Jangle Pop: "Little Rage," The Mice (1987)

Cleveland based mid-'80s jangle pop and/or power pop trio. Brothers Bill (guitar/vocals) and Tommy Fox (drums/vocals) and Ken Hall (bassist/vocals) start a band, specializing in covers of The Beatles, The Who, and The Ramones. The underdog superhero vocals are key. Peak moment for the band: "Little Rage" featured on a joint single with Yo La Tengo in 1987. Another golden jangle pop moment, another non-one-hit-wonder come and gone. 

Jangle pop goes back to 1964-65, Byrds and Beatles (Jackie DeShannon and Carol Kaye), and is based on but not limited to the sound affects of a Rickenbacker 12-string guitar, or according to novelist Michael Chabon anyway. I'd still vouch for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000); and enjoyed his novel Telegraph Avenue (2012) about a record store always on the verge of going under. But I don't know anything beyond that and I didn't like the Wonder Boys movie. Nonetheless, after spending an evening with his 100 song playlist of jangle pop history I'm ready to thank him for a sweet tour through this sub-genre of often maligned guitar pop and conclude Chabon knows jangle pop a lot better than I do.

My introduction to the jangle pop timeline was the late-'70s, early-'80s window, Tom Petty, Shoes, REM, The Dream Syndicate, Soft Boys, like that. In 1980 I felt like Chrissie Hynde doing "Stop Your Sobbing" was the single perfect capsulization of jangle pop history as far as I'd come to know it at that time. I loved that electrified "The Bells of Rhymney" folk rock sound, and even better with some Mod max r&b new wave energy like The Pretenders underneath it. Come to think of it, I felt more or less the same about the Pretenders' Kinks cover as I did about The Records "Starry Eyes" from 1979. This was a jangle pop/power pop golden age for me; uptempo jangle pop, Punk/new wave jangle pop that pushes tempo. I loved that stuff. 

So I know most of Chabon's jangle pop playlist from its beginnings up to REM or the Smiths or The Jayhawks, even if I might have gone sometimes myself with different songs. But to be honest, the formula of jangle pop (and power pop, for that matter) did eventually wear out on me some and I began somewhere in the late '80s or early '90s to tune a lot of it out. After that when some jangle pop (or power pop) would come to my attention I was more jaded and harder to please. With old crank cliche attitudes about the most popular stuff of the day, none of whom I will waste your time by insulting again now.

Bonus then that Chabon's 100 song playlist not only includes a lot of the old classics I already knew and loved but some sweet new discoveries for me too. This gem from '87. The Mice from Cleveland. A 2003 release on Rough Trade from the Delays, the lead guy has since sadly passed, called "Hey Girl."  Heavenly vocal group jangle pop. And Warren Zevon, of all people, from 1966, Lyme & Cybelle, "Follow Me."  Chabon appears to be a serious fan and excavator of the deep jangle pop tracks. 

There are probably such playlists out there that find more contemporary 21st century jangle pop but this is a big drink of the 1960s through 1990s stuff. Check out Chabon's fun history of the genre and overview of the guitar sounds that make jangle pop on substack. 

Take Two: "Red Lights," Marbles (1976): 

"I would sell my mother for a chance to play guitar in his band

We're still playing all the old songs in the garage but it's just a mirage."

Whose band? A song about wanting to make hit records or play with the kind of guy who makes hit records. They want to play with the guy with the "Red, Red Lights in his eyes," in "his band"; not so much Joey Ramone but this mythical figure with the Red Lights of rock stardom in his eyes. This could be the singer, Eric Li, but he sounds doubtful.

The Marbles stardom constituted being regular headliners at CBGB's and Max's Kansas City in NYC 1976-1977. They made a shambolic power pop garage rock sound, serviceable, running on amateurish enthusiasm and proficiency. It works but it's not the special part. The special part is the lead vocal and multi-part harmonies; the call and response between them. The contrast of the slow building and frail lead vocal lifted up by the rough multi-part vocal harmonies, including two brothers. A total knockout. 

The group harmonies are triumphant. Beatlesque in the best sense; a whole greater than its parts. "Red Lights" is a power pop, jangle pop, woulda/coulda/shoulda been smasharoo from 1976 but it came out on a small independent record label, Ork Records, and disappeared. Not that I'm blaming Ork Records. They deserve credit for documenting this fragile retro-futurist gem of a record, and nearly four dozen other punk/new wave/power pop songs orbiting around CBGB's in the late '70s.  

Also ROIR Cassettes, where I first heard "Red Lights" as a standout track on their 1982 comp called The Great New York Singles Scene. In 1976 the Marbles were pre-Knack proto-New Wave band in their ties and Beatles' haircuts. There is a whiff of Sha Na Na oldies about them but the rough uncut diamond glitter of their 4-part harmonies makes it new and eternal rock & roll. 

I can't find much else by the Marbles. Try "Computer Games" or "Fire and Smoke." The bassist, Jim Clifford, shares ten songs the Marble's made between 1975 and 1978 and might be the only guy in the world trying to keep alive their memory. The lead singer, Eric Li, the contrast of his downcast vulnerability with Howard and David Bowler's brother harmonies absolutely key to the heroic underdog Marbles sound, dies of a drug overdose in 1989. Impossible now not to hear this as his song. 

Press Color, Lizzy Mercier Descloux (Light in the Attic Records, 2015)

Snooping around the margins of the late-disco era, 1978-1982, as I like to do, and in this case looking up the sub-genre of "dance-punk," I came across this 2015 Light in the Attic Records reissue of Lizzy Mercier Descloux's Press Color, originally released on ZE Records in 1979. 

The first few times I played the CD I was totally wowed on several levels: the low-key finesse and style of LMD's French dance-punk music, its occasionally credible disco energy, and especially by the mystery of how the heck I had not noticed LMD before?! Many listens later, and having read Vivien Goldman's illustrative liner notes, I realize LitAR and Michel Esteban, co-founder of ZE Records and LMD's long-time creative partner going back to her roots in France, deserve a lot of credit for the revelation of the music packaged all together on this reissue. And if you have any interest in Goldman's musical bailiwick, the global intersection of post-punk, arty punk with funk, reggae, disco and Latin musical gestures, and in particular those vintage post-punk years of  '78 and '79 this reissue collection is an essential add to your musical library.   

Actually, the original Press Color album had already crossed my radar in the 2000s but briefly and mildly dismissively. The album is only 24 minutes long, breaking rock era conventions and making the album billing feel like a little hype. There's one passible post-punk novelty, Arthur Brown's "Fire" reimagined quite effectively (very rare) as a disco song. The signature "disco" sound of a looped electronic bassline provided by guest Moog synth guy Alan Wentz. I actually might have heard this one randomly somehow in the early '80s, it has that kind of vague familiarity, but it left no great impression. The rest of the EP is whimsical, musical, DIY post-punk, flatteringly kindred to what the Raincoats were doing about the same time on the other side of the Atlantic but without the poignant dark punk social realist turns.   

But this LitAR Deluxe Edition-- and must say I've not been impressed by a lot of DE's before-- compiles all LMD's earliest recordings from 1978 and 1979 on ZE Records into something more like a real album in length, 46 minutes, and a more emphatically whole expression of LMD's music in this period. LMD was generally billed then as No Wave, part of a crowd of artists that hung around CBGB's and The Kitchen. She flirted with reggae and Afrobeat like many post-punkers in her day. 

(Sidebar: What are the greatest examples of people from loosely associated No Wave crowd making good disco or dance club music? Arthur Russell's Dinosaur L "Go Bang!" or Liquid Liquid's "Cavern" (both '82) come to mind but not many others? Let's also mention here Delta 5's No Wave adjacent Brit post-punk classic, "Mind Your Own Business," the original and in later EDM remixes.)

Tracks 1-8, the '79 Press Color album, makes up actually less than half the tracks on the LitAR reissue CD. Added on, presumably Esteban had a big hand in what gets packaged together here, are all LMD's recorded output from '78 and '79. A six-song EP of her No Wave edgy performance art duo experiments with guitarist D.J. Barnes, Tracks 10-15, from '78. And then tracks 9, and 16-18, were never released until 2003 but at least two of them for sure, and one of those, "Hard-Boiled Babe," has to be the single best song here, were recorded in 1979 but unfathomably never released back then. And then the last track, "Morning High," is some sort of reprise of a LMD collaboration with Patti Smith from the mid-'90s, re-commemorating their mutual affection for 19th century poet Arthur Rimbaud. Which arguably still fits this '78-'79 retrospective because, turns out, LMD was already hanging out creatively now and then with Patti Smith in the 1970s (see photo). 

Again, news to this rube but LMD first visits NYC as a wee 17-year old French teenager in 1975, writes a book of poetry and illustrations called Desiderata with the help of rock luminary Patti Smith, and was also a favorite love muse of NYC punk rock icon Richard Hell. I don't know if this qualifies her for NYC's 1970s art rock Hall of Fame but she's definitely getting shout-outs at the induction ceremonies. 

Looking at Desiderata as an old geezer now, and an agnostic know-nothing about poetry, it strikes me as blunt and energetic but maybe a slight work in the NYC's '70s literary canon? Patti Smith's introduction sets the stakes pretty high, and maybe steals the show? Shamanistic hippy punk woman mud wrestling with her male idols of modern art: "We are all the children of Jackson Pollock," a "licensed killer," a monster like his brothers, de Kooning, Gorky, and Rothko she chants and wails like only Patti can. After the gonzo art world intro, though, LMD's poems feel more solitary, humbler, existential, fewer allusions to artistic idols and much less world historical art and poetry combat. The most lasting for me was her reaction to hearing Burning Spear for the first time, 10, Dec, '77: "I feel my lanky sides/Misery. The mores of my race mystery-bitterness Foreign. Percussion almost alive. I will never recover from it."  

I also thought I knew a lot of the catalog of ZE Records in their heyday, LMD's creative partner Esteban's NYC record label: Kid Creole, Cristina, Was (Not Was), Material, The Waitresses, Suicide, Sweet Pea Atkinson. I loved me some ZE Records in those days. But I still somehow missed Lizzy Mercier Descloux?! All the records on this 2015 collection came out originally on ZE Records but I think I jumped on board with ZE Records just about the time LMD left ZE for her 4-album solo career with Island Records in the 1980s. Her early records on this collection didn't rouse much commercial attention in the US but they did catch the ear of Island Records honcho Chris Blackwell, who sponsors her '80s albums. When, unbeknownst to me and apparently most music fans in the US, LMD turns herself into this indelible French version of Paul Simon, even beat him to making a record with musicians from South Africa in 1984 (hear her Zulu Rock) and put out a quartet of global pop albums in the '80s that were semi-popular in France but went largely unnoticed in the states. But that is getting ahead of matters here. 

I even have a vague memory of ZE's 1981 Mutant Disco compilation. Tracks like "Bustin' Out" and "Out Come the Freaks" were favorites at the time but the title felt like a bit of a misconception to me. Finding Smith refer to everyone as the "mutant" spawn of Pollock has to be relevant source but at the time I expected more synths and dystopia based on the name. But what I got was more of August Darnell's hyped-up Latin-disco fantasias. Which I quite liked, mind you, but wasn't what I'd call 'mutant disco.' The concept did not completely land with me, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. In retrospect, LMD might have have helped put the concept across but she didn't have a track on that original ZE comp. 

I actually didn't first hear LMD's music, or so that I can recall, until ZE's bigger 2-CD Mutant Disco comp came out in 2003. Again, many of the ZE tracks on that bigger comp I also recognized from back in the day but LMD's three songs were more or less new to me and actually did strike me as more 'mutant disco'-like than a lot of the other ZE material. I liked the way LMD played with synths and sequencers and her Leftfield French disco diva persona. Sassy and playful; dry and ironic. (Bjork comes to mind as another kindred artist.) Anyway, LMD's vibrant personality jumped out at me but I still think even then I thought of her as more of a novelty one off, like Cristina, in neither case true, but if all you knew were "Fire" or "Drive My Car" not an unreasonable conclusion either.

But rather than just a reissue of Press Color the 2015 LitAR CD is a complete collection of LMD's earliest records from 1978 and 1979, before she embarks on her 4-album solo global pop career on Island Records. She's often categorized as No Wave in this earliest musical incarnation but there's more humor and sheer musicality in LMD's records than anything you'll find on Brian Eno's No New York comp of No Wave bands from the same period.The single off Press Color is a disco novelty combining synths and sequencer tempos with LMD's French and endearingly limited English. LMD's version of Peggy Lee's "Fever," wherein she translates "Fever" as "Tumor," and spells it "Tumour" on the vinyl release, personifies LMD's goofy gothic free spirit. Goldman calls her a post-punk chanteuse. 

Even her specific No Wave experiments, Tracks 10-15, the EP she produced under the moniker of Rosa Yemen in '78, crude, minimalist, and edgy as you might expect No Wave to be, still show off LMD's musicality and uncanny ability to convey so much with her largely indecipherable (by me) chirping and yelping. There's maybe a little Marlene Dietrich, a little Mary Margaret O'Hara, or some talk-singing French siren I don't know very well, Jane Birkin, in LMD's music? At any rate, she's no great singer but her singing always conveys so much charisma, and coupled with her remarkably intuitive DIY musical instincts generates an accomplished sound rare coming out of the late-'70s No Wave scene in NYC.  

"Hard-Boiled Babe," recorded in 1979 with its electro chill-out vibe, and its droll, Noirish, commentary about Hollywood turning people into whores, could be a Trip Hop hit from the late '90s, think Portishead, or some deep cut off a MIA mixtape from the 2000s. Recorded in '79 it sounds remarkably accomplished and futuristic. I have to assume the 'whoring' subject matter blinded Esteban to the original's hit potential but "Hard-Boiled Babe"is LMD's most fully-realized and poignant song in English from this period. And coming full circle feels like a '79 model to Vivian Goldman's '81 post-punk cult classic, "Launderette."  

Broken up again into its constituent parts I can see how LMD's early '78 and '79 records might have misfired in the US. The French, of course. The silly humor might have rubbed some angry punk artists the wrong way. Her affect, on record anyway, isn't nihilistic. It's tough and game for adventure but not submissive or revengeful. Her disco forays are charming but not full on bangers. There is always a sense with these early records that LMD is trying stuff on, experimenting, like an artist. Maybe that put off the "authenticity" crowd at CBGB's? 'She didn't sound angry or manly enough? But pull all her '78 and '79 records together, as the LitAR Press Color reissue collection does, and what I hear is a super talented stylist and one of the most musical and accomplished documents of the late '70s NYC post-punk No Wave movement I've come across. 

Fernand Braudel on The Structures of Everyday Life between the 15th and 18th centuries, 1400-1800: 

"Luxury then can take on many guises, depending on the period, the country or the civilization. What does not change, by contrast, is the unending social drama of which luxury is both the prize and the theme, a choice spectacle for sociologist, psychologist, economist and historian. A certain amount of connivance is of course required between the privileged and the onlookers-- the watching masses. Luxury does not only represent rarity and vanity, but also social success, fascination, the dream that one day becomes reality for the poor, and in so doing immediately loses its old glamour. Not long ago a medical historian wrote: 'When food that has been rare and long desired finally arrives within reach of the masses, consumption rises sharply, as if a long-repressed appetite had exploded. Once popularised [in both senses of the word - becoming "less exclusive" and "more widespread"] the food quickly loses its attraction... The appetite becomes stated.' The rich are thus doomed to prepare the future life of the poor. It is, after all, their justification: they try out the pleasures that the masses will sooner or later grasp. 

The moral is not surprising: every luxury dates and goes out of fashion. But luxury is reborn from its own ashes and from its very defeats. It is really the reflection of a difference in social levels that nothing can compensate for and that every movement creates. An eternal 'class struggle.' 

In short, as Marcel Mauss wrote: 'it was not in production that society found its driving force: luxury is the great stimulus'." from The Structures of Everyday Life, 1979-1981.  

************

Does this mean we can expect the masses will soon all be owning yachts? Or boats? Or at least vacation getaways? 

Luxuries are things that set the rich or elites apart but also tantalize ambitions in the poor. It's possible with a generous reading to imagine in this social relationship some possibilities for progress, and not just the dreary treadmill of the "eternal class struggle," IF so many actually existing rich were not such cold stingy misers. 

This is also a capsule chunk of an argument economic anthropology has with formal economic science. Econ 101 assumes production is the driving force in social development. Anthropology, Mauss and Braudel, say the pursuit of luxury, this eternal class struggle, is the driving force in social development. Although not "class struggle" like Marx, a dialectic struggle that will eventually resolve itself with armed revolution and then some fully-automated communist Kumbaya utopia. But eternal struggle like there will always be rich and poor and the latter will always desire the exclusive privileges of the former; a cultural social hierarchy in constant state of tension and flux. 

World building, or politics, from this anthropology angle then, Mauss, Braudel, Polanyi, Marshall Sahlins, might concern negotiating some sustainable peaceful balance between those that would rather defend existing inequality and property relations by force, conservatives, Republicans, police state fascists, and those that would rather liberate the poor from the predations of the rich. Braudel's sympathies are obvious and appreciated; if too CRT for the present. 

Liberal in the sense of government protections for individual human rights. Governments, communities, investing in progressively reducing the hardships of poverty, food insecurity, homelessness, lack of health care, education, etc. Not neoliberal in the sense of protecting wealth and markets from democracy and basic human rights. 

 

"Hey Blindman, Have Mercy On Me"'

Before and After The Fall 

My memory, spotty as it is, is that I first heard about The Fall from Carter Wood in 1979. 

Carter went to my high school, although we never hanged out in high school. He wrote for the school newspaper, took college prep classes, and was on the Honor Roll. In high school, by contrast, I was busy going to keggers with my buddies and trying to find ways to be alone with my girlfriend; and playing a little sports, although I wasn't all that good at that either. School was an afterthought; I felt no pressure to get good grades at home and found it exceedingly easy to skate by. In short, we didn't travel in the same circles. But a couple years into college, Carter going to Reed, me Portland State, we ran into each other at a Wipers show in Portland and we saw some more shows together over the next couple years; The Rats, Sado-Nation, Gang of Four, like that. He knew lots of punk or especially post-punk stuff like The Fall and turned me on to them. 

Grotesque ('80) was the first album, The Fall's third long player, that I fell for. Truth be told, my initial reactions to earlier albums, Live at the Witch Trials ('79) and Dragnet ('79) were much less enthusiastic; too shambolic, too dry and tuneless to my virgin Fall ears. But already by '81's '77-'79 Early Years, a cassette collection I ended up playing to death before losing, I was already reevaluating and thrilling to a handful of early classic Fall numbers: "Crap Rap 2/Like to Blow," "Industrial Estate," "Repetition," "Psychic Mafia," and "Rowche Rumble," etc. Listening to this early stuff again recently I can't get "Bingo Master's Breakout," their debut single, out of my head. 

The Fall were always on the surface forbidding, noisy, often sounding as if on the verge of collapse. They found some difficulty getting recorded in those earliest years, like other longstanding post-punk survivors The Mekons, because even independent record labels, like Rough Trade, thought they were too incompetent as musicians to sell records, or enough records to justify production and distribution costs anyway. 

Mark E. Smith (MES), the band leader, always center of attention on the mic, talk-singer, poet or wordy crank, take your pick, was the initial draw and, as it has turned out nearly forty years later, the only lasting figure in The Fall. MES was a punk! Not the cliche punk stereotype but as if you had found a real one in the wilds of England (read: outside London). He came off like an update of one of those 17th century English ranters depicted in Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down (1972). Angry, inscrutable, disjointed but unflappably cocky in his right to speak for himself. Whatever he was yammering on about he was a "Hip Priest," a "Slang King," and crucial to his staying power, he had a uncanny knack for writing catchy, impossible to escape earworm hooks. 

Again, not that I ever had much of an idea of what was really going on in MES's lyrics or ever studied them too closely. I've learned later he was into the books of Philip K. Dick, John le Carre, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, H.P. Lovecraft, and other weird fiction authors. I knew The Fall name came from an Albert Camus novel. But his earworms, for me, were never more than a hook, a fragment of the lyrics, and often as earwormy for the catchy way his vocal played off and against the music, his sneering slurs and chants set against angular, cut-up, bass-drum-driven (equally catchy) tempos; in short, as catchy for the music as for his actual words or anything they added up to. I've learned only much later that the words in one of my favorite earworms by The Fall were not even MES's original lyrics. 

A longstanding early favorite of mine was "Lie Dream of the Casino Soul" (1981). It lived in my brain for years as an impossible to escape earworm; specifically, a dramatic bridge that is repeated twice in the track. The music drops out, a simple circus-y keyboard figure and a chunky guitar riff strike a spare groove, before MES intones dramatically, "Meanwhile in the States/Proles retch/Dancing in the streets." It took the internet age for me to finally learn that the actual MES lyric in "Lie Dream" goes: "Meanwhile in the sticks/Proles rich/Dance in cardboard pants"?! Obviously, I was projecting. But, also, it just goes to show that often MES/The Fall's knack for hooks was as much about the music, the sonic punch of a musical passage, as about MES's words.  

Still, MES definitely had a way with hooks made out of trigger words and provocatively conspiratorial language; "Hail the new puritan," "Jew on a motorbike," "What About Us?" etc. This was his earworm superpower. "LEAVE THE CAPITOL! EXIT THIS ROMAN SHELL!" off the Slates EP,* also '81, maybe my first wave Fall peak, was another MES hook stuck in my head for eons. But I really had little idea what he was actually going on about, other than he hated London and wanted to blame it on Rome. I never looked into it too much. More recently, I thought I'd maybe ran into the source of "Exit This Roman Shell" in this history book I ran into recently, Escape From Rome, before I realized the book came out in 2019. Still, a rich historical allusion is what MES's image of London or Britain trapped in dead Roman traditions tapped into. 

"New Face in Hell," another early fave, sported lines that went: "Wireless enthusiast intercepts government secret radio band and uncovers secrets and scandals of deceitful type proportions." He appeared to be mocking communications snoops while confessing his avid curiosity in scuttlebutt. Like he's swapping shop talk with his conspiracy theory buddies at the pub. MES was also often satirizing the pop music process; the hype machines at NME and elsewhere in the music press. Or bragging about how legendary he was and is to the bitter end; or bitching about how unappreciated he remains. He was funny, caustic, obscure, over half the time I experienced his vocals mostly as gruff barks, yowls, cleverly accenting the tempos, that varied between circus funereal melodrama and Bo Diddley on drugs.  

The title of "NFIH" refers to a movie from 1968, the paranoid conspiracy theory vibe "of deceitful type proportions" is vintage MES.

Original postpunk sublimity. The Fall's music in the early 1980s was called "Mancabilly," for Manchester rockabilly; or MES called it "Country 'n' Northern," as in northern England. MES sums up his favorite things as: "Scottish people, cats, Coronation Street [British soap opera set in Manchester], and Can." Like Can, OG German Krautrockers, already legends by the late '70s, the Fall were a mixture of high and low, progressive primitivists, if you will; MES going all in for the spoken word as performance art but always set to shambolic tribal postpunk sounds. He asserts "I am Damo Suzuki," former Can vocalist, notorious for his improvised free-associative lyrics, in one Fall song. In sum, The Fall, 1980 to 1984, that lineup, MES, Marc Riley (keyboards, guitar, banjo), Craig Scanlon (guitar, piano), Steve Hanley (bass, guitar), Paul Stanley (drums, keyboards), Karl Burns (drums, guitar), and Brix Smith (guitar), were the Fall peak in my first wave experience of the band.  

I know some people think the Fall were over after Hex Enduction Hour ('82), when Marc Riley left the band and Brix joined. I'm less partisan about Riley or Brix on guitar; I love both Grotesque ('80) and Hex Enduction Hour, Riley's albums, and Perverted By Language and Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall  ('84), (more or less) Brix's albums, for different reasons but more or less equally. During this classic period the band could do the slow Sturm und Drang, darkening MES's working class crank poetry (like Suzuki, like Pere Ubu, like Nick Cave), but were best for my money at uptempo, polyrhythmic, heavy melodic bass rumble and clatter (including often two drummers and always some pounding extras, plinky keyboards, kazoos, etc). The thick bass center of that now classic Fall sound is as signature post-punk Manchester as New Order's Peter Hook or anybody else. This was peak postpunk Fall for me.  

I remained on board through Wonderful and Frightening World (WAFW). I mean, I listened to each of their studio releases from Grotesque to WAFW pretty soon after they came out and played them many times. But I started to drift after that, turning to other music, other records, giving only glancing attention to The Frenz Experiment ('88), and then nothing for years after I am Kurious Oranj ('88). I even saw them a couple of times in this period, good shows. I liked the title track "I am Kurious Oranj. Another bass-centered guitar jangle, reggae inflected, flourishes of atonality, MES rocking his claptrap about being the unappreciated hitmaker. The sound is there but, and this had maybe been coming on for me for a bit, maybe "Slang King," which I liked, but maybe sealed the deal for me in 1984. It felt like MES was already settling into a schtick, too much repeating himself, the cut-up poetry of a self-aggrandizing crank from working class Manchester, England. 

Cool but I drifted away. To be sure, some of it was what I was doing with many of my punk/new wave/postpunk favorites in the late '80s. They quit or fizzled or I lost interest and moved on to something else: Husker Du, Public Enemy, MJ, Madonna, New Zealand's Flying Nun Records, etc. Really, too much music, too little time for listening to music. But maybe some of it was I ran into a wall with the MES persona? It had grown stale. 

Rip It Up and Start Again 

I returned to The Fall recently while reading Simon Reynold's Rip It Up and Start Again (2005). 

Reynold's avowedly "personal history" of postpunk music between 1978 and 1984. I've gathered since reading the book it has its critics. I will paraphrase: Too British, too much Green Gartside/Scritti Politti, a whole section devoted to the tenuously postpunk, "The New Pop and New Rock" (from Human League to Frankie Goes to Hollywood)." I have some sympathy here for both sides (more Talking Heads/Eno in the next edition, please) but I liked the angle Reynolds takes: postpunk was any music that was essentially created as inspiration or reaction to the Sex Pistols hostile takeover of the British charts at the end of 1977 and beginning of 1978. This covers the conventional postpunk canon, PIL to Throbbing Gristle. But also 2-Tone to Duran Duran, the latter of whom early on explicitly cite the Sex Pistols commando assault on the charts as a model (even if they were equally committed to not sounding anything like ugly punk rock, which they snarked in the music press at the time). 

Anyway, Reynold's write-up of The Fall tweaked my interest. He makes a compelling case for recognizing Hex Enduction Hour ('82) as their best album. I feel like I toggle between HEH and Perverted by Language ('83). But what I realized most in Reynold's informative review of The Fall's long career was how much more Fall there was after I tuned out. MES died in 2018 at the age of sixty; he was a alcoholic and struggled with his health for years. Still, the most lasting legacy of The Fall might be how long they lasted. Between 1988, when I tuned out, and 2018, MES's death, The Fall put out twenty more albums. They've put out over fifty live albums, only a couple of which I've heard.  And a bunch of singles; most I'd heard up to "Free Range" from 1992 but I don't think anything after that.  

At any rate, ready to acquaint myself with more of the Fall catalog I poked around and decided I'd also read long-time Fall bassist Steve Hanley's book The Big Midweek: Life Inside The Fall (2014) while digging into some more Fall. I always like doing this: reading about some music while listening to it. But it used to be magazines and music zines; now it's books. In this instance, this turned out limiting in that Hanley's account of the Fall's records stops in 1998 in a fiery breakup. So nothing really on The Fall's last two decades of records but good background on the longest-tenured Fall operation from 1980 to 1998. 

The Fall have gone through many lineup changes since their beginning. The only mainstay 1977 to 2017 is MES. But Steve Hanley, bassist, is the longest running Fall member besides MES, lasting in the band from 1979 to 1998. Moreover, his resonant bass sound is considered, and this take has been endorsed by MES, foundational to the original blueprint of The Fall sound. Riley and Hanley were roadies, hauling the band's equipment before being asked to join the band as teenagers in '79. Once up and running Hanley's bass became the axel around which The Fall's sound evolved.

Not sure if I've ever read a book about touring musicians who actually loved touring. Living on the road is hard. In the best circumstances the musicians enjoy some intensely strong performances and, hopefully, maybe some groupie party action, notably none in Hanley's account for The Fall, but life on the road generally sucks. In short, the corrosive grind of touring with an erratic, endlessly combative MES for eighteen years is the prevailing theme of Hanley's book. 

And the final straw for the original lineup, or what was left of it, Hanley and Burns, was MES messing with their instruments on stage during a performance in 1998. They fought, stormed off stage, and finally once and for all any remnant of the early Fall band broke-up. That was that. But, must say, I actually remember seeing MES doing something like that on stage, messing with other band member's equipment and them visibly not enjoying it, at least ten years earlier. The last straw was likely a long time coming. 

Another limitation of Hanley's book is as a source for greater insights into MES's lyrics. Hanley doesn't offer much. You'd like a phrase or two but then nowhere, he opines. And undeniable. MES at least some if not most the time, reportedly, used a cut-up style, remixing randomly a bag of lyrics; like Dadaists, William S. Burroughs. In Hanley's account the guys in the band paid most attention to MES's lyrics when they thought they heard lines insulting them. Otherwise, not much to offer. 

(I don't know if I'll ever get to it but I see now there is a book about MES called Messing Up the Paintwork: The Wit and Wisdom of Mark E Smith from 2018 that might answer any remaining questions about MES's wordsmithing.) 

Some of MES's irritating ticks were funny, though. Hanley complains that on early tours he was constantly making the band watch The Producers (1967) or Zulu (1964), so making fun of Nazis and Britain's Alamo last stand against native Africans. While in the tour van Hanley and his bandmates got into listening to The Clash, or especially other Manchester groups of the day, Joy Division, New Order, Echo & the Bunnymen, Smiths, and MES would invariably grouch about what shit they all were and force the band to listen to Frank Zappa.

If Hanley has an axe to grind it's that MES doesn't give the band or him enough credit for The Fall's music. As Hanley tells it, from 1980 to '98, some music was composed with the band all together, collaboratively, but most of it was MES writing the lyrics on his own, or early on with Riley or Scanlon, and the band, led by Hanley, coming up with the music on their own, without MES, and then going back and forth with MES editing songs via cassette copies and then finally rehearsals all together. 

There is also a scene in Hanley's book when some reputable studio producer is having a final meltdown, fed up with MES's methods, lamenting his efforts to make the instruments and recording sound good in the studio, only to have MES take the recording home and alter it with a home cassette recorder and then ask the producer to turn his cassette recorded version into the record they put out! MES, not much of a musician, was instrumental to the Fall sound, from beginning to end; for better or worse. 

And Hanley's bass sound was totally essential to the original blueprint of The Fall sound. Both these things, MES and Hanley being crucial to the original, peak or classic, Fall sound, regardless of Hanley's grousing, are still true.  

More stuff I've learned reading about and listening to The Fall again recently: 

1) There is this Complete Peel Sessions box set of The Fall doing 15-20 minute live set recordings with DJ John Peel at the BBC studios that came out in 2005. The box compiles 24 sessions the band recorded for Peel's radio show between 1978 and 2004. The uncanny part is how Peel seems to get the best out of The Fall, many live in the BBC versions besting LP versions of Fall songs. 

Sample classic session from 1980:

I'm not saying there are no duds in the Peel Sessions-- again, late '90s was obviously a very rough period, MES going through some kind of substance abuse breakdown-- but with Peel the strong sets stretch into the '90s easy, even the early '00s, after MES's breakdown. If there needs to be a one-stop- shop record with The Fall this would have to be my recommendation. It's very expensive but free all over youtube.  

2) So, again, keeping in mind I knew almost nothing about The Fall's recorded output after '88, so Hanley's second and last decade, and then the next two decades this century, when MES put out 12 more albums. Maybe a song here or there but no albums. But I've been dabbling enough around these last three decades of The Fall lately to suggest it appears clearly that the breakup with Hanley and the old lineup in 1998, actually, artistically rejuvenates MES some. The Unutterable (2000), especially Fall Heads Roll ('05), and Your Future Our Clutter ('10), for examples of his post-breakup output, sound stronger again to me. Like MES learned how to rock out with his band again, even if this likely meant bossing them around, nearly all his post-'98 bandmates are a generation younger; and meant bossing them around in a way Hanley and the long list of other bandmate casualties could no longer endure. At any rate, in my best rock critic voice, if haphazard and terribly incomplete survey, MES's post-'98 records show MES was still integral to the composition of The Fall sound and could reproduce that sound, or exhilarating facsimiles, with other groups of musicians. 

For instance, immersing myself again in The Fall for the past few months, what's striking to me is how much I've returned to this 27 minute master-mix of various versions of a song called "Blindness" or "(Deaf And) Blindness" that MES recorded with a Fall lineup in the '00s, after his breakup with the Hanley unit. A version appears on the last Peel Session in '04 and a studio version appears on the Fall Heads Roll LP* released in 2005. In addition to his knack for the verbal hook, MES retained a remarkable knack for recreating the classic Fall sound: Shambolic bass tunes, dirty metal guitar riffing, some twisted pop keyboards; the band loose but tight with MES. "Blindness" locks into this thick hypnotic groove, riffing guitar, heavy bass swagger, and a perfect minimalist keyboard melody. An intoxicating rocker you want to go on forever and it almost does clocking in at over 26 minutes of drone rock madness. MES barks out stuff, name drops some dead celebrities, a hook he repeats only the way he can,"Hey Blindman, Have Mercy On me," is about all of any story I pickup but there is again, all these years later, MES and his way with the hook. Also, this is very late postpunk mind you, even towards the end of the early '00s neo-postpunk thing, Interpol, The Killers, and near 30 minutes of a postpunk superjam bliss by The Fall to my ears. 

At any rate, I'm not saying there are not times, before and after '98, when MES doesn't sound like the indecipherable crank street drunk calling out everybody; barking, slurring, semi-coherently at best. Again, I rarely pick up more than a phrase here and there without looking at a lyric sheet. But it must be said, what Fall albums and records I've sampled before and after the big breakup he never sounds again quite as sick and bad as he did in those final few years with the original lineup, and he remains to the end the inscrutable and hostile postpunk wordsmith; "Your Future Our Clutter," "Sub-Lingual Tablet," and, ending in 2018 with, "New Facts Emerge." Indeed they do. 

3) Going way back to This Nation's Saving Grace ('85), regarded by the faithful as The Fall's best, or according to allmusic.com anyway, and Bend Sinister ('86), both of which I shamefully missed when I dropped out with The Fall in the mid-'80s, I would now add to their classic period, stretching that period from 1980 to 1986. TNSG burnishes MES's northern Mancunian nativist schtick while adding electro beats and proving again his mastery with the long edgy jams. "Bend Sinister," again, absolutely no memory beyond maybe "Mr. Pharmacist" via college radio, which stood out to me as a cover I knew, doubles down on "LA" from TNSG, and might be Brix's biggest Fall album. It appears to have more Brix song credits than ever. And there's this California surf-noir guitar/bass sound, not unheard of in the earlier Fall, but never more prevalent than on Bend Sinister that could be attributable to Brix. Anyway, both albums still focused in a way that starts to unravel and/or lose steam with The Frenz Experiment and I'm Curious Oranj, or that's my case anyway and I'm sticking to it for now. 

Also, still notable that their only proper Mancunian anthem, "Hit the North," doesn't appear before The Frenz Experiment ('88), when it appears they were losing sufficient steam as a band to produce engaging albums and were becoming preoccupied with turning into a non-hit singles band. They maybe couldn't figure their way out of that stuck-place for awhile. Another tension in Hanley's book is he and Brix really wanted to see The Fall get big hits. MES wanted that too but only on his incorrigible terms, which were way too weird and tuneless and hostile for Top 40. 

4) So how big of asshole and creep was MES really?  

In Hanley's telling, basically, MES was a drunk, so was Hanley eventually, but MES was drunk most the time, and an even bigger asshole when he wasn't drunk; according to Hanley throughout several parts of the 1980 to 1998 period you could measure how long MES had gone without a drink by his temper. At about 45 minutes it was always time to duck and cover. 

MES was also proudly nativist. He acted like he was a local polka king, and fancied he had connections with the local mafia, according to Hanley. He was incessantly oppositional, hated most everything that wasn't Scottish or from Manchester. Right from the get-go, in "Bingo Master's Breakout," it's like he imagines he's MC at a local bingo night, a mouthy nutcase breaking from the script and ranting to the local hangers on in a language he imagines only fellow Mancunians can understand.  

This gives MES and The Fall a certain rooted charm but also had its limits. When asked about Brexit shortly before his death he is reported to have expressed support for Brexit and insisted that next England should immediately go to war again with France. 

MES drops N-words in songs. I know of a couple instances. Once as "obligatory N-word plural," qualifying it as a scorned social role, not necessarily Black. And another time in relation to the Irish, I think. So I've never caught him using it in direct reference to a Black person but the N-word metaphor as a trigger word is part of MES's vocabulary, for sure. And maybe the school teacher in me but I can't hear it without cringing defensively. On the other hand, The Fall played in several Rock Against Racism benefit concerts back in the day, even though MES became a total crank about the music benefit concert scene once it blew up in the '80s. And MES relates with pride, true or not, that Bo Diddley once told him that The Fall were his favorite English group. 

MES was also a serial homophobe in his lyrics, as I've alluded before, but nothing, thankfully, more insulting or criminal comes out in Hanley's long account. You get the impression early on he felt menaced by the aggressive interests of gay men, which as long as no one got hurt strikes me as funny. MES fleeing his gay fans. Another group to disdain with his petty hatreds. 

As for women, Brix looks like a post-punk trophy wife to be sure, and MES was from the early '80s on mostly aloof and imperious with his bands, but he was also always bringing his girlfriends into the band, often to the chagrin of the rest of the old hands. Also then perhaps reflecting a small check on his tyrannical tendencies. 

In Hanley's account MES is frequently throwing stuff in fits of rage, acting like a "Little Hitler" around shows, bossing people around, spitting invective. He throws pipsqueak publicists out of The Fall's backstage tour space on the regular. But MES's victims were typically, as the saying goes, and as it goes with most misanthropes, the people closest to him. 

5) Finally, feeling more generous this time around with The Fall, here's their late classic phase again. (The Brix years, basically.) When they're scoring theatrical productions and going on TV. They still look awkward, then and now. It's their glammy pop phase, Smith in purple, Hanley looking like he's dressed for church, and Brix adding the LA glam punk Blondie wannabe look to our awkwardly turned out provincial northern lads. 

But what an impossibly insider-baseball catchy post-punk doomed bid at a pop record. "Big New Prinz" ('88) is so preposterously not a Top 40 record and so undeniably a Fall record that you imagine maybe it was a big hit record. But, not quite, peaking at 59; "There's a Ghost in My House" was their actual chart peak reaching 30 in 1987. This was the best The Fall could do when they were actually trying to sell out. A triumph of style and personality. The tune has got that clap and stomp along Fall tempo, the choppy repetition, the compellingly postpunk tribal rumble of bass and drums. The noir guitar riffing is pro forma but encases the snotty attitude of a combustible pop song concoction. And then MES on the mic:

Check the record

Check the record

Check the guy's track record

Check the record

Check the guy's rock record

Then the band chanting in the background: 

He is not appreciated  

And then follows a salute to the legend, Slang King, The Big New Prinz:

Drink the long draught down

Drink the long draught

Drink the long draught down for the Big Priest!

He, apparently, drink too many long draughts down but is now a marvel for how long he actually did last as a postpunk Hip Priest, a proto-postpunk rapper, as if he were barking and shrieking into a bullhorn on a street corner, an oppositional crank and earworm artist to the very end!

Brian Eno's Ambient Music in Early Electric Miles Davis

I could be mixing it up with something else but I'm fever dreaming Brian Eno had to be listening to this Miles Davis recording of a David Crosby song, "Guinnever," when Eno collaborated with Jon Hassell to make his much beloved by me (and, yes, his hilariously pretentiously titled), Fourth World, Vol.1: Possible Musics (1980) and his solo album On Land (1982), both abstract portraits of "possible" geographic spaces.  

Apparently, when Crosby first heard Mile's version of his song he was so disapproving Davis kicked him out of his studio. Crosby's beautiful melancholy folk pastoral, "Guinnevere," is stretched truly beyond recognition, and to nearly a half an hour of music in the version I share below. It's like the barest pulse of a melodic bass line from the original, everything stretched out as if surveying strange mysterious landscapes, not unlike Eno's later ambient albums. This barest ambient impression of a melodic bassline in "Guinnevere," which Xgau says actually was already coming from Mile's Sketches of Spain classic, functions as ambient launchpad into percolating tempos of the thick steamy tropics, fluttering in and out of exotic slow-building bird mating rituals, Arabian sandstorms and lunar space landing keyboards, ghostly horn fantasias, epic ambient tableaus of jazzy space rock soundtrack music. 

Miles recorded "Guinnevere" in 1970, with a lot of his fusion regulars of the day, Wayne Shorter, Airto, John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Bennie Maupin; a long list of musicians contributed to the recording. The album with a seven minute version came out in 1979, on Circle in the Round, just in time for Eno, always in the mix in those days, working with Jon Hassell, experimental trumpet player (actually, to my crude ears he sounds more than a little like a spacey foghorn tape-manipulated version of Miles), and composer (Vol. 2 of the Fourth World series on his own is equally stirring; and he has other very good ambient albums as well). And then Eno's On Land in '82; again, sonically sketching geographic terrain like Mile's "Guinnevere." There it is several of Eno's key ambient moves in early electric Miles. 

By ambient, big word now, I mean in the OG sense: unimposing and slow developing soundscapes that work well as background music. They fill the space without overwhelming the space; you can ignore the music if you want but if you do pay attention to it you can sometimes find ambient music mesmerizing and in moments physically and/or emotionally stimulating. Eno's original definition of ambient music, basically. 

I know there's all kinds of other shades of ambient music now but I'm going back to Eno's '70s originals, and even before that, the proto-ambient music source, early electric Miles Davis, 1970 to 1974, outtakes from his Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, On the Corner sessions, stretched out, sprung like Stockhausen ambient jazz landscapes, exotic soundscapes, beautiful black and blue soundtracks like "Guinnevere."

Like a space age Black Power music; Miles electric '70s peers with some of Sun Ra or Coltrane's most out there free spiritual jazz. But Miles is strictly secular, his spirituality rooted in the blues. His electric music an Afro-futurist meditation on the blues in 1970s that sounds cold, fierce, and visually other-worldly. Miles on another high modernist musical tip, like music writer Greg Tate was always writing about him. 

I still don't know how much this is Miles and how much producer Teo Macero, a topic of some controversy apparently. This half hour long suite was left off the studio release of Bitches Brew (1970) and appears first on the 1998 release of The Complete Bitches Brew sessions. In the same vein try "Calypso Frelimo" off Get Up with It (1974). Space rock funk at another early ambient peak for Miles.

Miles was a mother in these years; a jazzy space rock exorcist unable to escape his demons. Churning out beautifully dark and visionary music.  

Here's the Crosby, Stills, & Nash original, 1969, all melancholy pastoral acoustica, beautifully forlorn harmonies, "she/Ma'lady/we shall all be free," or for the purposes of enjoying the song anyway. Works for me but how Miles got from this CSN song to his electric voodoo Miles in outer space version I do not know but at any rate what a near miraculous act of musical creativity. Crosby warmed to it years later. 

I know electric Miles is way too slow and freaky austere for casual CSN pop music fans; think "Almost Cut My Hair" stretched and slowed down to three times its original length. But if you're into jazz or ambient or exotic longform background music early electric Miles and Eno should not be missed. Sonic safari music that goes well with reading. And strong coffee. Recommended. 

If it took CSN for you to read this far I don't have any problem with that. 

Transcendental Bubblegum Mature Kitsch

 "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)," Abba (1979)

To watch this video without sound you might think it was Abba doing the Brill Building. Turn it up and it's a galloping cheesy crystal ball of late classic era disco, right after "Disco Duck" has stormed the Senior Centers and Schlager disco like Abba rules the cruise ships. And how Stellas and Bellas and Agnethas and Fridas get their grooves back, I think, to this day. Begins with some classic rock fanfare. An Arabian Nights chug raises the pace when some big synths kick in, augmented by frilly keyboards. The vocals start out drab cliches, Abbaesque vocal group harmonies, we know this formula. And then, as if waking up, Agnetha leans into the cliches, ripping off a stem-winding couplet, "Not a soul out there/no one to hear my prayer," and the chorus lifts off, "gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight/won't somebody help me chase the shadows away/gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight/Take me through the darkness to the break of day." SOS! Man overboard: Transcendental bubblegum mature kitsch! And, again, 1979! TGIF.  

Aging Pub Rock Eminence Nick Lowe at the Tractor Tavern on a Saturday Night

Went to Nick Lowe show at the Tractor the other night. Not sure if it was as good as a "Rollers Show" on a Saturday night for Lowe and his buddies back in the 1970s but perfect in its way for my first rock show since before the pandemic. 

Long hiatus, too long, but I've always been a little ambivalent about live music. I attended lots of shows in my 20s and 30s, witnessed many great ones, but overall have to admit the ratio of good shows to meh or even bad ones for me was always disappointing. And the bigger the venue the worse the ratio. I think I can count on one hand the number of good shows I've seen in an arena size venue (Springsteen, Prince, Neil Young, P-Funk, Roy Orbison, Everly Brothers)? Even less in a stadium; and all pre-Jumbotrons at that. And I never warmed much to outdoor music performances until I accepted them as a different beast altogether; a concert in a park on a sunny afternoon, the music more incidental, part of the background. Combine all that with an aging body, standing around for hours taking an increasing toll, and once I hit my 40s my live music attendance became far more picky. A small handful of shows in clubs or theaters in any given year was good for me. 

And then Covid hit. Never liked crowds either, or standing in line much, although a sweaty crowd in a hot club, the band into it and feeling the energy, was always a welcome exception. But the pandemic, with all its weird people reactions, YOLO, "masks are for sheep," and anti-vaxxer idiocy just blew my live music hesitations up into a No Way am I risking rubbing up against some superspreader moron to see some live music. Not necessary. I'll listen to my records; thank you very much. 

Now once vaccinated, and my super old parents survived a bout of Covid, I began to lighten up a little about crowds. I resumed attending some crowded sporting events; still found crowds a little creepy but I survived. And now Nick Lowe, nonetheless, is my first indoor live music event back in my preferred live music small club setting since January 2020; The Delines, and the Mekons a short time before that, as I recall. And I survived, again, and as has always been the case with good live music I feel a new positive energy for going to shows. That, right, will last at least until I attend a show that turns out meh or lousy. 

That won't be Nick Lowe and Los Straitjackets, at any rate. LS are a crack outfit that perform in wrestling masks. One or two members go back to the Raybeats and NY Rocker days in the early 1980s but this particular configuration came together in Nashville in 1988. Superb musicians, playing driving surf music and classic pop instrumentals, they aren't Rockpile but they're the next best thing or here and there maybe even better. They can do post-Everly Brothers country rock, Rockpile's (Dave Edmunds, Billy Bremmer, and Terry William's) wheelhouse, but get most excited doing pop novelty stuff, New Wave, and Bubblegum pop. They encored Saturday's show with Shocking Blue's "Venus."  

Nick is obviously proud of the band and they him; and they play together like a loose mutual admiration society. Watching Lowe hold court like this it occurred to me what a pivotal role as an affable ambassador to the wider pop world Lowe must have played for all the oddballs and eccentrics at Stiff Records in the '70s punk/new wave England. He produced the first five Elvis Costello records (all 'A' albums, says me). He produced The Pretenders first hit single, a cover of the Kink's "Stop Your Sobbing." Also brilliant. And a whole bunch of other good punk rock or pub-rock-meets-new-wave records by The Damned and Graham Parker and Dr. Feelgood and Carlene Carter and Wreckless Eric and John Hiatt, etc. 

I was actually surprised to be reminded that Rockpile play on Lowe's first two solo albums, Pure Pop for Now People (1978; known as Jesus of Cool in UK) Labour of Lust (1979), because of how much those albums departed from the country rock model of previous Dave Edmunds and Brinsley Schwarz records that Lowe played on. Obviously, in retrospect, Nick with those two eponymous solo albums was trying to score with the New Wavers. But three Top 40 hits in the UK, one in the US ("Cruel to be Kind"), weren't enough commercial success, apparently, and after those he went back to production and eventually his true roots pop preoccupations, never abandoning the corny humor. Still, as far as peak 1978 to 1982 New Wave albums go, posterity might celebrate Nick's first two solo shots more than we did back then. They'd both rank high on any peak New Wave album list I could come up with, that is for sure; Talking Heads, Cars, Devo, B-52s, XTC, Parallel Lines, This Year's Model, Dare? Pure Pop and Labour of Lust were uptempo, jangly, and hooky classics. 

When I listened to Lowe's album from last year, Indoor Safari, his voice sounded diminished. Not surprising, as he's 75, for crissakes! But mediocre material on the album, "Trombone," for instance, comes to life in person with Los Straitjackets. And live, in person, Nick's old voice adds a fragile emotional power when he slows things down. I teared up as he milked every last drop of sentiment out of versions of "What's So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding" and, to end the show, an acoustic version all alone, to finally drive everybody out he jokes, of "Alison" or "My Aim is True."  

Nick's tall, thin, rakish in a shock of white hair and Clark Kent glasses. A charmer, he primes the crowd with stories about the wild going's on at the show the night before and wry cryptic references to the chaos outside. I associate a particular condition, an infatuation, say, with 20th century pop music, with a scene in the 1995 film 12 Monkeys. Bruce Willis, a crazed refugee from a future dystopia, drools over Fats Domino's 1956 version of "Blueberry Hill" playing on a car radio. A fetish for the 20th c pop music jukebox. Lowe is a product of this condition, as am I, and in Nick's specific case he loves everything rock & roll between 1954 and 1965 and distills it into ageless pure pop for, well,  honestly, yesterday's people, or surviving 20th c pop music loving people, but  hopefully, somewhere, some Now People too.    

Rock & Roll Showman: David Johansen, 1950-2025, R.I.P.

When I first read Robert Christgau's memoir, Going into the City (2015), I was disappointed to learn that his favorite album of all-time had changed to Television's Marquee Moon, and was no longer The Clash's debut album; US version, that came out in 1979, for me, original 1977 version for him. (Thanks for the edit.) I'd had the impression for years, decades, that The Clash album was his favorite and one of mine too; I liked that we shared that. Claiming Marquee Moon now, although a good album, struck me as a lame homer gesture. Somewhat understandable as something people do as they get older, things closer to us grow more dear, but too damn austere an album for an Xgau number one, by my lights. I might have expected his move would have soured me a bit on his Stranded (1978) Desert Island faves the New York Dolls but not at all. Actually, either one of the Dolls original classic albums from the early 1970s, New York Dolls (1973) or Too Much Too Soon (1974), would have made more sense to me as his all-time album favorite: NYC homers but undeniably, quintessentially, irrationally exuberant rock & roll music. Todd Rundgren gives the debut the glam rock power pop sheen of a big loud (if somewhat rickety) runaway subway train. "Personality Crisis" and "Jet Boy" should have been hits; "Frankenstein" is an epic hard rock masterpiece. The second album, TMTS, wasn't the song album of the debut but Shadow Morton's production might have sounded even better. The band turns covers of Sonny Boy Williamson, The Coasters, and Philly International, really, everything they touch, into a gloriously big and trashy burlesque of 1950s rock & roll. The Cramps, for one celebrated example, were born of such lustful irreverence. My enthusiasm for everything Dolls even carried over into all Johansen's early solo albums, even the often maligned In Style (1979), and up to 1982's live album Live It Up, which I saw at the Euphoria Tavern in Portland, OR. Great show; and Johansen was a great showman. NYC's proud idiosyncratic version of Mick Jagger. I lost interest with Johansen's Buster Poindexter persona, however; found "Hot Hot Hot" more annoying than anything else, but still liked that he had found a niche in the music industry. He played in the SNL house band for years. And then I fell back into the fold with their 2006 comeback album, One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This, and liked even a song or two on their subsequent last two studio albums, Cause I Sez So ('09) and Dancing Backwards in High Heels ('11); if overall each significantly less than the album previous to it. They were aging out of being able to play Dolls style rock & roll but deserve credit for still being able to do so convincingly for as long as they did. But I'll always think of Johansen lead style as going best with the sludgy feedback roar of Johnny Thunders' guitar; again, not unlike Jaggers and Richards. David Johansen was one of the great 1970s NYC rockers and, in the end, a consummate music biz pro, going from the lower east side all the way uptown and back. And represents some favorite music, inspired by his original Desert Island endorsement, I still share with Xgau. 

"Looking for a Kiss," peak period Dolls. Click on the youtube connection. 

"No Escape," Caberet Voltaire (1979)

 One of my favorite early electro punk singles;  bleak, brooding, tribal, and punchy hammer down electronics. And I'm pretty sure burnishing their punk cred with a reworking of '60s protopunk garage classic, "Pushin' Too Hard," by the Seeds. 

Edwyn Collins and Orange Juice: New Wave Romantics on Postcard Records

"We avoided the two major rock guitars, the Fender and the Gibson. Playing Gretsches was about bringing back a sixties sensibility, but still having the freneticism of punk. Nobody else used them at the time."--Edwyn Collins in Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, by Simon Reynolds 

Orange Juice were a post-punk outfit from Scotland early 1980s. A New Wave band into reading. Proto-New Romantic British pop in an indelibly Scottish jangle pop indie record label style. Edwyn Collins' style, OJ's nerdy Lothario front guy. Sort of Brian Ferry as a "New Puritan." And another post-punk vocal original. 

Orange Juice were the feature band on Postcard Records, a Glasgow indie label that put out 12 singles and an album between 1979 and 1981. The album featured label mates Josef K, named after a character in Kafka's The Trial, and true to form sounding like Gang of Four agit-funk with a literary bent. 

Postcard were dedicated in general to "The Sound of Young Scotland" with a romantic literary bent, in spite of or because the label's boss, Alan Horne, was something of a parochial Spinal Tap-like eccentric petty tyrant band manager type. Postcard also put out records by Aztec Camera and The Go-Betweens (notably not Scottish) and for a few years there were a promising post-punk enterprise from the north country of Great Britain. 

Orange Juice joined The Undertones on tour in the fall of 1980. What a hot double-bill that would have been!

At any rate, after one good album, You Can't Hide Your Love Forever (1982), a couple more iffier album propositions, pioneering the C86 jangle pop sound but unable to score the chart hits they wanted, the OJ's called it quits in 1985 but Edwyn Collins finally scored a couple of proper Top 40 hits in the 1990s as a solo artist. Here's one:  

"The Magic Piper (Of Love)," Edwyn Collins (1997)

"Violence Grows," Fatal Microbes (1979)

 

"They've seen too much and don't want to know/Violence grows/Violence grows/Violence grows." Brit punk rockers writing their own rules. Honey Bane on the mic. Boosted by John Peel. Edgy and timeless. 

Chrome as Space Rock Avatars and Cyberpunk Pioneers

My short playlist case for Chrome as underground proto-cyberpunk musical missing link to Erik Davis's High Weirdness in California in the 1970s. 

Damon Edge, creator of Chrome, after recording Visitation, 1976, their debut, sent the record to Warner Brothers but they rejected it. They told Edge it sounded like a "messed up Doors album." He took this as a compliment, of course. I might want to add a 'messed up stag Jefferson Airplane' but, yes, very apt. This is the only Chrome album that has such a bad '60s hangover vibe and isn't yet characteristically post-punk. 

What if NYC's band Suicide lived in the Bay Area and had a thing for sci-fi Alien Soundtracks, consider Chrome's second album that came out in 1978? "Chromosome Damage" might be a worst case scenario. Bad trip psychedelia meets DIY tech. Helios Creed joins the band on the second album to solidify the nucleus of Edge and Creed through Chrome's classic period, Alien Soundtracks to 3rd from the Sun (1982). 

"Zombie Warfare (Can't Let You Down)," off Chrome's '79 album Half Machine Lip Moves. Maybe their best album but there are several other legit contenders. As live music fantasies go Half Machine Chrome double-billed with the Wipers, not inconceivable, generates sci-fi psychedelic punk rock mind-melding live music energies. Cum feel the noize. 

Here's Chrome, if I'm not mistaken, and I could very well be, but from what I could gather, 1980, "unreleased studio outtake," so tossed out but, more significantly, tossing off seemingly effortlessly a prototype of a particular feedback heavy guitar band emo-screamo vocal style that anticipates bands like Husker Du and Nirvana and Guided by Voices. Although, I can't say for sure how much actual guitar Chrome uses in this take because all the instrumentation sounds, as usual, heavily treated and filtered. Still, more rootsy and soulful than typical Chrome. 

Chrome's New Wave bid, "Animal," off Red Exposure, 1980. I admire the boldly abstracted pop move but understand longtime fans find it a slight sell-out. 

From the 1981 Chrome album, Blood On The Moon, another album contender. "The Need." Chrome's mature sound is a visionary amalgam of jittery punk, bad trip psychedelia, space rock, and a kind of space rock musique concrete that would morph into industrial music in the 1980s. Creed's noir guitar sound also a big influence on Sonic Youth.  

I've tried less successfully with Chrome before. There is a muted quality to the production that makes everything sound distorted and staticky and so alienated and impenetrable but once you stop trying to get to some clear narrative center the sculpted, conceptual, abstracted shards of muted noise rock are catchy. Some wag on youtube mused, "Chrome are for Hawkwind fans into industrial music." That sounds about right to me. 

Chrome are a combo of psychedelia, punk rock, and obsessive uses of DIY technology. High-low weirdness from San Francisco, California, in the 1970s. Hardcore fans seem to favor '82's 3rd from the Sun as a kind of aesthetic culmination but my sense of the album is it's when they settle into a more conventional dark metal sound and lose some of the weird charm of their earlier records. Edge leaves the band and moves to Paris in '83, ending what I'll call their classic period.   

The Horrible (And Not So Horrible) Truth About Mission of Burma

Post-punk Amerindie guitar band Boston legends 1979 to 1985. "Peking Spring" was a local hit in '79 but the first I heard Mission of Burma was a 7" vinyl single, "Academy Fight Song," I bought with my hard earned dough at Singles Going Steady in Portland, OR in '80. Loved the bad college roommate tirade in it; I'm not your academy, your school, your philosophy, club, etc. Prep school punk; real Catcher in the Rye stuff; i.e., catchy, angry, and self-righteous punk declaration of independence. In an interview much later Clint Conley, the songwriter, says he was trying to do a Talking Heads song. And, indeed, there is a jittery New Wave-y pop quality to the song they rarely if ever return to in later records. 

Back in the day I was a little underwhelmed by their next record and first EP, Signals, Calls, and Marches. There were standout tracks. "All World Cowboy Romance." And I like "(That's When I Reach For My) Revolver," although, apparently, most other musicians and artists think it is Burma's signature song. It's the most covered of their songs. I get this, I think, but actually prefer another version of the same song they do later on Vs, their only album, '82, or only album in their original post-punk era incarnation, at any rate, called "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate." Which is a sort of a punk rock Trustfall-song or an inside-out love song that Burma plays with all their scrappy might. Rocking out is in the ear of the beholder, of course, but these guys play music loud and hard. The principle reason they disbanded after a '83 tour, not forgetting the live album of a tour they put out in '85 as the maybe underrated The Horrible Truth About Burma, was because the Tinnitus in Roger Miller's hearing was getting so bad he couldn't continue to be around loud music so much anymore. Their material is heavy, dour, and obviously hard work, if a pulverizingly effective sonic force. But the exhilaration in "Certain Fate" is gleeful and rhapsodic. And in keeping Conley has said of this song that he was trying to do the Buzzcocks. 

Live version gives you a look at Burma in their prime, with their original audience and band supporters at the Bradford Ballroom in Boston in '83. 

Rock critics, it is my memory, used to disparage instrumental psychedelic riff rock droning like this as tedious filler. This might be known as the English major bias in rock snob era rock criticism, 1960s to 1980s. No words here. Just sounds; that sound like Glenn Branca's symphony of guitars covering Tommy James' "Crimson and Clover." Moment of zen. 

I even liked a lot some songs off drummer Peter Prescott's Volcano Suns albums. I think there is that sense that Burma never quite lived up to their potential. Never broke through, had a smash hit. No A+ records or  albums. True, maybe. But "Academy Fight Song" and Vs. are close. They were one of those volatile the-sum-is-greater-than-the-parts post-punk bands, brilliant, erratic, too loud and dissonant for the radio or anything beyond college radio but a creative burst of their own post-punk noise rock thing.

"Lost in Music" and "Why Are People Grudgeful" The Fall (1993)

Smith in his disco homage phase. Both songs associated with The Infotainment Scam album, their highest charting album ever reaching a Top Ten 9th position, most embarrassingly obvious title and ugliest album cover (give me the scribbled montages or horror grotesque comics, any day), and equally obvious old guard post-punk Smith staking out a respected niche position in the EDM rave music takeover of 1990s British pop music. The music on TIS, however, is considerably punchier and offers more edgy rock contrast to Smith's deadpan than these live takes. But they'll do and I like the way this live version of The Fall leans into Disco's monotonously simple bass heavy melodic groovelines and still manages to give them their own stamp of post-punk rumble like old pros. I'd like to think Bryan Ferry would give this his nod. The lead track is a cover of the 1979 Sister Sledge disco masterpiece, "Lost in Music," Smith adding, cynically, ominously, chanted, "the roads of access lead to the palace of excess." His "I feel so alive" isn't entirely convincing either but his shrieks of "hideaway, hideaway, hideaway" are the only time we're sure he's being moved by the music. The B-side, and the actual single of the pair, "Why Are People Grudgeful?" merges reggae great Joe Gibb's "People Grudgeful" and some Lee 'Scratch' Perry. A sort of reggae world music post-punk lament for an illusions-free peaceful coexistence, as fanciful as that sounds today. Or difficult to swallow coming from such a crank as Smith. Post-punk noir disco. 

TGIDF

British Post-Punk Goth Rock Ground Zero

You might have heard of this thing where film critics of a certain age have this thing for the movies of 1999. A generation older, I think I have maybe something similar for the music of 1979. I turned twenty. The possibilities felt exciting and endless and endlessly exciting. I'm still ready to dismiss it all as coincidence but I keep finding all these extraordinary music performances from 1979. 

"Inner Sanction," Insex: Obsessive dark tribal pounding tom-tom drums and monster guitar riffing produces compelling prototype obscure British post-punk Goth Rock. Think Bowie's Berlin period with even bigger stacks of speaker feedback. Gives Joy Division a run for the money, even if Insex lost. They had to. Killing Joke. Etc. 

Punk Rock Tuesday. 

 

Skateboard Raps, Confessional Rap Gospel, Krautrock Disco, and House Music

Slowing down, relaxing enough, having enough room in your life for music is such a luxury. One I've learned to take for granted, savor, even protect, so when I lose that musical feeling, feel like I can't listen to music, whether crowded out by work or distracting emotional stresses, I grow manic, brittle, and burnout quickly. (Something like this happens with reading too.) I'm like a battery running down fast without regular recharging. Haven't felt like I could listen to music, beyond a few patches of very distracted background streaming, in two weeks or so, so splurging on underdog superhero Lil B and then some groove-oriented Krautrock and a double-shot of Frankie Knuckles' style House music. 

"Vans," The Pack (2006): East Bay hybrid hiphop artists do skateboard raps. Lil B startup. 

"Unchain Me," Lil B (2011): Lil B, The BasedGod, Im Gay (Im Happy) at a spiritual peak. On a short list of great ambient hiphop albums, as far as I know anyway which is admittedly very limited. 

"Synthesist," Harald Grosskopf (1979): Percussionist with Ash Ra Tempel, Cosmic Jokers, and Klaus Schulz's solo work. Late Krautrock as ambient electronic groove music. 

E+MC2 (Jelly & Fish remix), Giorgio Moroder (1979/2020): Peaked at number 4 on the charts. Moody, relentless, a cheap shabby beautiful grandeur. Elemental traits of robotic space disco like Kraftwerk and gothic disco like New Order. 

 "Move That Body," Marshall Jefferson (1986): "The House Music Anthem." Trax Records. Deceptively simple and catchy and fiercely vamping workout of piano, kinetic polyrhythms, clapping dub effects, and chanting "rock your body" dancers: "The music is going to set you free." You gotta believe it. 

"Que Tal America," Two Man Sound (1979): This is the 12" version but also appears on an album called Disco Samba. In the squiggly sonic details, a thicket of melodic polyrhythms (uptempo funk, basically), churning, unfurling mesmerizingly elongated grooves and intoxicating repetition transcends monotony. Get it on and let Two Man Sound take you for a ride. Dance music ASMR.  

Thank god it's disco Friday! 

The Big Lookback: Carola Dibbell on Pere Ubu

"But what I really got from that pioneering rock critic world in Riffs and Creem was what happened if you took something seriously that you weren’t supposed to. A lot flowed from that. You could write like you weren’t supposed to, and that wasn’t just about being slangy, or vulgar, or amateur. You could be personal, be wrong, be arty, tell lies—forbidden stuff, like thinking something was important that wasn’t supposed to be important."

Pere Ubu Lives in This Shit!" The Village Voice, May 7, 1979

Dibbell, Xgau's better half, wrote the piece hyperlinked above. She also shares some fun, interesting reflections about the story, those heady rock critic times (see quote above), and her 2015 novel, The Only Ones. I liked the latter a lot and would recommend it: A post-apocalyptic story about motherhood with a gritty punk rock feel. And by the way, one of the lines she quotes from Dub Housing, "Boy that sounds swell," combined with a song, "Wellsville," by a garage band from Lawrence, Kansas, The Embarrassment, both of which were on heavy rotation on my record player at the time, were how I came up with the name "Swellsville," the commercial-free fanzine (all moonlighting coffee/weed binging projects) I put out sporadically in the 1980s.

"Clam Shells and Roller Skates"-- The Triumph of Chic's Good Times

I really don't follow what's happening with the rock & roll hall of fame much. I visited the place once in Cleveland. Lots of fun rock & roll trivia. I wore a baseball cap with a yellow 7" record insert symbol I picked up in the Hall merch store until it was threadbare and falling apart. The annual ballot for new inductees into the Hall usually turns up in one of my news feeds and at least half the lists, it's been my impression, look like no-brainers to me. 

There's a lot of great rock & roll, why be stingy about it? The Hall ought to celebrate the immense diversity of rock & roll. Not narrowcast it as another classic rock only format. I've heard Chic have been nominated and failed eleven times to get inducted into the rock & roll hall of fame. That's ridiculous, and should be a shaming embarrassment to the music writers who vote. Chic should be in the rock & roll hall of fame for one song alone, "Good Times," and its' tremendous pop influence. 

 If one song isn't enough, which sounds weirdly anti-rock & roll to me, Chic have at least two other classic disco hits and turned into solid album artists. But, again, for "Good Times" alone, Chic belong in the Hall, easy. See/hear below. 

Anyway, they call the place the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame but seem unfortunately hung-up on Rock and the rock stars era. To my mind rock & roll takes off in 1954 or 1955. It's Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, The Coasters, The Shirelles, Ronnettes, Everly Brothers, Sun Records, Atlantic Records (including LaVern Baker, Bobbettes, Ruth Brown), Etta James, The Fleetwoods, the rest of the 1950s and, really, expands exponentially from there til possibly the end of the Century and the collapse of the record industry or why not all the way to the present? Rock & roll is more a mixed race/multicultural, by now vastly complex, constellation of sounds than any classic guitar rock cliche, not that there's anything wrong with the Beatles or Led Zeppelin. My point is Hiphop is as much Rock & Roll as Classic Rock as is Folk Rock as is EDM as is Punk Rock as is Disco, etc. 

And maybe it's all only rock & roll but I like it. 

"Good Times," Chic: Number one on Hot 100 in 1979. 

"Rapper's Delight,' Sugarhill Gang: Reached 36 on Hot 100 same year. 

"Rapture," Blondie: Number one in 1981.  

The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steal: Also from 1981 a live DJ mix of Flash cutting, scratching, and mixing a bunch of records, including "Good Times," "Rapture," Sugarhill Gang, Queen, Spoonie Gee, and Mr. Rogers. It's an ultramagnetic party mix based musically on Niles Rodgers' funky guitar and Bernard Edwards' super fat bass. And, Flash, winningly, DJ'ing for a bunch of kids whooping it up getting down to his fresh beats and cartoon wit. It's disco and New Wave and Flash's cutting stabs of proto-hiphop turntable hooks.  

Oh yeah, and another one: Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust." Spent 15 weeks on the Billboard Top 10 in 1980. In all, "Good Times" is a dominant force on the charts for three years running, helps launch Hiphop, and has been sampled by over 200 pop songs since coming out in 1979.