20TH CENTURY BOY

Waiting out in front of 9:30 for brain coral and his brother, I noticed a guy slip out the door for a smoke with a group of four or five others.

He was short and slightly built, with straight-leg skinny jeans and a haystack of hair on his head.

He bantered with his friends for a few minutes, and when the group broke apart he headed back toward the front door of the club. He stopped mid stride and spun on his heel. “Can I have a kiss, honey?” he said very gently to one of the women in the group, and she complied.

I saw him smile and enter the club, noting for the first time the laminate attached to his shirt.

So when this fun, unremarkable trio named the 1990’s opened the show, and I saw that he was the singer/guitarist, I liked the band just a little bit more than I probably would have otherwise…

FREEZE, MAN, FREEZE

Multiple choice quiz.

Place the following description: “Whipped up fluffy chocolate-on-chocolate taste!”

(1) From the liner notes for One Nation Under a Groove
(2) From the poster for Sweet Sweetback's Baadaassss Song
(3) From the wrapper of my fun-size 3 Musketeers bar

If you said (1) or (2), you're probably right. If you said (3), you're right for sure-- I have the wrapper right here in front of me...

ET TU, BRUT?

So as my buddy brain coral will happily attest, Art Brut ruled the night at 9:30.

Eddie Argos was all louche charm, with a loose flannel shirt draped over a pillowy gut.

His greatest innovation? Referring to the band by name at every opportunity.

“Art Brut, are you ready?” he’d bellow, and I’d feel a giddy little tug at my heart.

You had me at Art Brut, Eddie…

RUNAWAY AMERICAN DREAM

Nature does not spit out Bruce Springsteens casually.

I was reminded of this the other night watching Craig Finn of The Hold Steady flail around the 9:30 stage looking like your eighth-grade social studies teacher infected with the rage virus.

The boy’s got lyrical faculties for sure, the kind where it wouldn’t at all surprise you to hear him break into Blinded by the Light at any given moment.

He’s vulnerable to the same traps as early Bruce as well, e.g., the tendency to drop in syllables where silence would do, and a hella blind spot regarding real, actual women. Sandy, meet Holly. Holly, meet Sandy…

But Craig is a zero-charisma guy, whereas 70s Bruce dripped the stuff. And sex, too—I remember one dirtbag who passed first-year Spanish just because Ms. Krebs thought he looked like Bruce.

And I’d imagine that Bruce never used his encore as an opportunity to tell the audience what a sincere joy it was to be onstage performing for them.

I’m pretty sure he just let the encore(s) do the talking…

HEY, KIDS, ROCK AND ROLL

I took the kids to a friend's house last month, and there was a big old trampoline in the backyard, encircled by a thick wire-mesh enclosure.

The kids bounced around for an hour like radical ions.

A couple of weeks later, I saw The Go! Team at 9:30, and the experience was much the same.

I liked the Sonic Youth-y moments the best, and I was crushing on Kaori Tsuchida for sure.

Tomorrow night: Art Brut and the Hold Steady.

Ooh, my soul...

CODA

There was actually one more session, several days later.

We invited our friend Howie, who was assuming the role of "manager."

And yes, we were po-mo enough to say it with air quotes.

However, with Howie sitting in, we became paralyzed by self-consciousness. We abandoned anything we attempted.

Howie was our Yoko.

ONE MORE SONG

Mike, Larry, and I would soon find ourselves moving in different orbits.

I started to see less and less of Mike, and rumors of him wearing outrageous makeup in NYC clubs gained quick currency. The rumors accreted until it was said that he was living in the village with his boyfriend.

The last time I saw him was on the day of our 10th high school reunion, in a local pizza place with a girl I did not know. He wore a drab flannel shirt and jeans, with nothing on his face except a bit of dark stubble.

I lost track of Larry at around the same time I lost Mike. Folks said that he was living with a 40-year-old woman and her 10-year-old daughter, and I eventually heard a rumor that he had been institutionalized.

I have not seen Larry again.

I retreated to my poetry and to my books, and I am sure there was a surfeit of colorful rumors about me as well.

But before all that, there was time for one more song.

Just one more song…

Listen for: 0:38, Mike bringing the backup vocals. 1:33, as we get together one more time…

WE CAN'T HAVE THAT

I thought about leaving this one out.

The first half at least is just ugly and vituperative.

Well, except for Larry's drum solo at the start, which is pretty sweet.

I give teenage me a little credit for locating the anger more properly in the second half of the song, and yeah, “I can't have that/We can't have that” gets at the spirit of 17.

Listen for: theatricality masking pain, pain masking theatricality, throughout...

FLASH

Rumor had it that a flasher had been spotted on the grounds of JFK High School.

So this was our trenchant commentary on the situation.

Listen for: 1:48, a lesson learned from the Dolls on the simple glory of the word "trash"...

I LOVE YOU

And this one goes out to all the lovely ladies of Plainview!

Listen for: 2:09, where, for the love of Paul McCartney, I sing "But I can't let me go on like this." Well, at least I was just making it up as I went along...

TWIST

Now it can be told: I invented emo.

Listen for: me inventing emo.

FLIP FLOP

Jocularity!

Listen for: Speaking in tongues, 1:37.

I HATE YOU

I totally spit the bit on this one.

I mean, Mike and Larry brang the noise, but I just didn't bring the funk.

I'm thinking in particular of the moment at 0:48 when I resort to counting to four. Twice.

Listen for: OK, the “Ready, leeettt's go!” part at 0:11 sounded promising. And the Johnny Rotten homage at 1:56 is kinda cute...

HAPPENS ALL THE TIME

And then it was the day after that.

We got together again, and this time with intent. We wanted to make more songs.

We headed over to Mike's house, but soon realized that he was locked out (which became lyrical fodder for the walking blues of track 1). So we recorded instead at my house.

Listen for: the inexcusable run of irredeemably off-key singing that starts at 0:53. If I could change anything about any of these recordings, I would wipe both passes at “Glad you're not around.” The “Couldn't find a key, and then it hit me” part at 1:14 is pretty punktacular, though...

LET IT LIE

Mike's mother would be home soon, and we could see from the small window on the cassette that there was not much room left on side A for recording. So we'd do one more.

And a manic one it was. It starts off propulsive and then falls off a precipice-- you can hear it twisting in midair, with only a slight updraft of shambles to keep it from hitting the ground.

Then at 1:45, there's a parachute. The whole thing gies and haws in the wind a little, and damn if it doesn't land with force to buckle but not break our knees.

Listen for: my most heartfelt yelp of satisfaction at the very end...

WAR IS KING

This one starts out with Mike trying out his Invisible Sun chords. And promptly getting annoyed with me because I wasn't singing.

That's what his little whistle at 0:15 means: “Dude, this is tasty shit, OK? Make some noise.”

But it was taking me a little time to figure out where to go with this one. So by the time I did start singing, I was kind of pissed myself.

Bands, those funny little plans, that never work quite right...

Listen for: Larry's martial beat at 0:37. You goddam appropriate bastard, you.

GIANT HAND

This one starts out with Larry dragging a pencil across the wooden slats of Mike's louvered window shade. Then Mike joins in with a riff from Turning Japanese, done 16 RPM style. And we're off to the races...

Listen for: the “bridge” at 1:02, where with a couple of head gestures we somehow lock together for a mean tempo shift. Also, that “Hurts, man” at 2:12 is insou-sou-souciant...

WHAT AM I TO DO?

A few months ago I was rummaging through a box of old mixtapes, and I came across a beaten TDK shell I'd recognize anywhere. The label was partially torn off one side, leaving behind a thin white layer of paper. The label on the other side was intact, grayed and browned with age, with one word written in caps: SLEAZE.

This was the master tape of the songs that Mike, Larry, and I had recorded.

I handed it off to my friend DJ Birdhouse for digitizing.

So here is track 1, side 1. You'll hear that it starts during the outro to The Magnificent Seven, which is not a statement or anything. We just pushed “record” and went, paying no mind to the condition of the tape...

Listen for: the scream at the 2:30 mark. Dang.

WATCH THE TAPES

From a boombox perched on the pebbly black roof of a '73 Maverick we played our songs.

A group of about a dozen kids, a couple of years younger than us, gathered to listen.

“You guys are rock stars!”

No. No, we were not.

We were three bored teenagers killing a couple of early summer afternoons making noise.

And when I say “noise” I am not being immodest.

Mike had been practicing guitar in secret, stealing his little brother's acoustic and trying to recreate the new wave hits of the day.

Larry did not appear to have any ambitions that involved drumming, but he was game to grab a couple of pencils, and sit in front of some empty cassette cases and overturned trash baskets.

I was the most verbally inclined of the three of us, so there was a good chance that I'd find something to say when it came time to sing.

So we sat and improvised, recording four songs one afternoon, and another eight the very next day.

The results were often horrendous. Rhythm, pitch, meter-- we violated just about any organizing principle of music you might care to name.

And yet, there were these rare moments when our streams met, and carried us along for five or seven seconds of something resembling magic. You would not need to listen very hard to hear us smiling.

We were rock stars...

RIP PURR

Bye-bye Smoltz. Hope you're slinking around somewhere with Lemke, chasing invisible mice...