delivered with a clenched fist, and she's going to make you feel the same pain.

Bread & Roses (& others) @ Stone Soup Collective, Worcester MA, April 28 2007

2007-05-07T01:23:00.000-04:00

(B&R @ the Electric Tractor, Montreal 2004- from their website)

My history with Boston's Bread & Roses is long-- frontguy Morgan Coe is an old friend and when his previous band The High-Steppin' Nickel Kids dissolved in 2003 he began sending me demos of Bread & Roses, initially that band's offshoot. I'd liked the Nickel Kids a lot because they wrote truly catchy songs about the moral abyss of capitalist society. They did also have occasional ska parts, but it was the 90s and that was forgivable given the context. When I received Bread & Roses' earliest demo, I was happy it wasn't a far cry from the Nickel Kids-- they still played loud punk songs about the same issues, though a little slower and more carefully put together. The second CD-R Morgan sent me, however, was startling-- the makeup of the band had changed entirely and now consisted only of Morgan on acoustic guitar and his Nickel Kids compatriot Andrew playing banjo. Both were playing unamplified. A further demo confirmed the change-- Bread & Roses was restructured as something of a situationist bluegrass ensemble. By the time I booked the band to play Montreal's Electric Tractor in October of 2004, a semi-official full-length CD-R showed Bread & Roses growing, uneasily but determined, into a band with a distinct sound, strong themes (the First World War and resistance to it, workers' history, and whaling-as-metaphor) to which they would continue returning, and a wobbly but cohesive sound built on traditional country music.

When they played Montreal in 2004, they were the last band of five on the bill, and they surprised the audience by quietly setting up in the back corner of the large room while the Doers played the final songs of their set in the opposite front corner. When the applause finished and the crowd turned toward the door to the loft's front room, Bread & Roses began to play without introduction, their unamplified strings and brushed drums startlingly soft by comparison to the amped din of the preceding four bands. When the song finished, Morgan introduced the band and announced, "This is as loud as we're going to get, so if you want to hear us you're going to have to come close." Puzzled, the audience obliged and surrounded the "stage" as the band struck up their second song-- ears adjusting to the quiet and the fact that we could hear all the words clearly. The songs, then, were less like a performance and more like a conversation. Within two songs more people were excitedly crowding in from the lobby and the lawn outside to investigate the rapt silence coming from the crowd in the formerly loud room and the human-scale music at the centre of it. By the end of the set many in attendance were singing along, their voices at equal volume to the band's.

Though frequently slotted into the category of "folk-punk" and certainly owing some debt to the raw emotion of early acoustic Against Me!, singles Bread & Roses plays music more justly categorized simply as "folk." Their influences are vast and drawn mostly from pre-rhinestone-era country & western and bluegrass. Though they play with keen energy and an unironic earnestness that could be described as "punk," their music is deliberately aimed at "folk"-- its concern is for the people in the immediate crowd around them, those close enough to hear the songs without the need of a PA, and the band's goal is to communicate ideas and emotions directly without mediation by the traditional elements of the music industry. They play in public spaces, parks, backyards, and houses rather than in bars, and sing only as loud as their voices will hold up, allowing the audience to overtake them and become the performance themselves if they wish. They sing about people, for people.

I wasn't, then, surprised to discover the venue of the benefit-show they were playing in Worcester MA was a collective house full of student activists, older community organizers, and really young kids running zooey with sugar. Some friends and I were in Boston for the weekend and had tracked down B&R guitarist Steve at his job behind the counter at Veggie Planet where he told us about the show, and we decided it was worth an hour's drive to see them again. As our party arrived, we found the "stage" set up in the living room with the "audience" area in the main hall, the whole place lit with garish banks of fluorescent tube-lighting. It was a strange setup, but one on which I suspected Bread & Roses could capitalize. Waiting for Bread & Roses to arrive, we endured several acts typical of every activist benefit show: topical folkies, a young hipster kid with a casio keyboard peeling paint with unlistenable covers of 80s songs, and a young woman with an acoustic guitar playing cabaret-folk. Morgan and the rest of the band arrived and we went out to the house porch to get caught up. Only when hip-hop duo RADIx, the night's penultimate act, took the "stage" did we return to the living room to investigate. A two-piece with a beatbox and a tightly-drilled collection of intricate rhymes, RADIx was among the best hip hop I'd ever seen live, and their set ended far earlier than the crowd wanted it to. But I was there to see Bread & Roses, so I was excited to watch them quickly unpack their equipment and tune their strings to one another. When Steve had told me that the show was an hour's drive from Boston, I asked him, "Are you as good as were when you played in Montreal? Because I don't want to drive an hour to waste my time." Steve smirked and said, "We're a hundred times better. You'll see."

(somewhere in MA, 2005-- photo from band website)

Thirty seconds into "Grass," their updated cover of Carl Sandburg's famous anti-war poem, I believed him. Playing hard, the band was drum-tight and fierce, all instruments in perfect line with one another. Unlike the large Electric Tractor hall, the comparative smallness of the house living room made the band surprisingly loud, and a crowd had spilled in from the other rooms and the porch by the end of the song. As the set unspooled I thought about how well-honed the band had become-- the harmonies were careful and the instrumentation exact. When I'd seen them last they seemed unconcerned about occasional dropped notes or beats, but three years had given Bread & Roses practice and presence. Their set was composed largely of songs I hadn't heard before, some new songs about the First World War and whaling, and covers of folk and country classics, and they were all great. But more than the some of its parts, the band's performance made the set remarkable.

Beneath the greenish fluorescents the room had an air of plainness which Bread & Roses used to great effect: all artifice seemed burned away by the light and the room, in the centre of which the band crooned, waltzed and raged. Individual instrument solos went unheard by those not nearby and occasionally the drums or fiddle overtook other players, while the voices of the crowd drowned out Morgan and the various other members of the band from time to time. At multiple points in the set I had goosebumps, but at no time as intensely as in their closing songs, fiery versions of the traditional "Babylon is Fallen (To Rise No More)" and the WWI rebel song "Hanging On The Old Barbed Wire." The quiet fury of those two tracks, both generations old, was breathtaking, and the small scale of the room seemed to seal the crowd's agreement that the emotions the band was passing out were equally shared by those listening. In an atmosphere as intimate of that living room it would have been hard for any listener to remain unmoved.

The applause at the end was deafening and left me wondering how and where such a set could be repeated to greatest effect-- surely such distilled rage and hope must have some purpose more than making a small group of people feel fired up. Yet an acquiescence to the music technology that the band so fervently rejects could easily distort the experience of hearing them live-- meaning that they're necessarily destined to play small rooms and yards to small groups of people forever, quietly. It's a funny thing to consider from a band whose spirit is deafening.

The Red Dons, The Clorox Girls, The Aversions-- Bar L'Escogriffe, April 22 2007

2007-04-23T12:28:00.000-04:00

There have been times that I've seen bands I've been truly excited about only to discover that onstage they lack the energy to inspire a reaction in the crowd. Some just lack energy in general, but others seem to have it without knowing how to impart it. However, there are also those bands who succeed in shaking me from the first chords and the initial drum rumble, those groups I find myself dancing to before the songs have even fully started. Those are, always, the best musical surprises.

(Photo by Nate from Toronto show)

Two years ago I saw Portland OR's The Observers and experienced that rare, instantaneous rush, so when I heard that they had split up and that frontman Doug Burns and bassist Hajji were passing through town as the Red Dons, I was eager to see them again. I have the Observers LP and it's a fine record, but over time I'd forgotten what to expect from its principal members live. It took them about ten seconds to remind me: even before the lyrics came in, I was swept up by the swift current of the rhythm. The response in my feet and hips was unconscious and instant. By the time Burns dropped his guitar, grabbed the microphone, and hopped off L'Esco's miniscule stage into the crowd a few seconds later I was already awash with elation. Ten or so songs (including three Observers numbers) after that, it was over far too soon.

I've always been a sucker for a particular sound-- frantic and melodic surf-influenced rock and roll in the tradition of late '70s West coast punk rock-- and it's in the Red Dons favour that they play pretty much that. But what's important about the Red Dons is that despite playing a style that's arguably of one time and one place, they make the music immediate. You don't stand in the crowd and watch them play-- you feel what they're playing, and Burns goads spectators into response with intense eye contact, constant motion, and a long microphone cord that allows him to wander far from the stage and engage people in the back (or, in some cases, wrap around and tie them up in groups). 30 years past punk rock's year zero, none of this behaviour is novel, and I've seen bands turn the same thing into uninspired schtick, yet coming from Doug Burns, against the able backing of his band-- particularly the fierce rhythm section-- it's electrifying. The Red Dons, like the Observers before them, actually encourage a feeling of breakdown between the audience and "the show," leaving everyone in the crowd feeling like a participant. That feeling is the aspiration of many second-rate punk bands, but the rarity of its achievement in spite of so many lame attempts makes the Red Dons genuinely special.

(photo from the Aversions' myspace page)

I'd had a similar feeling about Quebec City's The Aversions the first time I saw them three years back-- from the beginning of their set of high-test Ripoff Records-style rock and roll, there seemed the promise that things would get broken and people would get hurt. I was enthused. The band played their songs about as fast as they could manage and in the process lead singer managed to damage instruments, mike stands, and himself, occasionally bowling into the crowd and knocking people over as well, and between their confrontational posture and catchy, frenetic numbers, it was hard to remain unmoved. What was already a good, tight band was made that much more engaging by the feeling that I was risking a bloody nose by remaining pressed to the front. However that's a hard feeling for a band to maintain, and the second time I saw the Aversions I was already less excited than I'd been at their previous show. Even as they threatened the club's equipment (the soundguy coming up mid-set to confiscate mic stands and disconnect unused mics), the atmosphere was less of inspired hostility and more of a band on stage working through a controversial stage show.

The problem then became that the Aversions write solid songs and play them well, but every show I've seen them play since has found me comparing them to what I expected after that first time, even as they've become more and more accomplished, practiced, and inevitably rehearsed as well. Their set at l'Esco was tight and exciting and though at first I wasn't expecting to be exciting, I found myself dancing in spite of myself by the end, enjoying their new numbers and still relishing the old tracks they've been playing for the last three years. A part of me, however, felt disappointed nonetheless. Their show is a performance, like most other bands, and their songs are great, but I keep expecting more and I know I'll never get it. Yet I'd never ask that of most other bands-- so am I holding them to an unfair standard, or is it one against which they set themselves up to be measured?

(Photo by Nate from the Toronto Show)

Two thirds of the Clorox Girls are also in the Red Dons-- they are, essentially, the same band with a different drummer minus Doug Burns. Unlike the Red Dons, there's no particular sense of yearning or desperation about their songs. Instead, they play quick pop-drenched punk rock along the lines of the Ramones or the Urinals. Lyrical subject matter includes, inevitably, sitting alone in one's room thinking about a girl/girls. When I saw them two years ago they covered the Urinals (twice?) and the Germs, and that got them points in my book, but overall they don't inspire me more than well-played classic-style punk rock usually does. It's a bad sign when the most exciting thing about a group is that they cover songs by bands you like more than them. The Clorox Girls are full of energy--at l'Esco they remained so despite having just played a full set as the Red Dons-- and a lot of fun and I respect that, but their songs don't connect with me in a way that feels like it matters. I watched about five or six songs (in under 10 minutes, naturally), bobbed my head, felt alright, and went home early. Still, I'll go back to see them the next time they come through town.

The Feelies: Crazy Rhythms (Stiff, 1980) and Only Life (A&M, 1988)

2007-04-19T12:52:00.000-04:00

I was born in 1977, which means that my sense of what was happening culturally in the 1980s was filtered through TV, radio, a step-sister two years older, and a postmodernist/artist uncle who, brandishing a copy of Meat Is Murder, proclaimed to me in 1987 that "alternative music is mass culture's only hope." My memory of the 80s is thus full of false cues, yet there are little details that I remembered vividly only years later: skinny men in tight jeans with dress shirts a size too large tucked in, sleeves unbuttoned. Large glasses. Women with ample crepe skirts. Unfortunate bolo-tie choices. "College rock." All of that comes back when I listen to the first and third Feelies albums.

Whatever happened to "college rock"? The words, these days, bring to mind Dave Matthews and crowds of fraternity and sorority fans more interested in beer-bongs than reading. My untrustworthy memory maintains, though, that there was for a while a period in which "college rock" was a self-contained genre of jittery, shimmery music appealing to weirdos, nerds, and intellectuals. As undesirable as that fanbase may have been for some, the centre of that venn diagram seemed to me, when I was eleven or so years old, like a social standing to aspire to. The way the music sounded made its fans seem cooler by association: erudite, capable, and sharp, it was music that made you feel as though you were in on something.

The Feelies were the archetype of that certain sound in college rock to which many bands clearly aspired and but which few achieved--probably why they sounded so familiar when I discovered them in my mid-20s, 20 years after they stopped releasing records. All over their albums are crisp telecaster guitars that stretch from breezily clean to overdriven and oozing sound then back to clean again, drums that echo-- but just enough, like bootsteps in an abandoned garage--and half-muffled bass that gulps away behind it all. The vocals are the best part--inevitably delivered a wry baritone, they sound knowing and wise and odd. My favourite track on the Feelies' debut, Crazy Rhythms, sums it up nearly worldlessly, twisting sparse nonsense lyrics around the coolest echoing guitar I've ever heard and stuttering, syncopated drums that turn abruptly surf-skimming: the song, "Raised Eyebrows," suitably cocks an eyebrow at the listener and in doing so illustrates what's so appealing about the entire genre. The music twitters and jangles, the voice scoffs, and listening to it feels like having a good conversation with some far-out character you're cool enough to know. It's interesting, and it makes you feel interesting just for listening to it.

In 1993 I was volunteering at a university radio station when David Lowrey, formely of Camper Van Beethoven (my favourite early "alternative music"), came in to be interviewed prior to a show by his new band Cracker. Being a 16-year-old CVB worshipper, I watched the interview with my nose practically pressed to the studio glass. The interviewer asked him about what he thought of the bands playing "alternative" music, a term that was by then already beaten meaningless by publicists and music press. He replied, somewhat bitterly, that he didn't understand what made bands like the Lemonheads and Soul Asylum an alternative to anything. "What's weird about Even Dando?" he asked. "Nothing!" For a while that seemed only like sour grapes, an irrelevant complaint by a guy bitter his best band had broken up before they could get famous, but as I got older I came to realise that he was right: weird music is good. It expresses the emotions otherwise left out of the range of popular song, and it makes you feel alright about being whatever nut you actually are.

Which is maybe why these Feelies records still sound so great. The title track of 1980's Crazy Rhythms fidgets convulsively around a hepped-up beat, the guitars fresh and trembling with reverb, into a ball of unrestrained awkwardness kicking free to accidental grace. "Fa Ce La," the album's other best known track, has a similar tense velocity, but the band keeps the frantic pace for nearly the whole record, also managing straight-faced covers of both the Beatles and the Stones. Only Life, recorded at the other end of the 1980s, shows its pedigree-- the drums have a little too much echo, the guitar a bit more reverb than necessary, but the songwriting is just as strong. Though the tempo is slower in spots, the songs hang together perfectly. The unmistakeably 80s-production even brings a shivering edge to a couple of tracks, notably "The Undertow," a goosebump-inducing handful of percussion, jangle, and faint drone organized around the gentlest d-beat. Sparse arrangement and carefully placed lyrics give this record a breezy springtime feeling, which with its weak spots feels like fresh grass too muddy to step on yet or blinding-bright sunlight blasting through still-leaveless trees: it has its faults, but it's hard to argue it's not beautiful. Only Life is by all accounts a more direct pop record than Crazy Rhythms. It's not nearly as jerky and odd, definitely lacks something for that, and it bears both the positive and negative marks of maturity. There's a Velvet Underground cover that's as brash as their previous covers of the Beatles and the Stones but far more smoothly delivered. The band, by this point, has learned a few social graces, and sanded down the sharpest points of awkwardness in their sound, which is to their detriment. Yet they does pop well, and still do "college rock" better than any of their imitators.

Incidentally, the reason I didn't mention the Good Earth, the second Feelies album, is that I don't have it, and since I discovered the band a few years ago I've been putting off buying it so that I can stretch my enjoyment of the aforementioned other records as long as possible. When a great band leaves in their wake only a small number of records, it just isn't sensible to rush into listening to all of them at once and burning them all out at the same time. Far better to spread them out around years, events, and memories. So I'll get around to talking about The Good Earth when I eventually get the record.

Electrelane - No Shouts, No Calls LP (Too Pure, 2007)

2007-04-12T13:22:00.000-04:00

It wasn't a surprise to me that the new Electrelane album didn't sound precisely like any of the Brighton UK band's previous releases-- with each album they've made, Electrelane has managed to do something different, veering in and out of kraut-influenced instrumental drones, choral arrangements, driving postpunk, surf-rock, and folk instrospection. The breadth of the band's inspiration, under the capable direction of guitarist/farfisist/pianist and singer Verity Susman, is massive, but at no point does it seem tinged with bullshit or self-satisfaction. Even when they're putting old poems to music, occasionally in languages other than English, or playing odes to Sapphic modernism, Electrelane sound as humble as they are inventive.

They're a band that has sounded like a lot of things, but until now Electrelane have consistently retained a certain emotional distance from the listener, veiling feelings in oblique lyrics and inaccessible sounds. Thus, it's a surprise to discover that No Shouts, No Calls is an unqualifiedly vulnerable album. It's charming, it's tender, it's plaintive, and melancholic, and like a multi-layer cake all the pieces of it are held together by seams of sweet melody. Time may prove me wrong, but I think I can safely say that this album-- especially with a ship on its cover and a song ostensibly about sailing-- is the closest thing Electrelane will ever make to a Beach Boys record.

For all its pop, though, the album is sad one. The lyrics deal largely with mournful recollections of a failed relationship, clearly one which the speaker wishes had continued longer. No Shouts, No Calls is held together as much with longing as with melody-- from beginning to end, it reads like a series of letters pleading for a loved one's return. Yet the prevailing tone is of peaceful resignation, rather than the emotional frenzy of most break-up records. The speaker's attitude toward her lost love is respect and acceptance: the storm she speaks of in "At Sea" is internal, and the songs sound less like a communication between two people than one voice sorting through its feelings with itself. If these songs are letters, then they're not necessarily intended to be sent-- or maybe they are? The speaker seems no more sure than the listener of that.

In that indecision appears the vulnerability that's so striking for an Electrelane record. Where previous records seem only to express emotions that have been throroughly interrogated, songs like "To The East" and "Cut and Run" are surprisingly uncertain and raw. The austerity of 2005's Axes is totally absent here-- this record is warm in all the places its predecessor was grim and cold, and though at times it shimmers dreamily, it does so not with Axes' detachment, but instead with all too much attachment.

As usual, the instruments are played masterfully. Susman and guitarist Mia Clarke are confident enough to paint guitar lines only where needed, playing at full bore occasionally but just as willing to hold back and allow the rest of the song to assert itself. Bassist Roz Murray is subtle but solid: her lines stick out only sometimes, but a closer listen reveals how crucial they are to the whole of the melody in nearly every song. Key to the band's overall sound, drummer Emma Gaze has reined in some of the intensity of her style, limiting the heavy-hitting noise in favour of more minimalist beats that bring attention to the spaces between themselves as much as to the sound of drums and cymbals. While Gaze's fierce and insistent drumming has often been my favourite part of previous records, she proves here that she can make restraint work as well, especially to clear a path upon which other instruments may travel easily. The result is a record largely about hesitation played with absolute confidence: the band remains on top of their game.

Like Axes, No Shouts, No Calls makes sense mostly as a complete album and is intended to be listened to as such. Certain instrumental tracks ("Five" and "Between the Wolf and the Dog") don't make as much sense in the absence of their interaction with previous and following tracks. That doesn't make the record weak, but it does suggest an indivisibility that may be off-putting to some listeners. It hasn't been to me-- this has been my favourite release of the year so far.

Sicko: You Can Feel The Love In This Room (eMpTy Records, 1994)

2007-04-05T22:34:00.000-04:00

May 1995: I was about to finish grade 12-- there was less than a month to go, I had good enough grades that I wouldn't have to write final exams, and that left only one year before I'd never have to be in high school again. I was seventeen. I had access to a car, I had no curfew, I had a new girlfriend, and my parents had gone away for two weeks: soon I would be an adult, for real. It was warm enough that I could leave my windows open over night and wake up to the sound of birds and the smell of dew in the morning before school. When I drove to school, I did so with my arm out the open window and You Can Feel The Love In This Room on the tapedeck, because that's what this album sounds like, and that's what it's meant for.

By spring of 1995, the Offspring had been big for nearly a year, Green Day were huge, and NOFX was close behind, but pop punk hadn't quite yet lost all credibility. It's true that earlier that year I'd been roughed up in the hall at school by a couple of skate-jocks wearing NOFX t-shirts who called me a faggot because I had a mohawk and tattered clothes, but by and large pop punk still felt like it belonged to the socially inept, the geeks, and the earnest youth. All of which was me.

Enter Sicko, a band that masterfully illustrated the basic principle from which all pop punk extends: if melody and harmony are good things, then increasing the speed of the music that contains them should result in a higher density of melody and harmony packed into each minute, and amplifying the music to the point of distortion should improve the volume of melody and harmony the listener may absorb.

Proceeding from this principle, behold You Can Feel The Love In This Room, which my then-mohawked friend Neill called (albeit reverently) "the most candy-assed record I've ever heard." The melodies on this record-- sung in nerdy voices hoarse and breaking-- indeed will, as Neill went on to warn me, rot your teeth. The dumb songs really are dumb and worth skipping (songs about Star Trek, Carl Sagan, and wisdom teeth did not do it for me then and do not do it for me now), but the good songs consistently hit the ball out of the park. Album opener "Where I Live" is an adrenalized nod to hesitation and anxiety that to this day thrills me with its velocity and grit. It joins songs elsewhere on the record about failure, nostalgia, death to maintain an undercurrent of melancholy and dread by whose contrast the sunny high-test pop is given vivid depth and irony. Throughout the pace remains high, the guitars propulsive and distorted, and tone plaintive. On my vinyl LP the production is such that it sounds just a little distance away, as though there's the distance of a summer's breeze between me and the music. That's the way I like it.

The record ends with an earnest cover of the Indigo Girls' "Closer To Fine," which, though played several times faster and a hundred times louder than the original, is perfectly respectful. It's a good song to begin with, Sicko forces us to admit, but it sounds a lot better if you can shout along with it while keeping rhythm on a steering wheel with your bass-drum foot on the gas, speeding forward into the future.

Ponys / Black Lips / Sunday Sinners, Sala Rossa Montreal, March 26 2007

2007-04-05T20:48:00.000-04:00

Riddle me this: how is it that the Sunday Sinners could make one of the best albums to come out of the city of Montreal last year (Sweet Jam EP, Sonic's Chicken Shrimp)-- a soulful, tuneful, and urgent seven songs swinging between sweet jangle and delicious noise-- yet they still haven't figured out how to play live? They've always been an awkward band on a stage-- frontwoman Jenna, for her vast talent and vocal range, is stiff and nervous, as is Annie, Jenna's melodic counterpoint on Farfisa, and the rest of the band simply fumbles around them. When I saw the Sinners play their first show in winter of 2004, I figured they were just starting out and would soon relax-- they clearly had talent and potential by the bucket and would realize it before long. But they've been playing for three years and their live set has hardly improved. Missy, their original guitarist, is gone, and they've replaced her with a guy who doesn't seem to be able to tell when he's not playing in key. All members of the band are riddled with hesitation, as though each waiting for cues from the others that never come. The scene is puzzling-- their songs are stirring and masterful, and on record they sound phenomenal. Why can't they do it live?

I arrived early to the Ponys/Black Lips show to make sure I caught the Sunday Sinners, but three songs in I wished I'd taken the long route over. Three songs after that I was wishing the set would end as soon as possible, for everyone's dignity. When the merciful end came, I could hear the same question all through the audience: What the hell? We'd all heard the record, we all came expecting something on par with Irma Thomas fronting the Velvet Underground. Instead we held our ears surreptitiously, trying to keep the band from seeing, ashamed for them that we knew what they could do but weren't doing. It was a shame.

What a relief when Atlanta's Black Lips tumbled onstage. As they set up my pal Greg said, "If this band doesn't immediately rock my ass off, I'm out of here." They didn't look like much-- a wee longhair in Crue t-shirt and toque on guitar, a skinny guy with short hair in a tie-die shirt on bass, an Eric Bogosian lookalike in a white t-shirt on second guitar, and a kid on drums who wearing a sideways camo hat featuring a dollar-sign in rhinestones. Someone had told me they played in suits and ties in deference to their Nuggets-era sound; instead they looked like a group of kids you'd see in a bus stop near a high school smoking a joint the size of a parsnip. Greg nudged me and pointed at the guy in white. "Does the guitarist on the left have gold fronts?" he asked in disbelief. After careful surveillance we determined that the most normal looking guy in the group did, in fact, have a top row of gold teeth. Huh.

Without preamble they hit the first beat and the room instantly jolted to attention. I'd heard their record and I knew what to expect-- old-school garage rock reminiscent of the Seeds or the Count Five or the early Stones, looser and lower-fi, with an edge of darkness and menace to the lyrics. Most garage rock is repetive and predictable, but Let It Bloom is a solid record that weathers repeated listening well. However, onstage the band was a different beast entirely-- each member played differently with a different energy, all singing at various times. The longhaired guitarist and shorthaired hippie bassist moved around, the drummer swung his head and neck wildly about as he played, and the gold-fronted second guitarist stayed mostly fused in place with his eyes inebriatedly half-lidded, mouth half-open, and a long trail of drool hanging from his chin down his chest. This he disturbed occasionally by spastically waggling his head like a wet dog, always with the same look of total stupefaction in the visible parts of his eyes. His look was such that he surprised me every time he actually played a guitar line, but he did that frequently and well.

What sets the Black Lips apart from a lot of other lo-fi garage bands is that they know how to write songs with hooks, which do things you don't expect and pique your curiosity and hold your interest. Through a brief set nonetheless packed full of short songs, it was clear how much songwriting talent was buried beneath the fuzzy distortion. Where other garage bands play uninspired 12-bar blues, aping the Sonics mimicking Chuck Berry, the Black Lips actually write songs that sound new while sounding old. They're catchy, and while they look like they must consume bull-doses of liquor and dope, they have a tonne of energy that they pass ably over to the audience. However long they had played, their set would still have been over too soon-- I was hooked and would happily have listened all night.

Finally the Ponys came on. Having seen them on the Laced With Romance tour in the summer of 2004 I knew what to expect-- not a lot of movement onstage, but solid songs played loud and well. They too are a weird looking band (as the band that wrote "10 Fingers, 11 Toes" should be)-- fronted by a hulking fellow with terrible posture who lurches over his guitar like a praying mantis, their bassist looks like a shy bird and their androgenous drummer clearly takes his fashion tips from Richard Hell circa-1975. They sound weird too, at least weirder than the Black Lips, but not so weird that you can't follow them. After all, they're a rock band first, an arty band second, and as a rock band they're sturdy and catchy. They played only a couple of old songs off the first album, avoided my favourite song from their second ("Get Black"), and encored with "I Wanna Fuck You" off of their first single. The Tom Verlaine worship of the first record has developed somewhat into a fuller sound with smoother lines and fewer angles, but they still held my attention for the duration of their set despite playing so loud that they left my ears ringing in spite of my earplugs.

I'd gladly see either of the last two bands again. As for the Sunday Sinners, I can only wonder when they're going to live up to their very obvious potential?

Mika Miko - C.Y.S.L.A.B.F. LP (Kill Rock Stars, 2006)

2007-04-03T13:10:00.000-04:00

For the past six or seven years there has been wave after wave of bands labelled "dance punk" by reviewers or publicists, but for the vast majority of those groups the title was inappropriate. Bands like The Rapture, !!!, Q And Not U, and Bloc Party play music you could dance to, usually with live drums and guitar, but none play punk rock or anything approaching it. Virtually none of the "dance-punk" bands do or have, until the appearance of LA's Mika Miko.

I could waste a lot of space quibbling about what defines a band as punk rock, but it's hard to argue that certain elements (both sonic and behavioural) remain hallmarks of the genre. Mika Miko covers them all-- soundwise, they play spastic, energetic rock and roll drawing strongly from the glorious late-70s LA punk sound (capably carrying the mantle of such giants as The Germs, early Black Flag, The Urinals, Red Cross, and the Middle Class), with enough of the influence of danceable European postpunkers the Slits and Liliput that their record sounds like an instant punker dance party. Yet even their nods to disco-inflected No Wave are a little off-- Mika Miko owes more to the good-time punk-funk of the Big Boys than the forced cool of James Chance and Liquid Liquid. Either of the two sets of dorky shouted vocals could be paying tribute to the late Randy "Biscuit" Turner, but whether they are or not makes no difference: there's nearly as much "Fun Fun Fun" on this record as in the Big Boys catalogue. The result is thrilling-- this record surges forward with the unironic vigour of old hardcore while swinging enough to put a shake to even the tightest ass.

What really makes Mika Miko a punk band, however, is that they believe in doing it themselves, volunteering at LA's DIY art-and-music venue The Smell and championing small community venues and house-shows when they're on tour. And they're young, which is maybe what's been lacking from the various troupes of bored-eyed art-school haircut bands heretofore called "dance-punk." It's unfair, but young people tend to do punk rock better if only because they're often a lot less worried about how silly they'll look if they reveal that they care enthusiastically about anything, be it for political causes or just having fun. The five women in Mika Miko are barely out of high school and, according to their website, mostly still live with their parents.

Whatever drives the band drives them hard. Their sound is bracing and and vivacious, rollicking between out-and-out hardcore and dancy rock numbers that sound like they could inspire the kind of party at which people try to hang from the ceiling and fail, leaving in their swath wrecked halls and property damage. Alright!

"Crows" by Sexy, Por Vida LP (2006)

2007-04-02T22:13:00.000-04:00

Download track here, while it lasts.

The most appealing thing about sloppy music is that it imparts emotion directly, bypassing the impulse to do so sensibly (or in some cases listenably). Sloppy music is good precisely because it feels good when it sounds like it shouldn't work. The listener may not be able to make out the individual instruments, or the words, vocal melody, or even the rhythm, but is nonetheless thrilled by something other than the success of those individual elements. It feels good-- it quickens your step and makes your blood race, even as it constantly reminds you that it isn't making you any smarter.

Oakland's Sexy, however, do sound like smart guys (and smartasses, though often the two are inextricable), but they also sound like they've got personal problems and probably drinking problems as well. What you can hear of the lyrics are clever, plaintive, snotty, and occasionally suicidal. But you can't really hear the lyrics most of the time-- the entirety of Por Vida is several glorious slight steps above white noise. The band plays what might be diminutively described as East Bay pop punk-- certainly descendent of the punk-party-positivity of Operation Ivy, the melodic malaise of Jawbreaker, and the energetic earnestness of Crimpshrine ("Pink Elephants," another track on Por Vida, even includes a whistle solo that outdoes Crimpshrine's "Butterflies").

While the music is frenetic and loud and hurtles forward at a high tempo, what marks it is the fact that each individual part of it sounds as though it could have been made with cardboard boxes and broken glass. Were they not so well-played, the cymbals and drums could easily be the sound of smashed bottles and boots stomping on boxes. If you can imagine cardboard being torn musically, that's what the guitars sound like; the bass is like that too, except lower. The only non-recyclable part of the deluge is singer/guitarist Ashley's frenzied yelp occasionally rising above the din to cheerily explain things like, "The only way I can explain that you're gone is that I'm dead to the world."

It sounds like garbage, but it's not-- in spite of the terrific noise, every member of Sexy is very good at what they do. The music is horridly recorded, sure, and the instruments are no doubt cheap, but the band plays tightly and fervently. Guitarist Ashley is a more accomplished player than most punk rock guitarists, playing careful high-speed parts with strained grace. He's well aware of how the guitar sounds and seems to treat it less as an instrument and more as an item that makes a loud noise, but even that he does distinctly-- I'm particularly fond of the little guitar barks he emits following the brief drumroll-rests in the chorus to signify that the music will continue. There's natural and palpable talent under there if you pick the scab of the recording far enough away to hear it. As such, it's unfair to call this "sloppy"-- the only thing truly sloppy about this song (or the rest of the album) is the recording. Yet the poor recording is part of what's great about this track. Having all instruments and vocals striking so directly and consistently into the red gives the song the adrenalized dizziness of pure energy. It feels more than it sounds, and the feeling it communicates is exhiliration.

Lyrically it's a broken-heart song, but from the sample at the beginning of a smarmy voice bleating The Smiths, it's clearly one that deliberately eschews the self-absorbed preciousness of popular songs of love and loss in favour of the profanity and hysteria of real heartache. Ironically, the song's subject matter is exponentially self-indulgent than anything Morrissey could weep up. The snatches of lyrics that fight through the bedlam of the music are cartoonishly despondent (lines like "I'm stuck in this world where nobody loves me, nobody wants me, and nobody holds me" have kin in other tracks on the album -- "All I want is someone to love me. Til death. Til death" in "Xmas Song" or the point in "Valentine's Day" at which Ashley suggests, "I'll put my head in the oven"), but instead of wallowing in it the band is sweating the misery out. Beneath the noise, the song's melody is clean and pure and even joyful, kicked forward by the frantic tempo.

Revelling in unintelligibility, the song races along gathering mass and speed like a filthy snowball bounding down a ski hill full of mud and sticks and discarded mitt-warmers and hot-chocolate cups, headed for the cheerful unsuspecting lovers enjoying their apres-ski at the lodge. Sexy is angry about love and bent on destruction, whether for themselves, their instruments, the venues they're playing, or their listeners ears. It sounds like fun.

Live take of a new track from the forthcoming Ted Leo album: "Who Do You Love?"

2007-03-12T02:55:00.000-04:00

"I've Found a New Baby" by Lester Young Trio (with Nat King Cole on piano and Buddy Rich on drums), 1946

2007-02-16T22:34:00.000-05:00

Download track here (while it lasts).

Without a doubt my favourite piece of instrumental jazz, on par with Billie Holiday's later, rougher version of "Love Me or Leave Me" on Verve. Probably one of my favourite pieces of music, period. I have listened to this one track over and over since first discovering it twelve years ago and it has yet to tire me even slightly. There are so many angles from which I approach listening to it that it's hard to begin with one, but the sensible approach is the obvious one: a tenor saxophone sounds like a human voice, and Lester Young's saxophone sounds like the voice of someone whom you care about very deeply. It's by turns intimate, teasing, rousing, and reassuring, and as such much of this song is like a conversation with someone.

But it's not so much a conversation as it is like listening to someone's thoughts. Maybe your own, maybe someone else's, maybe an archetypal anyone's. Somehow, in barely over four minutes of instrumental music, this track manages to impress upon the listener the sense of the most important emotions and routines of human thought. Transcribing the process of trying to make up its mind, the track progresses through all different levels of reason and emotional reactions thereto. Wonder, care, uncertainty, self-doubt, hope, reticence, confidence, and joy are amply present at various times, as well as less emotional moments of pensiveness, suspicion, reason, and verification. All communicated, of course, through wordless music.

What's astonishing about this track is the monstrous ability of all three of the musicians playing it. Each of the three is unequivocally a master of his instrument, and here all three play freely and wildly together in a manner that--in spite of the brilliant spacing and room all over the track--allows each one of them to be doing something astonishing at all times. Pres, Cole, and Rich spend this track being infinitely interesting, which is why it works so well to communicate so much without really saying anything. If it's an exercise in virtuosity, it's one that displays pure joy in playing (and, in some sense, of living) rather than a practiced digital ability.

The fact that it's so poorly recorded, scratchy and trebly, plays well in its favour too-- the extent that the joy and genius is electrifying in spite of what is clearly not a 100% representation of what the music actually was succeeds in suggesting some mythological quality to the musicians, that in person this would have been somehow beyond human. But the recording is enough-- you can instantly absorb the exuberance of Rich's swift, layered drumming, and the magnificent endowment of Cole's ability to express with a piano what otherwise no one would be able to express at all. All of which is tied naturally together by Lester Young's by turns swaggering, nervous, plaintive, thoughtful, and vivacious stream-of-thought saxophone. But it's not even the sound of a voice anymore-- that saxophone sounds like the taste of butterscotch, or cool water passing over and over through a parched throat. It breathes, it swallows, it thinks, and it talks. This music sounds like being alive.

Record reviews, Summer 2005

2005-06-13T18:05:00.000-04:00

Epoxies - Stop the Future (Fat Wreck Chords)

Remember when you first heard “Kids in America” by Kim Wilde, and you listened to it over and over a hundred times a day? The Epoxies sure do—they sound at times like they’ve been listening to nothing but that one song for the last twenty years. On their sophomore album (and first release on Fat Wreck Chords), they continue cranking out infectious and infuriatingly danceable synth-drenched new wave that makes it feel even more like Reagan was still in the White House. They’re obviously struggling with the creative limits of such a deliberately retro sound, and it’s hard not to notice the songs all sound alike. But The Epoxies have such energy that it’s hard not to grin and turn it up, even though you know that after the inevitable week you’ll spend listening to little else, you’re probably never going to want to hear it again.

Finks - More Songs about Robots and Black Things (Permaculture Records)

Ever since carny culture fell victim to video games and good taste, theatrical weirdos haven’t had a lot of career choices. But thanks to the circus-punk sounds of bands like North Carolina’s Finks, and their sub-subcultural predecessors Old Time Relijun and Montreal’s own Dante’s Flaming Uterus and Me Mom & Morgentaler, would-be carnies at least have music to dance to. On their self-released debut, Finks scroll out ten shambling tracks of guitar, accordion, and drums, with scrambled free-associative lyrics about technology, poison, confusion, clowns, and, of course, robots. Trading off wailing male and female vocals in a manner at best reminiscent of LA’s immortal X (at worst grating and whiny), the Finks amp up the carny sound with the volume of punk rock, but their hearts clearly belong to the circus, as the sinister accordion of album-closer “Clown Song” makes clear.

Electrelane – Axes (Too Pure)

The easiest way to describe Brighton UK’s Electrelane would be to suggest Brian Eno split into four well-educated women playing in a garage band. But even that doesn't do justice to their ability to both rock hard and entrance the listener with austere and hypnotic melody. Axes, their third full-length, is a document of how much Electrelane can do in a single disc. The initial sounds are familiar—Verity Susman’s insistent piano and organ of previous records, Mia Clarke’s driving and feedback-sodden guitar, and the persistent throb of drummer Emma Gaze and bassist Ros Murray—but the magic is in their interweaving. Incorporating choral arrangement and occasional horn bursts among the stunning drones, warbling feedback, and raucous rock and roll, the album displays the band’s versatility as musicians exploring the limits of popular music. Prominent here is a pronounced willingness to play with sounds and melodies, some of which loop and slip here and there to haunt the course of the whole record. Around these, guarded and reluctant, frontwoman Susman sings cautiously, but never seems as vocally detached as her obvious influences in British post-punk groups like the Slits and Joy Division. The album’s masterpiece is the mesmerizing two-track combination of the instrumental “Those Pockets are People” leading into an grim cover of the French resistance song “The Partisan.” There, as the guitar washes in bleak waves over the unrelenting pound of drums and bass, Susman’s aghast delivery is most effective in lyrics explicitly handling death, cruelty, and desperation. However, it is the interplay between those songs and their follow-up, “I Keep Losing Heart,” an oddly plaintive number anchored in jaunty banjo and New Orleans-style horns, that truly presents Electrelane’s remarkable talent for composition and contrast. Easily one of the best discs of the year.

Essay: "Blank Generation, Indeed," PF Zine, 2004

2004-08-15T11:30:00.000-04:00

I wrote this on a request from my pal Nina Sudra for her zine PF, which was largely by and about people working in the music industry. Nina defined the term "industry" loosely-- since I wrote a zine that occasionally touched on music, she asked me to come up with something about music that was important to me. At the time I was between teaching jobs, answering phones at a thankless customer service gig, so I wrote this at my desk one afternoon, frequently switching between program windows to make it look like I was hard at work on something customer-service related.

-----

This is going to sound dorky, but the first time I heard “Love Comes in Spurts” by Richard Hell was when I was thirteen years old, because Christian Slater’s young pirate DJ plays it the in the starry-eyed 1990 teenage rebellion flick Pump Up The Volume, which I saw on its opening weekend, and which changed my life. Prior to that I’d never understood that there was such a thing as underground music, what it meant, who made it or played it or listened to it, or why. Having just turned thirteen and seeing before me the impending absurd agony of my six-year sentence to adolescence, it all became clear—the gleeful beauty of puerile, filthy, restless music that accepted that everything was fucked and there was not a damned thing any kid could do about it.

Punk rock existed to save kids like me, kids who could neither understand nor stand the role they were expected to play among their peers (theatrically contrast against the more ominous banality of adulthood). When, a year and a half later, I finally procured what I knew was an actual punk tape (In God We Trust, Inc. by the Dead Kennedys), I was at the end of my rope and had I not heard that music then, I can only darkly speculate what would have happened to me. Driven crazy by lingering shadows of the cold war, the protofascist social hierarchy of my upper middle-class high school, and that peculiar adolescent solipsism that convinces kids that their lives define all life and what they experience at the age of fourteen will be the feeling they will live in forever, I had to dig to find a way out. And dig I did. In that just-pre-internet age, the “underground” was actually hidden from view, and you needed some idea of where the cool places in town were if you wanted to have access to the people, the music, the ‘zines, the clothes, the community that seemed most assuredly to exist but into which one couldn’t simply buy.

If you were too nervous or young to walk up to kids with green hair and big boots, the only other option was local BBS network, a pre-internet system where local weirdos could commune pseudonymously and talk about their weirdo shit. There you could find out the names and locations of the crazy record stores that smelled of hash and incense and had records with frightening covers made by ominous people who were obviously insane. Those stores were run by terrifying old guys (almost always guys) with gravelly voices and faded denim wardrobes and just talking to them made you feel the paucity of your years. That was part of the trick: you needed to get over the fear of going in, of asking questions, of finding out what suited you, in order to know what it was you needed to find—more in yourself than in the store. That’s where I went, and that’s how I found out where to start, but there was no one to help me along. And, frankly, thank god for that.

Eventually, having borrowed some punk tapes from the tamer weirdos at my school, having been to the cool spots and screwed up my courage enough to meet up with other freaks from the local BBS, I ended up with some weird friends and a key to the underground community that was happening in my town. It was a scene where on some level you needed to be involved—you came to the shows, met the other weirdos, made friends, tried on identities for yourself in front of an audience of your peers, and ideally went on to help create and foster the community by starting your own bands, your own zines, or your own venue. Outside of the kids I meet on the BBSes, I met my first group of punks when I went alone to a show at an art gallery and lit the brick outer wall on fire with a can of lighter fluid as we stood in line waiting to get in. I was, at that point in my life, experimenting with pyromania, but everyone was testing themselves somehow. You tried out the possibilities for who you could be, but unlike at high school where you’d be beaten and ostracized for showing any sign of not being a wealthy, athletic, heterosexual specimen of the master race, you could try out being queer, being crazy, being criminal, being any of the things that your community had held you so tightly to keep you from becoming.

One day I remembered how much I’d loved that Richard Hell song and decided that I wanted to hear it again. Of course, I didn’t know it was by Richard Hell—all I knew was that it was called “Love Comes in Spurts” and that it had been in that Christian Slater movie. The latter information was useless, so all I could do was ask some the older punks if they knew the song. “Devo!” they said, sending me off to spend a couple of months digging through old Devo vinyl looking for the record with that song on it, to no avail. Because those records were, at the time, mostly unavailable on CD, the timeline for such a search was always a matter of weeks or months, predicated on waiting for someone to decide they didn’t want their old punk records anymore and sell them. Eventually I started asking questions of the haggard old guys that ran the record stores and a large bearded dude named Big Al said, “No, kid, not Devo! Who the fuck told you that? It’s Richard Hell and the Voidoids!”

“The metal band from Montreal?” I said.

“No, kid, not Voivod. Shit. The Void-OIDs. Record’s called Blank Generation.”

“Uh huh,” I said, promptly writing it down, “You got a copy of that?”

“Nah,” he said, “You don’t see it too often. It comes in from time to time. Gimme your number and I’ll call you if I see it.”

Scary as it was to give Big Al my number (He could call me! At home! Where I lived with my parents, who were civil servants!), I scribbled it down and handed it over. He wrote “BLANK GENERATION” in block letters over top of it and stuck in on a pile of stuff next to the phone. Then I began to wait, and to scour. I spent eight months searching for that record. Once a week I went to every one of the five or six cool record stores in town and checked their bins. Every time I visited relatives in another city, I asked my mom to drive me to the record stores, or I took the bus myself. When I returned home, I was back at the task. Once a week I asked Big Al, “is it in yet?” until he started greeting me at the door by growling, “We do not have a copy of Blank Generation. We have plenty of other records, though. Maybe you want to buy some?” At first he intimidated me, but over time I learned to make smartassed remarks back to him until I could provoke an impressed smirk. And I bought as many other records as I could afford as I waited for that Voidoids record to appear—Big Al himself gave me my first taste of Bad Brains, The Cramps, Hüsker Dü, Black Flag, the Germs, and more—discovering slowly the geography of a subterranean word held together by rock and roll.

To Big Al’s eye, I was, I think, the only fifteen year old obsessed with tracking down smacked out, nihilistic NYC art-punk recorded the same year he was born at a time when other kids the same age thought that Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden were the pinnacle of rock and roll. But there were others like me looking for stuff that was just as off the wall, discovering, say, the Butthole Surfers, or Seven Year Bitch, or DRI, or Alice Donut, or whatever music weirdo kids heard and said, “This was meant for me.”

I found the Richard Hell record eventually, and it was great, but it could never have been as good as the eight months I spend looking for it, seeking, asking, learning how to participate among the older weirdos, getting up the courage to start shaving my hair off and dying it eye-gouging colours, learning the attitude required to talk back and not be pushed around for being myself. It was one of the most important periods in my life and it took place largely because there was a community there to support it, where old guys like Big Al knew that kids like me were going to come and need direction, and if you had the backbone to ask questions, you’d be rewarded with answers that proved more valuable with each passing day. That seems to me now a relic of another time.

If I was fifteen years old right now and I wanted to find a song like that, I’d download it in fifteen minutes on my parents’ computer, and I’d read the history of the band online and, maybe, if I was lucky, find a message board where folks were talking about old songs. It’d be amusing for a few minutes, and then I’d move on to something else. I wouldn’t meet any weird kids and borrow tapes from them, nor go by myself to a “punk” show not really knowing what that entailed, nor would I have to screw up my courage and talk to some crazy old dude in a Melvins t-shirt running a shadowy record store. I could do it all without leaving my house, and I’d get the song, for sure, but really, it wouldn’t end up mattering to me at all.

Will Oldham interview, August 2003

2003-08-26T20:09:00.000-04:00

I did this interview with Will Oldham at the Babylon club in Ottawa the afternoon before his solo show that evening squeezed into a day off on his North American tour opening for Bjork. Oldham is legendarily reticent about interviews, but I was surprised to discover that after the first couple of questions, he sat back and began to talk with comparative ease (at least by contrast to his mood as we sat down, at which point he got up, said, "I'm going to need a beer to get through this," and went to the bar). It was broadcast on CKUT Montreal and I transcribed it for some reason, though now I can't remember what that was. I suppose it was ultimately so that you could read it. And now, here you may:

JB Staniforth: Are you happy doing what you’re doing with this big tour?

Will Oldham: Sometimes.

I got an idea from your tour diaries, but I want to know if you’re enjoying doing 10,000-person stadium dates.

I really don’t know how you can conceive of it—it’s really sort of not like playing music. It’s just like doing something. It was a little bit like playing music the last time, the second New York show, because I had a friend come up and play with me. But otherwise, it really is just like doing something, like… [long pause] …rock climbing, more than it is like playing music.

Is there any personal fulfilment in having tens of thousands of people clapping?

No.

Really?

There’s not a lot of personal fulfilment in five or six hundred people clapping. There’s more personal fulfilment, like, knowing that you’ve made it through the night playing music. I can appreciate when an audience is great, or is rambunctious, or when it changes, but I don’t appreciate it as the goal. I don’t appreciate it the same way.

What kind of effect does it have on your relationship with yourself to be standing and playing these songs that are—I mean, I recognize that your music isn’t personal, in the sense that you don’t write about yourself, but it’s still a personal creation.

Sure, even just being a performer in front of people.

Is it difficult to get in front of 10,00 people and do what is, to them or to you, not necessarily an intimate thing at all?

The main reason it isn’t difficult is because it’s a challenge on some level, and it’s doing something that’s unknown, and so if someone said, “Do you want to jump off of this cliff into that water,” I would say yes before I’d say no. It’s more like playing… [trails off]. I have no idea what anyone in the audience is thinking, beginning, middle, or end. Every once in a while, there will be this weird feeling, where you feel like you know what someone’s thinking in the audience. But as far as it being intimate at all, it changes. On one given night, the intimate part could be just the melody, the intimate part could be the clothing that you’re wearing. The intimate could have something to do with one part of a lyric, or a whole song, or a series of three songs that you put together. So, it remains intimate in a way, unless the distraction is so great that you don’t have an experience at all, except like in a traffic jam—which it can be, sometimes. But rarely, because there’s enough going on, and there’s enough to think about, that you don’t get distracted.

Is it a pain in the ass to have to be the opener?

Well, is it a pain in the ass to have to be the opener? I wouldn’t put myself in the position of opening for almost anybody ever, and I almost never have, because it doesn’t configure. The main reason for this is that I was invited by someone I respect a lot, someone whose show I wanted to see. So, for me, my meal ticket is opening. That’s the reason I can be here. I’m glad to be here, because I’m enjoying everything else about the trip, which is why I’m going, rather than going to play my own music. Because I feel like I don’t know if anyone’s going to listen. I’m going to play the music as well as I can, but the reason I’m going is because I wanted to see these shows and I thought it’d be an interesting trip. I think opening sucks, unless it’s a similar situation where you have a symbiotic relationship with the other group, whether it’s the headliner, and you travel for a period of time with them, and there’s some sort of musical evening happening, some sort of correlation, some sort of A to B that the audience is going to go through if they pay attention. Then it’s okay.

Do you think in terms of the audience when you’re writing music?

Yeah, I think so.

Is there something you’re trying to bring about in them as a reaction, or pathos, or is it just—

Sometimes I try to entertain—

I recognize that it’s a bit of a bum question.

The whole reason for making records is that, ideally, there’s an audience. It’s inextricable, the concept of writing for an audience. It’s always thinking, like, “Will this make any sense? Will this melody sink into someone’s head, or will it just go right past them?” The only real thing you can base it on is your own experience. You try to listen to different music that affects people in different ways and figure out why it does, and say, “I think this song will work if it’s done like this, because I know it works on this level, and somebody—I don’t know how many people, maybe five, but ideally more—will pick up on it, because that’s what’s being put into it. And it’s always thinking that it’s for the audience.

I’m not much of a musician myself, but I think that in terms of music, it’s almost like building bombs, because you never know what it’s going to do people.

That’s true.

I know having an immensely personal reaction to music you’ve done, and seeing people having intense personal reactions to other music that I just don’t get.

Right, like Ani DiFranco, or something.

Sure. But it must be pretty bizarre from the position of the person who’s making the music to know that for some people, it’s just going to go flying over their heads, or they’ll just turn their back on it, but for other people, it’s going to lay them on the ground.

Yeah. And at the same time, that’s only at the present moment. Because that person who’s on the ground, maybe then, the rest will go flying over them, hit the person who’s turned their back, and they’re now going to turn around and listen.

When I listen to the early Palace records, I listen to the progression of the past ten years. It seems to me as though the things that you’re writing are a lot less manic, confused. But at the same time, it seems as though there’s much more of a comfort, a sense of your own capabilities. Is that true?

I think so, yeah. The way that I think of it is that making the Palace records was like going to college. Rarely in all of those—or just sometimes—the lyrics can be more. Which is one reason that I never bothered printing them in those records, just that the lyrics might just be musical, they might just work on a visceral level, and were not intended to be on the printed page, ever. And they were worked, like, “If it fits into this verse, on a rhythmic level, if it makes the melody sound good, if somehow there can be something that approaches a theme in the song, then that’s great, that’s perfect.” But it was all a question of “How do you take this totally amorphous song and record it?” So we had to go into the studio and learn that. To the point that after making Viva Last Blues, it was sort of, “Okay, now I know how to do all of this stuff. Does that mean I should stop making records now?” A part of the excitement was always in, “Let’s try this, let’s try this.” And then, it’s like, do you continue with what you know, or do you do something completely different? Trying to figure out if life is only a discovery thing, or if it’s about learning to do something with the discovery.

It was after Viva Last Blues that you started printing the lyrics.

Mm hmm.

With I See A Darkness?

With Arise, Therefore, and Joya.

I’m not that familiar with those two records, but with I See A Darkness, was that because you were willing to deal openly with the issue of death?

At that point, it was—I mean, there have been various times when it’s been, like, everything seems to matter so much, and yet, and yet… Those kinds of times. Or where I don’t know why I’m happy, why I’m not happy, for what purpose, for what person. And with that record, and a couple of songs right before that record, I said, “Let’s deal with all these things, but try to make it as fun as possible. And try to formalize it as well. Let’s sort of deal with these things, but then also make it something that resemble music, with a structure. Maybe even an A,B, C-type structure.” Just trying to make it a little bit fun. An Addams Family kind of fun.

I See A Darkness has always seemed to me like a really fun record.

Yeah, I think it’s really fun.

Recently a friend of mine lost her mom, she died really suddenly. My friend didn’t listen to music for a long time after that, but when she finally started to buy records again, I recommended that to her as something to start with. A couple of friends of mine said, “Jeez, that’s really morbid.” But I didn’t think that at all. In my experience, that record was about having some fun with death as something real.

Yeah.

Has your relationship with death sort of been sorted out a little further since then?

No. [pause] It always seems like there are periods of time when, say, you’re on a plane, and there’s heavy turbulence, sometimes you think, “that’s fine. If this goes down, this is totally fine.” There are other times when you think, “this is not the right time. This is a bad time.” If it’s a bad time, it’s usually because everything isn’t right. It seems like I’ve had more of those “it isn’t right” periods of late than times when it’s okay for the plane to go down.

I’m sorry to hear that.

It’s okay—it gives you the motivation to run away from the plane when it lands. You get your bags, you start doing something else.

Lech Kowalski interview, April 2003

2003-04-02T23:36:00.000-05:00

I interviewed director Lech Kowalski for CKUT-FM in spring of 2003. Later I'd been in contact with Punk Planet magazine and had sent them some of the draft and the expressed interest in the interview, so I typed it up as follows and sent it to them. It never ran for some reason I don't remember. Here it is:

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This month’s release of Hey Is Dee-Dee Home, at a time of pop-culture fascination with 70s punk, may well finally make a name for underground documentarist Lech Kowalski. Responsible for such uncompromising pictures as D.O.A.: A Rite Of Passage, and Story of a Junkie, Kowalski’s best-known works are his films documenting the underbelly of New York City, to which his participation as an artist and music fan allowed him unprecedented access. Filming D.O.A., he was allowed to travel on the Sex Pistols’ tour bus and document their botched American odyssey up close, and 1989’s Rock Soup found him documenting, with trademark unrepentant realism, the lives of New York’s homeless people.

Within the past few years, he has focused on underground communities in his native Poland, following the lives of squatter-punks that run a fledgling business making boots out of cast-off materials in Boot Factory, and some of Poland’s 15 000 prostitutes in The Fabulous Art of Survival.

Returning, for the moment, to the New York punk scene where he inaugurated his career, Hey Is Dee-Dee Home is a different kind of movie than the rest of Kowalski’s body of work. Originally filmed only as an interview for an eventual documentary on Johnny Thunders, Dee-Dee is little more than Dee Dee Ramone sitting on a stool and talking for over and hour. And he is absolutely entertaining: poignant, funny, frightening, weird, and pitiable, the man could tell stories, and that’s precisely what he does. Kowalski’s hand is present but deft—he makes the film happen and decides how you watch it without ever pushing you around. Brave enough to risk boring his audience with straight-up monologue, Kowalski’s gamble pays off as he gives the viewer the closest thing left to the experience of sitting down and talking with Dee Dee Ramone.

I recently spoke with Lech Kowalski about Dee Dee Ramone, rock and roll, and mythmaking. This is how it went:

JB. Staniforth: I just saw the press screening of Dee-Dee. It was fantastic.

Lech Kowalski: Thank you. It's essentially a work-in-progress. There are a few little snips and additions to what you saw in that screening, but that's our final test screening, and I wanted to do that in Montreal. My film D.O.A. premiered there in '83.

Yeah, I saw it there when it played in '99. It's funny, your stuff is really hard to find. Even the more left-field places don't seem to carry it.

It's very obscure, and I kind of like that. But, actually, it's all coming out in the next two years, fifteen of my films, on DVD.

Are you expecting a wide distribution of that?

It's gonna be world-wide. The first deal is happening in Japan now, and then next deals are happening here in the States, and in Canada, and in France, and in England. And then the rest of the world. You know, my films are, like, these cult items that appear here and there, and real hardcore fans can get ahold of them. But the last two films I've made were made for French television, so those are easier to see. But the other stuff is usually privately financed, and there's always some kind of weird problems with the films, they have very strange distribution patterns.

I worked in a video store for a few years, and we carried everything, but we never had any of your films. They were definitely off the beaten track, though I'm sure that's how you like it.

Yeah, it's fine with me. But now they're coming out and they have this history to them, and, in fact, I think that history is a commodity. So, finally, I'll be able to make some money off of my films.

You haven't been making much money until now?

Well, you know, I can't complain, because I was always able to find financing to make these films, but I'm not a wealthy person. I’m not poor, I'm not complaining. But for instance, when D.O.A. came out it was even hard to get a distribution deal on it. But over the years, there's more and more demand for it. I've actually made more money on that film in the last six or seven years than in the first two or three. But it's strange, you know? If you take a Hollywood film that was made in '81 or '82, chances are there's no value left in it? I mean, who cares about yesterday's newspapers? My films have a long shelf life, and I think it will continue that way. For me, that's great. I'm very happy with that.

Well, especially D.O.A. I'd figure that especially in the last six or seven years, considering the revival of "punk rock fashion," and "punk rock," though I'm hesitant to call it punk rock music when a lot of it is just pop music sped up. At the same time, it's paved the way for people to discover older bands. I think way more people were upset this year when Joe Strummer died than, say, if he'd have kicked off ten years ago.

Absolutely, that's true. And Joe also appeared in a lot of films. He had, and he continues to have, a long shelf life. I think there's an integrity factor here. If something has integrity, and also has artistic merit, the marriage of the two is pretty incredible, I think.

What makes good punk rock, I think, is honesty. That's the same of any music. If you can hear some degree of honesty in it, that will make up for bad recording quality, or flat singing, or whatever.

I think that's true of anything. It's really true of films. When you take, like, a typical contemporary film, all the problems in those films are solved with money. In other words, they'll buy the best talent, they'll buy the best sets, they'll buy the best special effects. But they sort of miss the point that something at the core of the film needs to be very honest, very real, and have some kind of emotional or political or artistic art to it that will allow people to feel the film as opposed to just view it. I think the standard that applies to punk rock applies to everything.

I’ve read that you weren’t initially interested in punk rock until the time when it started to disintegrate. Is that true?

Well, it depends on how you define punk rock. When I was into that scene in New York, you didn’t go into CBGB’s, or Max’s, or whatever, thinking you were a punk rocker. You were going there because you enjoyed the music. The whole punk thing filtered in slowly, so by the time the word, and the punk fashion, and punk the way that we know it now glommed onto it, it was pretty much over. It was finished. And as it was finishing I became interested in it. As a form of expressing myself.

The people that were punks, for instance, the people who were in D.O.A., they were expressing something that I found interesting, and they were expressing it for me. But my idea was not to document the music at all, it was just to take those images and the music and combine it together and reintroduce my own look at life, and use all that to create another thing. It’s not a punk movie, it’s my creative interpretation of the reality I saw through my eyes. So it’s not like wanting to document the punk thing, or wanting to be a punk rock filmmaker, it was just that that aesthetic and that music suited my creative talent and needs.

It’s true that there was something happening that you wanted to document, though.

Yeah, there was. The only thing is that the scale of it was quite small. It was not a big thing. But it was vital in a way that nothing else that I saw in that time period was vital, meaning that it was touching on something that also touched me. It was like a tennis game between my self and the punk rock thing, and what was going on in the world. So I felt like I was connected to that energy in a way that was not just cerebral, that wasn’t just making a product. It was more about making a point. I can’t tell you what the point is other than a lot of little points that add up to something greater that now you can look at in retrospect and make judgments on.

I think that still stands up. The proof is that when I saw D.O.A. three years ago at a midnight screening, the place was still packed. Part of that’s the music, sure, but I think the main reason is people still want to watch the personalities that were emerging out of that particular time and situation. Of course, though, for years kids have been trying to recreate that tiny period, in music or in fashion or in copping attitude from Sid Vicious. Do you think that there’s anything worth looking back at, or is that time something we should be progressing beyond?

It’s kind of weird to me because we’re about talking 25 years ago. If you looked at Elvis Presley 25 years after Elvis Presley came out… I remember people who were into Elvis at that time and we looked at them like dinosaurs. In fact, there’s a scene in D.O.A. at Graceland where Elvis Presley is buried, and we I remember filming people coming in dressed as Elvis Presleys, and thinking, these people are weird. So now, I live in Paris. I went to a book-signing party that Dee Dee’s translator had when his book came out, and I saw these kids, people in their 20s, there. And they looked like little Sids, or Dee Dees, or upgraded versions of Johnny Rotten, and it was strange to me. It seems like there’s a time warp there. But I understand what they’re trying to do, they’re probably upset because there’s nothing really vital happening in world culture right now in terms of them being able to identify with something and express themselves. So they hang onto this punk thing, and in some ways that’s a little bit sad, that it hasn’t gone beyond that. Of course, we’ve had other musical things happening like rap, but those things too have become commodities. And I think most white kids identify with rap in a different way than they identify with punk.

I’ve got a quote of yours from an interview: “The essence of rock'n'roll is a way of thinking that is uniquely American, allowing yourself to be completely undisciplined in terms of the way academics, or an academic social structure wants you to be. It's like being uniquely yourself.” In your interviews with Dee Dee Ramone he talks often about being an outlaw, living outside of society. Would you say then that rock and roll is about the negation of society?

Negation? I remember being in high school and being excited by rock and roll music. What it was telling me was to do things the way that I want to do them, and not pay attention to how people were telling me to act and behave. I think that’s the answer. There’s something in rock and roll that speaks to individuality. And once you feel comfortable by yourself, with your imperfections that fuck you up so much when you’re young, then you enter into the next level, which is the club, and he club is structured around musical tastes.

One thing I noticed about watching Dee Dee was the number of times throughout the film that he refers to himself in the third person, explaining how he’d get into trouble for “just being Dee Dee.”

Yeah.

In terms of both him and Johnny Thunders, who’s the subject of a lot of the discussion in the film, were they making up personas for themselves as a product of the music they were making?

Absolutely. I think it’s really important to understand, because Johnny Thunders made up a myth about himself, and later on that myth killed him. And I think the same thing happened with Dee Dee. He was an extremely irresponsible person who was heavily into drugs, who was very creative, wrote a lot of the lyrics of the Ramones songs. And he was kind of, for me, an idiot savant. And he continued to have to act like an idiot savant. Right through that interview, you can see it all the time, where he’s playing himself, while knowing that he’s something else, but unable to grow up beyond that. These are the pitfalls of rock and roll.

His myth, and Johnny’s myth, did not allow them to grow up. Johnny could never grow out of being that junkie musician that everyone wanted to see performing a certain kind of song. In his 30s, he’d go out and tour. He never had a record label or support, so he’d play 200 or more gigs a year because he had to earn that money. And he was always upset because people only wanted to hear “Chinese Rocks” or “Too Much Junkie Business,” never his new material. He was stuck in his myth-role, just as Dee Dee was stuck. The material I filmed of Dee Dee has a certain charm that captures that tragic element. For me, Dee Dee was the most important star of that scene. Johnny has a specific role, but Dee Dee is in another category because he was the most successful and was under tremendous pressure. He was, perhaps, more of an artist than Johnny. I think Dee Dee had a real artist’s soul, which allowed him to get lost in the creative world. And he was unable to be realistic in terms of keeping his life together. He fucked up in so many ways, but the charm of that artistic soul allowed him to survive. The film has a real, deep Dee Dee Ramone sense of humour to it.

Initially, I filmed this material to be part of the Johnny Thunders film (Born To Lose), but as I was shooting that film over the years, it was slowly dawning on me that the story is much greater. I started collecting all this material, about 500 hours worth, and around the time that Dee Dee died, I decided to make a series of films that are all structured around Johnny to a certain degree, like the Dee Dee film is, but are actually about the people talking. It’s easier to make a film about somebody not really concentrating on themselves, because you can really see them.

Putting it that way really plays upon the myth of Johnny Thunders.

The myth of Johnny Thunders is a myth that hangs over the entire New York punk rock of that time period. You can’t have that scene without it. If you take Johnny Thunders out if it, you’re defining the period by groups that I don’t think are as important, like the Talking Heads, or Blondie. Those were the success stories of that period, but they’re not really part of that scene. Whereas the Heartbreakers, the Ramones, the Dead Boys, etc., Johnny is part of that myth. You can’t split them up.

Were you expecting Dee Dee was going to die in the same way that everyone figured Johnny would eventually die?

It’s weird. When I was filming with Dee Dee, I had this feeling that he was very sick, and I had this feeling that something was not right with him. I felt something was going to happen. But he continued living for another ten years, so I just forgot about that. But when he died, it was kind of a surprise to me that he died the way he did. I thought he’d tossed the needle away. But I guess he didn’t.

I think that his death, like Johnny’s death, is more complex. It’s not just a death by a drug overdose; there were other problems in his life, personal problems, psychological problems, and a certain kind of unhappiness. Dee Dee was deeply unhappy about a lot of things.

He talks about his own depression in the movie, about his own depression and Johnny Thunders’s depression.

Yeah. But the thing is, these depressions, if we talk about it this way, it sounds like such a downer. But in fact, these guys were able to take their depressions and do something creative with them. The depression and the problems that engulfed their lives or that they gravitated towards also fed their music and their creativity and the way they looked. You can’t take one and create a situation where everything would be perfect and they would be great musicians. You need that interplay. Like great jazz musicians of the 50s and 60s. They had drug problems, they had social problems, economic problems. Black people had huge problems in terms of the culture in the states. So all these things together made for better music. Look at Lenny Bruce, man, you know? New York Jew, who had a drug problem, who was discriminated against because he was Jewish and because he was a genius. If you take any of those elements out, you wouldn’t have Lenny Bruce. Tragedy is linked to great creativity in these cases. We’re living in these very dull times, but some young generation, maybe not this one or the next, is going to rediscover that equation, and we’ll have something new to look forward to in terms of creativity that will then put rock and roll way back into its place.

Reading about Dee Dee over the years as I was growing up, I always had a feeling that he was doomed to self-destruction. He was a perennial outsider.

Yeah. He was. He was a male hustler, which people don’t want to talk about. The way he set up his deals… the fact that he quit the Ramones and became a rap singer? That move alone was so destructive. Because he wasn’t a rap singer. He liked to fuck around, to walk the edge that way.

Some people seem to think that Dee Dee died the way he did because he’d never been able to put money away, and as a result of that he wasn’t able to get a consistent grade of drugs. Would you agree?

To me, that’s a pretty cynical way to look at it. No, I don’t believe that. He had money. He was doing okay. I don’t think it’s a question of that. I think that Dee Dee was just exhausted by reality and by his life. He just got very tired. And he had some other personal problems. He had people in his life that he was not happy with. I even think there were much deeper problems with him in terms of his relationship to women, and men, and certain ways that he was forced to be that were not natural to who he was. I won’t want to get any deeper than that because I don’t want to say things that— these are just deeply personal things that I know about him. But I think that Dee Dee’s unhappiness caught up with him.

There’s a definite suggestion through the film that there’s something very problematic about the way he relates to other people.

Yeah. Extremely. He can’t. I mean, before I filmed him, we talked about it. We were shooting in the afternoon, and in 35mm, so we had a big crew, because I wanted it to have a very classic look to it. That morning he asked me to go to his shrink to discuss the shoot with his shrink, and I thought it was kind of weird. So I went with him to 14th street to his psychiatrist. And as it turned out, man, his fucking psychiatrist was just a two-bit shrink whose objective was to make money, who just prescribed various medications. He didn’t even want to talk to me. There was nothing to say. So Dee Dee got some medication prescribed. But here’s the interesting thing: he didn’t take it before the shoot. Because Dee Dee understood that if he took it, he wouldn’t be who he really was. The camera’s very sensitive. If he’d taken anything, other than smoking pot on camera, it would change the way he comes across. You’d see in his mannerisms a certain sloppiness. It was only later on he took the medication.

You say in the director’s notes to Boot Factory that one of the main objectives of the people running the factory is “to make each of the co-workers self-sufficient enough so that the need to obliterate themselves with substance abuse will not have to be a necessary escape mechanism.” Would you say that for the people that you’ve filmed who’ve been trying to live outside of the obligation to conform to other people’s expectations, it becomes almost a necessary evil to face up to addiction?

I think the problem that everyone faces is that when you get to a certain age, to a certain stage, you have to deal with the fact that you’re going to be under somebody’s thumb. You have to make a living. And I think that creative people then have to start understanding how they’re going to compromising. In that compromising process, big messes occur, and people’s lives fall apart, or they succeed. The kind of success that most of these people want, they don’t really understand it, and they don’t have the goods to go all the way. So they have to find these plateaus on which to survive. Johnny Thunders found his plateau; Dee Dee Ramone found his. All of them had bigger dreams, but they could never go beyond that. They were probably never supposed to go beyond that, and their plateaus were great for what they were. Does that answer the question?

I’m just trying to tie together the problem of addiction as it runs through your films, and the people in them who are desperately trying to live by their own rules beyond the control of other people.

The substance abuse thing is a hard battle to win, but as you’re fighting that battle, it’s a lot of fun. Somewhere along the way, though, something’s gotta give. You can’t just keep having fun with it. The odds are against you.

It seems to me that drugs are a more quintessentially American product than rock and roll. All of America is hooked on something.

The thing is that Americans don’t even want to deal with this thing, but in Middle America, people who are not creative, who are not involved in rock and roll and couldn’t care less about it, factory workers, lawyers, doctors, the entire middle class, they take a lot of drugs, man. And they don’t call them drugs. Because they’re kidding themselves. But they survive day-to-day because life is so boring, and as a result of that boredom so painful to them, that they can’t face up to that reality. So in a certain way, the Johnny Thunderses and the Dee Dee Ramones of the world are ahead of the curve. They’re not hiding it. They have the same problem, they just make it a little more obvious.

Or think of the rumours that circulated that Barbara Bush was supposedly whacked out on Halcyon.

Look at all the Bushes!

Do you think there’s something doomed about a country that’s in a perpetual state of trying to escape itself?

Absolutely. And I think that America is in serious trouble. Real serious trouble. I see so much gloom here, an inability to call a spade a spade. Americans don’t have an objectivity about themselves. I think it’s something like 20% or less of Americans that have a passport. Which means that the other 80% plus haven’t even been outside of the United States, so how can they see themselves?