Monthly Archives: November 2016

“As a kid of the tape/CD generation, I’d frequently sift through my Dad’s records feeling slighted that the album art now was only a fraction of the size of what it used to be. A bunch of the jackets were all chewed up from when his dog got into them. Ray Manzarek’s face had been eaten right off of L.A. Woman.”

“He had all the cuts a Jersey boy from the ’70s should: The Flying Burrito Brothers, Fleetwood Mac, Warren Zevon, everything Springsteen ever did. Listening to “Thunder Road” with lyrics in hand is more than partially responsible for my hopeless Romanticism. He’d weave verse into cinema that would play over and over in my head. Though, I’d always get stuck on that line, ”you ain’t a beauty but hey you’re alright.” I mean, who says that? I’m positive this is something you should never say to a person.

Eventually we put the record player in the basement and got one of those five CD changers, but Dad got real defensive anytime Mom suggested throwing out the records. He wasn’t ready for that. Soon enough I inherited his collection and took it to Brooklyn where there was cheap used vinyl everywhere. Slowly I began to build on what the ol’ man had started.

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Okay, so the cover is eerie; the youngish Billy Joel’s face, seemingly sinking into an oozing tarpit, makes me want to run. But 1973’s Piano Man includes three tunes I absolutely adore, including “Captain Jack,” one of the greatest pop, er make that pot, songs ever written. It was the album on which Joel, thanks chiefly to the title track, seized the brass ring of stardom and staked his claim as America’s very own Elton John. Not everybody liked it; The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau charged that Joel “poses as the Irving Berlin of narcissistic alienation, puffing up and condescending to the fantasies of fans who spend their lives by the stereo feeling sensitive.” Ouch.

Me, I hear the alienation but not the condescension; on “Piano Man” Joel doesn’t seem to be looking down on the customers in that cocktail lounge so much as feeling empathy for them, and the same goes for the reefer-smoking kid who seeks refuge on his “special island” in “Captain Jack.” We all need something to get us through this world, Joel seems to be saying, and while that’s sad, it’s just the way things are.

Besides, Piano Man is hardly the album to sit around and contemplate your navel to. In fact it’s full of fast numbers, like the chug-a-lugging “Travelin’ Prayer,” which is powered by the banjo of Eric Weissberg and the violin of Billy Armstrong, and the bona fide funky “Ain’t No Crime,” on which Joel once again tells us that getting fucked up may be the only way to survive in this hellhole of a world of ours. And on the similarly funky and calypso-flavored “Worse Comes to Worst” Joel sings, “I’ll get along/I don’t know how,” which is a despairing sentiment if I’ve ever heard one, and really isn’t so far away from Samuel Beckett’s “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” As for “Somewhere Along the Line” it sounds like an Elton John song, and on it Joel, sitting in a café in Paris sings, “But in the morning there’ll be hell to pay/Somewhere along the line.” There’s no free lunch on this LP, and that’s one of the things I like most about it.

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In the second half of the 1970s, the hilly West Coast burg of San Francisco was noted for some bands, and a few of them specialized in the creation of punk rock. Amongst the more illustrious names are The Avengers, Crime, The Dead Kennedys, and Flipper, but one of the less championed troops in the city’s early punk narrative was Negative Trend. Their terrific self-titled 1978 7-inch has just been repressed by the folks at Superior Viaduct, and it’s an essential purchase for anyone striving to build a comprehensive punk library.

By this point, the late-‘70s punk uprising has been examined from a multitude of angles, with the majority of the approaches offering at least some measure of substantive insight. Since the whole explosion proved to be such a complex beast, indeed so multifaceted that individual perspectives can frequently seem downright contradictory, the value found in such a large number of diverse viewpoints should really come as no surprise. One particularly interesting outlook concerns how punk’s North American surge was inevitably doomed to initial failure due to the lack of an appropriate distribution network to service its burgeoning creativity as it was emerging.

It’s a tempting idea, but it tends to sidestep the reality of what actually did occur after The Dictators’ Go Girl Crazy! (my pick as the starting point of the unhyphenated punk era) first hit the racks in early ’75. Specifically, the impulse spread like wildfire, or better yet like a disease. In England, the situation grew into an epidemic that sent shockwaves through the country’s entire culture, but in the USA, the very land that gave the form its messy back-alley birth, the transmission remained either underground or largely disdained but the public at large.

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I rarely write about overtly political rock bands, primarily because I find politics morally lowering but also because, as Bob Geldof once said, “Music can’t change the world.” Political rock bands tend to preach to the choir, which is a complete waste of breath. If you really want to change the world—and I personally believe it can’t be changed, not really—quit said rock band and start a revolution. Form your own Weather Underground. Bomb stuff and shit.

But if political rock is useless, I still have a soft spot for Dicks, the Texas/San Francisco hardcore band fronted by the great Gary Floyd. He’s written reams of protest songs, but I can relate to them because they so frequently come down to wanting to off the pigs or the KKK or rich bourgeois bastards. It’s never going to happen, although the police have become more of a threat to public safety than ever, but I find listening to Floyd singing about hating the police rejuvenating. He’s all rage and vitriol, as anybody who’s been paying attention to the homicidal antics of police forces around the nation should be. Throw in a great band, and catchy melodies, and it’s no wonder Dicks are the considered one of history’s great hardcore bands.

I wish Floyd were a bit funnier, but he obviously takes his subject matter seriously, which is generally an aesthetic mistake in my Oscar Wilde-influenced world. But once again I’ll make Floyd and Dicks an exception, in part because Floyd was one of the first openly gay humans in the hardcore community and I can’t imagine that was a pleasant experience. As for his hatred of the police, it was a universally held notion in the early days of punk and hardcore, because the po-po treated your average punk rockers the same way they treated all defenseless minorities, namely like shit. So small wonder Floyd reached the boiling point, and his only means of expressing himself was through bile and more bile.

Dicks were formed in Austin, Texas in 1980, and 1983’s Kill from the Heart was their first full length. In addition to Floyd, Dicks included Glen Taylor on guitar as well as bass on “No Nazi’s Friend” and “Marilyn Buck”; Buxf Parrot on bass, backing vocals, and guitar on “No Nazi’s Friend” and “Marilyn Buck”; and Pat Deason on drums. They quickly won hearts and minds in the counterculture with their first single, “Dicks Hate the Police.” They certainly won over the Butthole Surfers, who immortalized their lead singer forever with the great “Gary Floyd.”

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Minus the aid of a financial stockpile it’s often difficult and sometimes well nigh impossible to experience many punk classics via their original format. So it’s tremendous that five killer chips off the genre’s block by The Residents, the Germs, The Dils, X, and Flipper are seeing reissue as they initially appeared; as 7-inch singles. Pressed on color vinyl and available separately in stores the week of April 14, the whole batch can be obtained as a special-priced bundle only by ordering through the website of Superior Viaduct.

Unfold and ogle a map of North America and it’ll be hastily apparent that California covers a lot of acreage, and is in fact the third largest territory in the US union. By extension the Golden State looms large in its country’s punk narrative through the spawning of thriving city-scenes in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Apart, they join New York and Cleveland as the USA’s healthiest regional explosions from ’76 to ’81; considered together, LA and San Fran become an unbeatable combination.

It might not seem a fair fight, but of the 50 states the 31st wields the strongest output of the pre-HC era; New York and Ohio had the heaviest hitters, the former municipality cultivating many of the defining acts in the style as the latter berg came to embody the sparks that can fly when the need for artistic expression collides with significantly grim surroundings, but simply put, California had the deepest bench.

As the music bundled by Superior Viaduct illustrates, Cali possessed a hefty share of vital bands; these units, two hailing from Los Angeles and two from San Francisco with one chalking up time in both cities, managed to unleash wide-ranging sounds persisting as highly influential. Indeed, the music ranks amongst the finest punk ever waxed.

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It’s all right there in the title. Washington, DC’s Black Market Baby was a great punk band, but they never went national despite all the fantastic songs they recorded—more than Fear, certainly, and more than my beloved Dictators even!—never received significant airplay, and remain beloved by DC punks but are largely unknown and unacknowledged outside our nation’s capitol. Is that unfair or what?

Ask Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat/ Fugazi/ Dischord fame, and he’ll tell you the answer is no. In fact, the whole notion kind of pisses him off. MacKaye was kind enough to speak with me about Black Market Baby, and he let me know he disagreed with former Government Issue singer John Stabb’s assertion (in his funny and perceptive liner notes to Coulda… Shoulda… Woulda) that Black Market Baby never got “their proper due within the punk music scene.” Said MacKaye, “I contributed a line to the press release of the reissue: ‘They were not underappreciated. They were a great fucking band.’”

A brief history: Black Market Baby was formed in 1980 when singer Boyd Farrell basically looted several other local bands for talent, snatching guitarist Keith Campbell from D. Ceats, bassist Paul Cleary from Snitch and Trenchmouth, and drummer Tommy Carr from the Penetrators. Mike Dolfi replaced Cleary on bass shortly after the band released their first 45, which they followed up with their 1983 debut album, Senseless Offerings.

But personnel changes were rife, they broke up several times only to regroup, and when Black Market Baby finally got around to recording their second LP (with MacKaye producing) in 1986, they couldn’t find a label to release it, although they came close with JEM, a large independent distributor trying to move into the record business. In light of this failure, Black Market Baby decided to call it quits, playing a farewell show in January 1988, only to regroup in 1993 and stick it out through 1997. Fortunately for all of us, in 2006 the Dr. Strange label released Coulda… Shoulda… Woulda…, which offers a grand and relatively comprehensive representation of the work of a great band.

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“My grandfather and his brothers own an old farmhouse in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts. The original house is nearly ancient, built before the Revolutionary War. It used to belong to my grandfather’s parents, and has since become a home away from home for five generations in my family. It’s an old, rickety structure on an overgrown, uneven green plot of land. The place reeks of mothballs and mold. But it’s a family gem nonetheless.”

“A few years ago, the family decided to put the old farm up for sale, after deciding that there were too many heirs to the property, yet not enough of them willing to take the time out of their busy lives to care for the poor old house.

The house has not yet sold. Still, my family, especially my grandpa, mourns the loss of the farm and the cherished moments and memories housed in its wobbly old walls. After all, it’s the memories that really form the structure of the old farmhouse; and it’s those memories that make it so beautiful.

One of my favorite things to do at the farm is to rummage through all of the archaic artifacts around the house. From playing the painfully out-of-tune piano, to digging through my great grandmother’s vintage coats, to stealing pots and pans for my Brooklyn home, there’s always something magical to find at the family farm.

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Of all of the bands that came out of New York City’s No Wave music scene, my faves have always been James Chance (aka James White) and the Contortions. The Contortions combined the atonal jazz skronk of Chance’s blurting and squealing alto saxophone with broken-glass-sharp shards of guitar, played atop one very funky bottom. I preferred Chance because you could actually dance to his music, agitated as it was, because in his own special way he never abandoned that James Brown groove—he just tortured it a bit.

How Chance’s sax stands up to that of “serious” jazz players is open to debate; while he briefly studied under the great David Murray, I think of Chance as an outlier, what with his brief tenure in Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, James Brown screams, nihilistic world view, and frequently antagonistic interactions with the very people who paid money to see him play live. These very “punk” attributes certainly separated him from the likes of his free jazz contemporaries, whose style he incorporated into his own playing. But the bottom line, when it comes to comparisons between Chance and the many other purveyors of free jazz is this: Can the guy actually play his horn, of is he just one very ballsy but amateurish poseur?

I asked my brother Jeffrey, a world-renowned free jazz expert, and this is what he said: “Regarding James Chance, I’m not quite sure where to rank him. Sonically, his alto falls neatly in the Luther Thomas/Noah Howard/Albert Ayler range. Chops-wise, I don’t think there’s a big enough pool of recorded material, especially material where he really stretches out, to see how good he really is, or could have been. That said, I think he’s ridiculously interesting, and captivating, as a soloist. What may have started as a joke, or a goof, very well could have morphed into something far greater.

John Lurie, who began in much the same vein, over time developed into an incredibly articulate player/composer. He outgrew the caricature he first presented himself as to become, in the end, a fine altoist whose sound fit hand in glove with his compositional skills. If James Chance ever played/recorded with some of the more jazz-oriented No Wave players, I think he could have done much the same thing. Imagine him sitting in with the Free Lancing-era James Blood Ulmer trio; that could have been the crucible. As it stands, however, you treat him as a joke at your own disservice.”

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Experimental music is by its very nature a risky endeavor. Occasionally something outstanding occurs, at other times the attempt is best forgotten, but far more often the results are moderately successful; add collaboration into the scenario and the dangers of failure are only heightened, a circumstance that makes the meeting of NYC psychedelic free-rockers Oneida and veteran avant-garde composer Rhys Chatham even more impressive. What’s Your Sign? documents their recent encounter, and it’s a prime example of raw, robust, experimental energies available on vinyl, compact disc, and digital November 11 through Northern Spy.

Amongst this collaboration’s numerous positives is multi-generational appeal, with What’s Your Sign? at least potentially roping in adventurous listeners spanning from NYC’s minimalist era all the way up to the current moment’s thriving experimental scene. That Rhys Chatham remains active and relevant beyond this record only increases its contents’ vitality; nobody pulled him out of retirement for this session, and in fact this is the multi-instrumentalist-composer’s second release this year; the other is the very strong Pythagorean Dream on the Foom label.

Chatham’s musical background stretches back to the late ’60s as he studied under electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick and played in the groups of essential drone-minimalists La Monte Young and Tony Conrad. His compositions date back to 1971, but perhaps due to his role as the first musical director of Manhattan’s The Kitchen, his didn’t get a full-length recording out until Factor X hit racks in 1983.

In the late ’70s Chatham’s artistic direction was profoundly altered through a performance by The Ramones. Subsequently, he became a component in the compositional wing of the city’s No Wave scene alongside Glenn Branca, an associate who Chatham utilized as guitarist for performances of his Guitar Trio back in ’78. But as Branca recorded earlier and more, much of the NYC avant-punk-experimental spotlight fell upon his profile, though with the arrival of the masterful Die Donnergötter in 1987 Chatham’s rep spilled beyond the city’s boundaries in earnest.

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