Category: Punk

Rust, Still Awake

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At his excellent blog, Can’t Explain, Jeff Pike assembles a small road crew to re-evaluate Neil Young’s 1979 Pazz & Jop-winning LP, Rust Never Sleeps. Jeff, Phil Dellio, Steven Rubio, Jack Thompson, and yours truly all pipe in, with reactions which, while positive overall, are surprisingly varied. The one perhaps not-so-surprising common denominator, mentioned at least once by everyone, is punk. (My original impulse, in fact, was to put Rust on a scale, and simply measure its then-and-current worth against other late ’70s punk-inspired moves by pre-punk people, i.e., Some Girls, Street Hassle, “Who Are You,” The Bride Stripped Bare, et al.) There’s some great stuff in all this. Thanks to Jeff for letting me play along.

“Fear of Everything”

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So of course I always thought Talking Heads were about the individual human units (ha!—and fuck you, Fripp) response to cybernation, depersonalization, the effect of corporate consciousness on individual identity, all those great contemporary questions nobody can seem to come up with any real or workable answers for. Richard Hell was about the same thing on a darker, more hermetically selfenclosed/obsessed/possessed level, in fact the Ramones, Clash, just about all these New Wave bands that really count seem to be trying to deal with these questions which is why no matter what happens to it commercially New Wave for me will always be a lot more crucial than the R’n’R bands explosion of the Sixties, when it was all too easy to croon how there’s somethin’ happenin’ in here and what it is ain’t exactly clear. The point is, now we’re all “in here,” and apart from each other, and how are we gonna get out?

– Lester Bangs, unedited review of Talking Heads’s Fear of Music (3,000 or so words, nary a sneeze about “music” per se, and it’s a remarkable piece of writing).

Don McLean, American Punk

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“[Dylan’s] music will far outlive anything I’ve ever done. I think a lot of reasons why I look good are because times are so bad.

“There’s not a heck of a lot of music around now that I’m really thrilled over. Patrician rock is going down now. I like punk rock.”

Don McLean,  quoted in The Free Lance-Star,  Feb 17, 1973

pie-punk

Painting red doors black

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Was reading Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, a second run-through, for college, and whenever I picked up the book I’d put the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” on the record player, over and over, my sound of Quentin Compson trying to break out but turning in on himself in loathing.

My point is that here are a couple of the many ways into hard rock, if someone wants to take them. But then, I can imagine my parents appreciating Hamlet, but I can’t imagine them being him. And I can see the similarities between Mick Jagger’s schematic wrong-end-of-the-telescope analyses of male-female relationships with my dad’s hard-headed, persistent political analyses. But I can’t imagine my dad wanting to blot the sun out of the sky, even in pretend. And my relationship with my parents wasn’t good enough for me to ever explain to them where my dad might have some Jagger inside.

– Frank Kogan mining the territory re: hard rock he more or less invented.

The Priests of RockThink

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It has always been hard for the priests of RockThink to deal with punk in any manner other than ideological; this is why the Sex Pistols go down in history as somehow more valuable than the Buzzcocks.) An almost unlistenable triple LP dedicated to a communist revolutionary government (The Clash’s Sandinista!) means more to those who write the histories than an unspeakably gorgeous #1 pop song like [the Bee Gees’] ‘Too Much Heaven.’
– Brian Doherty, Death Before Disco, Reason Magazine, 2003

[For the record, I’ll take Sandinista! over “Too Much Heaven,” but the point is nevertheless well-taken.]

sandinista bee-gees

James Chance on Film Noir

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Yes, that James Chance. From the latest edition of Perfect Sound Forever. Because I’m fairly noir-deficient, much of the context here eludes me, but there’s some great lines throughout. On 1947’s Nightmare Alley: “The movie that proves that the geeks that you meet on the way up are the same ones you meet on the way down. In fact, you just might be meeting yourself.” (If that’s not a tag line for this very site, I don’t know what is.)

Nightmare Alley

Early Coley

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A review of Byron Coley’s C’est la guerre: Early Writings: 1978-1983 (published by L’Oie de Cravan, in both English and French), at Blurt Online.

And to further mark the occasion, an interesting interview with Coley at Vice magazine.

Q: So back when this stuff was being written, did you think you’d still be writing about music 30 years later?
A: I remember talking to Richard Meltzer back then and he was telling me ‘You got to give this up! If you want to be taken seriously as a writer, you have to stop this. You can’t keep writing about rock music after 30.’ But I always had this thing for it. I would watch people like Richard or Lester Bangs or Nick Tosches sort of from the sidelines when I lived in New York and it just looked like they were having a lot of fun. They weren’t doing anything really productive, but I would just look at them and think ‘What a way to die!’

Reading Books About Hüsker Dü

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Hüsker Dü’s Propulsive Liberation (Reviews of two new Dü books by Christgaü — including one co-written by Mould and Michael Azerrad — in the New York Times)

“Three dec­ades later I still feel lucky to have experienced that transmutation of wrath into flight. Not only did Hüsker Dü generate an impressive recorded legacy during their eight years on earth, they were ferocious live — as memorable onstage as Nirvana or the Rolling Stones. They deserve one great book, not these two mediocre ones.”