I AM TIRED, I AM WEARY

I'm suspicious of the language of coercion that we tend to use to describe our emotional reactions to art. It made me laugh, it made me cry...

And yet there I was yesterday, idling at an intersection in front of the local Giant on my way home from work, feeling my jaw tighten in a gentle surge of rage.

If you've been reading for the last few days, you'll notice that I've been dipping into the Velvets. I confess that it's been quite a while since I've done so, and it can be refreshing to come back to the good stuff with new ears.

But as Heroin skronked to a climax, I was more and more gripped by the feeling that the whole thing was irresponsible. Kind of reprehensibly so...

While you could hardly call the song a glamorization of the drug, I don't think you can deny the darkly seductive tableau of self-annihilation that's laid out. There are a couple of particularly disconcerting moments where Lou kind of chuckles the lyrics...

If you're reading this, chances are you'd be quick to acknowledge that art can be a positive force in a local and global sense, but we also have to acknowledge the corollary. That is, like any worthwhile religion, there is good and there is evil. And no, both of those words aren't dead...

So, just as I know that Heroin never made anyone stick a spike into their vein, I realize that it did not make me have the reaction I did-- the whole nexus is pretty damn intricate. But I can't completely let it off the hook in either case...

Well, today I found a cure in Loaded. By this point the Velvets had embraced their inner CCR, and taken the long road from ermine to flannel. I'll be damned if Sweet Jane, Rock and Roll, and Head Held High are not some of the most exhilarating, life-affirming songs ever recorded. They made me feel better about all this.

I ended the day by scooping the cases for the four Velvets albums off my front seat, and filing them back on my shelf. We'll get together again in a couple of years and see how we're both doing...

HE'S TAKING A SICK DAY

Semi-obscure Fountains of Wayne reference or simple statement of fact? You make the call.

THE RALLY MAN'S PATTER RAN ON THROUGH THE DAWN

The Velvet's literary pretensions were right there on the surface. The Gift was a blowsy little short story redeemed by its sonics. The Murder Mystery was a muddle, with the occasional arresting image jumping out of one speaker or another.

But The Black Angel's Death Song was awesome, like the non-diagetic soundtrack music to Bob Dylan's 115th dream...

SPUTTER MUTTER

This is my personal favorite “waiting for the man” story.

One bright morning a friend of mine and I decided that going into Manhattan to buy weed trumped another boring day in 9th grade, so we slid out a side door and made our way to the LIRR.

We pulled into Penn, detrained, and wended our way back out into the sun, navigating purposefully to what we had been told was a prime spot for making our intended purchase.

It didn’t take long for us to hook up with a dealer, who clearly knew a couple of easy marks when he saw them. He sized up the situation, and quickly realized that the best way to negotiate the transaction was going to be by flattering my vanity and talking to me as if I had been doing such commerce from the cradle.

He suggested that he and I duck into an alley, so he could give me a sample of his wares. He pulled out a joint of “premium Panama red” and lit it up, offering me a toke, and advising me to cup it, as there was a police precinct right across the street. “It’s cool, I’m cool,” I whispered, smoke leaking from my constricted lips.

Now, chances are that this “joint” was a repurposed Camel, but I quickly agreed with his assessment that it was strong shit. After some further discussion, I palmed him $30. He handed me a tightly packed one-ounce bag, and advised me to secrete it down my pants. I emerged from the alley, gave a quick nod to my friend, and we were back on the way to Penn.

We reached the station and headed for the nearest bathroom, where we took up residence in adjoining stalls. I reached into my pants and pulled out the baggie. I unrolled it, unzipped it, and found…

Paper. Tiny, wadded up pieces of thickish brown paper. I conveyed this discovery to my friend in the stall next door, and almost immediately I heard a loud, rhythmic pounding on the divider. This was accompanied by a loud, rhythmic series of “Fuck!” exclamations…

He was hell bent on returning to the scene of the crime, but I finally persuaded him that this was probably not a good idea. I knew that I had been suckered, and I even felt a certain warped sense of admiration for the psychology that underpinned the ruse.

In an effort to take my friend’s mind off thoughts of glorious revenge, I spent the last of my money on tickets for Jerry Lewis’ Hardly Working. Which experience made the absence of drugs that much more palpable and regrettable…

With no money in our pockets, we hopped back on the LIRR as rush hour approached, and made it all the way to Garden City before we were kicked off the train...

DENIGRATE OBTUSE AND ACTIVE VERBS PRONOUNS

At one point this weekend I shot past the sublime and straight into I’m Waiting for the Man, and I have to cop to spending 10 minutes or so obsessing over the fact that the title is at slight variance with the chorus (“I’m waiting for my man”).

Makes you wonder how the discrepancy was born. Anyway, it knocks me slightly off my axis, and I appreciate that…

HAVE A SUBLIME WEEKEND!

Candy Says—The Velvet Underground
Broken Heart—Spiritualized
Velvet Water—Stereolab
Waterloo Sunset—The Kinks
Valerie—Broadcast
This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)—Talking Heads
You Made Me Forget My Dreams—Belle and Sebastian
In the Morning of the Magicians—The Flaming Lips
Sunday Morning—The Velvet Underground
I Am Waiting—The Rolling Stones
Here’s Where the Story Ends—The Sundays
God Moving Over The Face Of The Waters—Moby

COMBIEN DU TEMPS?

My apologies, but I’m afraid this “national treasure” thing ends with a whimper, and not a bang.

The way I see it, there are a few groups remaining.

There are the stone-cold locks, who I could not muster either the passion, courage, or time to cover in much detail:

Elvis
Note lack of last name.

Chuck Berry
I am he as you are he as you are me…

James Brown
Get on up.

Beach Boys
I liked them most when Brian was either lying through his teeth or being nakedly honest. One of my top five is I Get Around, in which I suppose he’s doing both.

Then there’s the “sorry, not quite, but thanks for playing” bunch:

Michael Jackson
Damn, there was a time when this was a no brainer. But his second round of massive success helped to make everything attending him massive, including the consuming self-hatred.

Prince
A genius, for sure, and the same temperament that fed the genius probably drew up the blueprints for that Purple Castle of Weird he ended up building.

R.E.M.
Time and distance might one day elevate them off this segment of the list. I hate to play the “If they went away after…” game, but if the whole thing wrapped with Automatic for the People…

The Replacements
My friend brain coral spoke very eloquently the other day about their flameout. But for a brief shining moment they ripped off three or four beauties, and kinda sorta stood for something or another.


And finally, there’s the collection for which I suppose someone could make a case, but not me:

The Grateful Dead
As if the intemperate, interminable, impenetrable noodling was not enough, they encouraged that whole caravan of passive/aggressive stoners to follow them around. Bad trip, mannnn…

Jimi Hendrix
Sorry, technical mastery was never my bag. I know that’s not the alpha and omega of Hendrix, but it’s what sticks...

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
My stance on Springsteen has softened over the years, and I do appreciate his integrity and boundless energy. But from his New Dylanisms to his New Depressionisms to his New Working Classicism to his New Whateverism, we just never connected.

Run-D.M.C.
They brought the most important genre of the late 20th Century to the mainstream by cutting it with rock. That I can’t make a case is probably my fault.

Public Enemy
Kind of like The Replacements, but sunk more by self-righteousness than booze. Or, to jump continents, exactly like The Clash.

Aerosmith
They did the burnout/redemption thing well, and were actually kind of amusing at both ends of that spectrum. But treasure needs substance—Aerosmith is a big wooden chest full of paste.

eins-zwei-drei-vier

The Ramones taught both of my kids how to count to four.

They could each out-Dee Dee Dee Dee by the time they were two, barking “1-2-3-4!” with possessed self-possession. It gave them great confidence.

Because, after all, once you’ve got the linear locomotion of counting down, going beyond four is really just rote academics—it’s simply a matter of learning more numbers.

Now there’s nothing wrong with learning more numbers. But being proud of it and showing off that you can count to 130, well that’s for proggers. Fuck that.

This aesthetic of concision was married to an aesthetic of inclusion, best exemplified in the Freaks-biting Pinhead: “We accept you, one of us, one of us.”

This is the essential chemistry that makes The Ramones a national treasure.

They stuck around long enough to turn the burnout/etc cycle into a rondelet, as their haiku became bloated and distended.

Then within the span of four years Joey, Dee Dee, and Johnny were gone, inserting a touch of classical tragedy.

But thanks to The Ramones, losers, loners, glue-sniffers, medicine-cabinet rouletters, and basement dwellers will always have someone there to accept them, someone to teach them how to count to four…

DINOSAUR VICTROLA

Uh-oh, it’s turning into National Treasure Week on the Tongue— here’s another: CCR.

The old-school SAT analogy would be “Sly and the Family Stone is to James Brown as CCR is to Bob Dylan.”

Both groups built on certain key elements of their analogues, and created something that in theory should have been marginal, but in practice was epochal.

CCR translated the mythic portents of Dylan into plainspeak. Yeah, a hard rain was gonna fall— Have you seen it? Who’ll stop it?

Plus, they turned Dylan’s elliptical protests into Fortunate Son, perhaps the most stirring and clearheaded thing of its kind.

And then there’s Proud Mary, one of the best American songs of the 20th Century…

I could prattle on through the catalog, but you get the point. Chances are you got the point before you got here.

John Fogerty also followed a rough outline of the “burnout/dissipation of visionary talent/lost wandering in the wilderness” paradigm—his drug of choice appeared to be bitterness, which is highly addictive and tough as hell to kick.

Fogerty, however, had his redemptive moment in the mid 1980s, when he reappeared looking and sounding so much like he did in his prime that everyone was willing to overlook the fact the he didn’t really signify anymore.

The tailend of his wilderness period played out in public in the form of lawsuits and stubborn refusals to play his old CCR songs, but he softened in the light and gave the people the grace notes they desired...

BE MICE ELF AGIN

Sly and the Family Stone are a national treasure, and we shouldn't let this be obscured by the fact that Prince, Outkast, et al have quite ably jizzed them into our DNA.

And yeah, part of the "national" in that "national treasure" is the burnout, the dissipation of visionary talent, and the lost wandering in the wilderness.

What's missing is the redemption, and I can wait as long as it takes Mr. Stewart. In the end you'll still be you...

WHAT’S THE POINT IN SAYING “DESTROY”?

While I certainly responded to the pointed political anger of punk, and to the general ether of anger floating through punk (I swear that nothing could put me to sleep in a more efficient and complete manner when I was 16 than listening to the Pistols at volume levels courting pure distortion), what ultimately won the day for me was the confrontational positivity of punk.

The first time I heard the first Clash album, I was sitting in the same local park that I had retreated to upon news of my father’s death four years prior. It was late fall, it was cold, and I was characteristically underdressed. The air from conversation among friends was visible, and quickly mingled into one breath.

Clash City Rockers started with its stuttering guitars and thudding drums, and then came Joe Strummer with his sputtering vocals, and I was lifted off the ground. From my new elevation I heard “You won’t succeed unless you try!” The air was nearly visible again.

I felt immediately as if I had found another friend, the crucial kind who understands you, to whom you don’t need to explain an obscure reference or an obscure mood. The kind who is going to share your frustration that “things” are fucked up, but is not going to let you wallow in it. You got a problem? Well, whatcha gonna do?

And that’s what punk rock means to me…

A REASONABLE ECONOMY

Lazy man like theme. Theme good.

So Bollocks turned out to be as patchwork as the album art's ransom-note motif. It ranged from the glorious (Holidays, God Save the Queen, Anarchy), to the gleefully nihilistic (Bodies, No Feelings, Problems, Seventeen), to a simulacrum of the glorious and gleefully nihilistic (Pretty Vacant), to the punkily pedestrian (Liar, New York, E.M.I), to the please-make-it-stop-right-now (Submission).

And the stuff worth mentioning outside of Bollocks?

Substitute
Early Who is as punk as anything, so this fit like a glove.

Steppin' Stone
"Hey hey, we're the Punkees..."

Belsen Was a Gas
This is no doubt the kind of by-the-numbers punk rock shock horror they would have churned out if there was an album number 2. Europe would've recoiled; America would've rested comfortably waiting for someone to explain what a Belsen was.

Silly Thing
This is flanged, phased, overdubbed, and more processed than a package of Kraft singles. Goes down like comfort food, though...

Something Else/C'mon Everybody
It would take actual effort to not make these songs pulse, and lord knows the boys couldn't be bothered. So it all works out for the best.

No One is Innocent/The Great Rock 'N Roll Swindle
McClaren, McLuhan. McLuhan, McLaren.

NO DOGS, BUDDY

The only album I ever threw from a moving car in a spasm of anger, informed by something as quaint as betrayal? PiL's This Is What You Want, This Is What You Get.

In the underpass where Washington Avenue ducked below the Long Island Expressway, the underpass where my brother's best friend Paul died in a car accident, I huffed the cassette out the window and caught a faint echo of it smashing against the lightly graffitied wall as I drove on...

FODDERSTOMPF

The Sex Pistols were a lot of things. Dickheads, dopers, defibrillators, feckless fucks, and poncy feckers. They were also archly funny, and occasionally downright hilarious, never moreso than on Seventeen:

We don't care about long hairs
I don't wear flares!

Sometimes I think this is a more accurate statement of purpose than Anarchy. And the way Johnny gargles with the word "flares" reiterates that he was the punk Sinatra...

IT KEEPS ME STABLE FOR DAYS

Prison labor in my fine state is apparently so cheap that they're practically giving away vanity license plates. Plus, they make the cons do ampersands, which is hard labor, because we all know how tricky ampersands are...

So, tonight I'm going to take the plunge and order my first set of personalized plates. And the screws will be happy to know I'm going to make those prisoners earn their keep:

BEL & SEB

Is that the damnedest little manifestation of a midlife crisis you've ever heard or what?

BELLE & SEBASTIAN PARKER

On a languorous late-summer Friday, these were the best lines to pass my ears:

Stars of Track and Field, Belle & Sebastian

"You liberated
A boy I never rated
And now he's throwing discus
For Liverpool and Widnes"

Why I prefer B&S to The Smiths, reason #36.

Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying, Belle & Sebastian

"Think of it this way
You could either be successful or be us"

Reason #109.

Discovering Japan, Graham Parker and the Rumour

"As the tears dropped sideways down her face..."

Narrative songwriting needs more of this kind of thing. Tell me two things in one compact image. The tears didn't just drop down her face, they dropped sideways. So she was crying and laying down. It seems so simple, but you'd be surprised how rare it is...

Protection, Graham Parker and the Rumour

"So all of you be damned
We can't have heaven crammed
So Winston Churchill said
I could have smacked his head"

Um, I think it was actually Swift, but when someone sounds this self-righteously pissed and, uh, Swiftian, you don't niggle the details...

SCORPIONS LOVE YOU!

Took the kids to the Richmond County Fair a couple of weeks ago, and had the good fortune to run into Rudolf Schenker, founder and rhythm guitarist of The Scorpions. I borrowed my wife’s notepad, and sat down for a quick chat.

ST: Welcome back to America. You’ve had a pretty good history of success here, huh?
RS: Yes, the Americans love our power. They know that we will give them rock, and the girls like the slow kissing songs. America: power and kissing!

ST: So you think that dichotomy has helped you through the years?
RS: Yes, yes, yes. When Klaus had his throat problems back in 1981, everyone said “Is Scorpions finished? Will Don Dokken sing for Scorpions?” And then Klaus had the dichotomy and his voice came back, and I don’t need to say the next thing, do I? No, I don’t.

ST: OK, I’ll say it then. The next thing was Blackout, with the breakout FM hit “No One Like You.”
RS: I still remember when Klaus and I wrote that. He had just gotten out of the Stuttgart clinic, and he was feeling strong. I said “Klaus, maybe we should do a slow one, where the vocal performing is like a whisper.” And that’s what we did. But it’s not like a little kiddie whisper: it has the sexiness and power in it. When he does that “Girl…” whisper part in concert, every time the bras bloom like tulips.

ST: That brings up a point. You guys were often accused of being sexist, due to some of your lyrics, videos, album covers…
RS: This makes me so angry. The fans know we are not doing sexism. We are doing sexy, with the Y. They see our videos and they say “Hey, Mr. Critic, Scorpions are in cage. Not pretty ladies. Scorpions are animals.”

ST: Some of those album covers, though…
RS: We get criticism for Virgin Killer, but it is joke. The naked 12-year old girl just means that Scorpions are virgin killers, and if you are one of them, we are going to get you and kill you with our love. So maybe you won’t be the virgin anymore, yes? Lovedrive has the picture with the bubble gum on the guy's hand sticking on the tittie. But the critics don’t get the humor. I think that’s not the only thing the critics don’t get, yes? Animal Magnetism, the man with the tight trousers and the woman and dog kneeling before him? You know the word for a woman dog is, right? So, again we make a joke, but you have to be paying attention to appreciate. It has the subtleness. And power.

ST: Well, Rudolf, I thank you for your time. Do you have any words for your American fans?
RS: Look out for our newest album called Unbreakable. Klaus has written some of his best song lyrics here. Listen, listen: “Roller coaster flies off the track/Hits you in the face, stabs you in the back.” I mean, you can just see that roller coaster going woooo, and then hitting the guy in the face and stabbing him in the back, yes? And the new ballad Maybe I, Maybe You that Klaus wrote with Anoushirvan Rohani is something for the ladies. So, keep rocking America! Scorpions love you!

LITTLE BIT OF DIRT MIXED WITH TEARS

My time with Car Wheels on a Gravel Road yesterday reminded me that the thing is just a major sumbitch of an album. It's loaded with those moments that make me feel like a hit of extra-oxygenated blood has been injected into the base of my skull, and is tingling its way up to the crown of my head. Seriously, it's a physical reaction.

A few specific lines that do the trick:

"Could tell a lie but my heart would know"
"Are you heavy enough to make me stay/I feel like I might blow away"
"All I ask/Don't tell anybody the secrets/Don't tell anybody the secrets I told you"

Of course that stuff benefits from its context and delivery, but there are also moments of unadorned poetry:

"We used to drive
Thru Lafayette and Baton Rouge
In a yellow El Camino
Listening to Howling Wolf"

Plus it kicks off with an unashamed and adult encomium to female masturbation.

Go. Listen. Now.

GHOSTS FROM THE PAST

My good friend brain coral made the point the other day (on notes, a fine adjunct to his primary site) that was on my mind all morning today. Namely, how a great tragedy can radically recontextualize a pop song.

He references Joy by Lucinda Williams, but I think he's really after Lake Charles from the same album (Car Wheels...). It's an ode to Louisiana in the form of a lament, and beyond all the requisite place names that currently clog the cable alphabet news nets, there is the chorus, which now seems painfully prescient:

"Did an angel whisper in your ear
And hold you close and take away your fear
In those long last moments"

We have spent the last week being collectively overwhelmed by long last moments...

But of course, this is not a song about the aftermath of Katrina. And that is part of the magic of the best pop.

Although it is such a circular medium (think verse/chorus/verse/chorus; think cylinders, 78s, 45s, LPs, reel to reels, cassettes, CDs, the wheel on your iPod), pop curiously lacks a center. It can have a POV, an agenda, maybe even a subtext, but the best of it is out there waiting to be willfully and willingly misinterpreted. And in the act of misinterpretation and being misinterpreted, it can take on an almost unbearable increase in gravity. I have heard Lake Charles at least 100 times, and for all its lyrical, transportive grace, I was never moved by it so much as I was when I listened to it this morning. And misinterpreted...

The last time I experienced this transformative moment with such power was in the days and weeks directly following 9/11. During that period, I listened to Abernant 1984/85 by The Mekons at least a few times every day. Sometimes it was the sole accompaniment to my 20 minute ride home from work. Listen. Repeat. Listen. Repeat.

I was intellectually aware that it is a song about the miners' strikes that roiled the UK in the mid 80s. I was not compelled to listen to it because it was helping me to form some thesis about how the callousness of the Thatcherite/Reaganite years had led us to 9/11. Rather, I was reacting quite viscerally to this:

"Vengeance is not ours it belongs to those
Who seek to destroy us
How much more is there left to lose?"

That is such a slippery couplet, but it affected me so profoundly, and in ways that I don't quite fully comprehend to this day. But the act of willfully misinterpreting once again got me through...

A DOSE OF THRUSH

Now, you don't normally associate Belle and Sebastian with the garage. And if you do it rhymes with carriage, and they're 12 years old, and they're in the corner behind the pram, and they're looking at a picture of Lulu that they cut carefully from last week's Melody Maker, and they're feeling conflicted about it. Because yes, their high frequency sensitivity does sometimes put the twee in tweeter...

But then in Lazy Line Painter Jane, those girl-group handclaps come in before the bridge, and the whole thing devolves into a glorious Al Kooperesque noise at the end that you really need to turn up loud, and as it skids to a close you marvel at this inflation of the everyday into the epic. In the garage...

GARAGELAND

The job's got me pegged like a pair of jeans this week, so I'm going to stay in the garage for the next couple of days...

Forever Changes is awesome, but this is my favorite Love moment, from 7 and 7 Is:

"Trapped inside a night but I'm a day and I go
Boom bip bip boom bip bip yeah!"

I swear I could listen to that on an endless loop some days...

Plus, I love titles that seem to dare you to complete them. I don't know, 14? Whiskey and lemon-lime soda?