Posted March 11, 2002
WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR BAND BREAKS
UP...AGAIN
Kind of a dispiriting week. Last weekend, the wheels came off
the band I've been working with for the past six months, trying to develop
some original material. The singer wasn't quite cutting it, and elected to
bail rather than doing the work. That wouldn't have been a deal-breaker all
by itself, but then the drummer (whose presence has enhanced two or three
other musical ventures of mine, including one that actually got to the gigging
stage, which this one never did) called and said that he wasn't going to be
able to continue - work and travel schedules, family obligations, the time
and distance involved in traveling to rehearsals, etc. Tried contacting our
old drummer, who informed me that he'd been offered a gig recently and discovered
when he sat down behind the traps that wasn't able to play at all.
My guitar partner and I were both more depressed than we figured we'd be by
this turn of events. We talked aimlessly about putting something else together,
but the reality is we're both too blasted by this to even think about doing
anything else for a coupla months. I spent the last few days bombarding a
woman I dig a lot but can't approach for reasons of Honor with a barrage of
e-mail in which I bared my soul about loads of things I probably ought not
to have. I can only hope I haven't scared her off. Meanwhile, at least I don't
have to feel like I donwanna go to anyone else's gigs until we gig, at least
until there's another "we" to think about gigging (but more about
that later). Maybe I'll watch some movies or something. Catch up on my reading
(not bloody likely as I don't even have the attention span for cereal boxes
right now, although I'm attempting to read Peter Doggett's "Are You Ready
for the Country," about the roots of country-rock, and wishing I hadn't
sold my Elvis Sun sessions CD).
Meanwhile, I've been revisiting American rock from the eighties, the decade
I mostly sat out Defending Freedom's Frontier, a period which is framed in
my mind by two Lou Reed albums: "The Blue Mask," which is the last
thing I was interested in hearing before I came back to The World from Korea
in '83 and which, in the event, I wound up not actually hearing until much
later, and "New York," which was the album that pulled me back in
when I found it in a mall in Abilene, Texas, in '89.
After shoveling thousands of dollars into repairing my old short ('89 Plymouth
Sundance, the last Chrysler product I will ever buy), I broke down and went
to Carmax.com (best retail experience of my INTAHR life) and bought a late-model
Saturn (my child support payment will go down when my oldest daughter gets
married in April, so I figure I can swing with the car payment). One of the
numerous advantages to my new vehicle situation is that I can actually listen
to music in the car again. The cassette player in my previous ride was inoperative
ever since the bride-to-be, impatient with the tape-intake mechanism, jammed
a Red Hot Chili Peppers tape in the deck which had the collateral benefit
of also making it impossible to reset the clock or listen to the radio. I
got used to driving without sound, so much so that when I was driving a RENTED
Saturn during the Plymouth's last interval in the shop and my middle daughter
had the radio up at pain-threshold volume (although probably not near where
I USED to keep it when I was listening to music), the infernal racket unnerved
me so much that I ran a stop sign and wound up having to take defensive driving
(online!) for my trouble.
But now those days are gone. My current tape o' choice in the ride is a tape
of the Minutemen's epochal "Double Nickels On the Dime" double-album
(plus some other goodies) courtesy of the Rev. Wayne Coomers of the First
Church of Holy Rock'n'Roll. The Minutemen came out of the same L.A. hardcore
scene that produced Black Flag, but they didn't hew to any kind of Ramones/Sex
Pistols punk orthodoxy. (Ever notice how boring and doctrinaire punk purists
can be? Christ, they're worse than Communists or academics!) Their vision
of "punk" was big enough to encompass pretty much anything they
wanted it to, from Creedence Clearwater to free jazz to funk (these guys could
really play, defying the three-chord punk stereotype; in fact, D. Boon often
employed his guitar in the same was as Funkadelic's axemen Eddie Hazel and
Mike Hampton did, while Mike Watt matched him with telepathic intertwining
bass figures), and today, "Double Nickels" hits a lot like an eighties
"Trout Mask Replica," substituting D. Boon's political consciousness
for Beefheart's ecological obsessions. The singer intoned his diatribes in
a high, reedy boy's voice. What was punk about that: he didn't allow his tools
to interfere with his expression. As varied as it is sprawling, "Double
Nickels" is my favorite kind of record: the kind that creates its own
universe that you can inhabit if you want to (like "Trout Mask,"
like "Exile on Main St.," like Wilco's "Being There").
Listening to late eighties Seattle bands like Green River (their "Dry
As a Bone"/"Rehab Doll" compilation) and Mudhoney ("Superfuzz
Bigmuff plus Early Singles") as I penned last issue's Seattle screed,
I've been struck by how strong the sonic similarity is between these Mark
Arm-led bands and lower-division post-Birdman Oz bands like Bored!, God, and
the Splatterheads. It's instructive to remember, too, the various connections
between Aussie eighties rock and its Pacific Northwest equivalent: Kim Salmon
was once asked to join Mudhoney, while Kent Steedman actually DID join the
Screaming Trees (allegedly his favorite band) for a spell, not to forget Mono
Men leader/Estrus Records honcho Dave Crider's Lime Spiders fixation..
Oz stuff is never far from my playback apparatus, whether it's a tape of some
rough mixes from the forthcoming Angie Pepper album which her husband graciously
sent, or a CD-R of the new Saints album "Spitting Out the Blues"
courtesy of Geoff Ginsberg. The Angie stuff is a revelation; her voice has
gained expressiveness from the Life Lived, and a couple of the songs that
she co-wrote with bassist Jim Dickson really represent something new in the
canon, with a production sound that's downright psychedelic. Can't wait to
hear the full-length. The Saints, a band of whose post-Ed Kuepper work I'm
admittedly ignorant, surprise with an album that seesaws back and forth between
blues and rock. Chris Bailey's voxxx remind me a lot of another Chris, Youlden
of Savoy Brown fame (a CD-R of whose classic "Raw Sienna" and "Blue
Matter" albums I've had in my CD-ROM drive at work for weeks), as well
as both Mick Jagger and the Pretty Things' Phil May in their early R&B
daze. Bailey's lead guitar playing (!) is a stunning surprise, as well. From
the aural evidence here, the fella oughtta come down to Texas; it sounds like
he could hold his own in the roadhouses and blues jams down here. Besides
covering chestnuts like Howlin' Wolf's "Who's Been Talking," Bo
Diddley's "Before You Accuse Me" (thoroughly obliterating the memory
of Eric Clapton's formulaic version from a few years back), and Elmore James'
"It Hurts Me Too," he pens a few gooduns of his own (sample lyric:
"I put my faith in things I can't see/Sooner or later it's gonna do for
me"). Sounds like I'm gonna have to investigate the eighties and nineties
Saints further.
Things to look forward to: the Dictators in Dallas next weekend, the Streetwalkin'
Cheetahs the beginning of April. More than that: there's a possibility I'll
throw caution (and expense) to the winds and head north to catch the Deniz
Tek/Scott Morgan shows in Ann Arbor and Cleveland (with Ron Asheton making
a guest appearance in A2) later that month. I'd begged off attending the shows
in Philly and Brooklyn, as they're the same weekend as my daughter's wedding,
telling the Iceman, "I'll have to try and catch you guys next time."
His response: "How many next times do you think there are going to be?"
Beyond that: the imminent re-release of Wayne Kramer's remastered/bonus track-enhanced
catalog on his own Muscletone Records imprint. Bro. Wayne, it seems,
has been attending business management classes sponsored by the Small Business
Administration, as a result of which his website is now filled with homilies
about Change that sound like they coulda come from my MBA-holding boss at
work, YAWN, but "The Hard Stuff," first release in the projected
series, is so great that it's worth enduring all that.
- Ken Shimamoto
