Threw a mess of Monk in the changer and let it spin, just like him, come to think of it. Will be hearing Charlie Rouse in my sleep. OK with me. But getting ready to write a book review and I needed to soak my head in Monk, since he’s in the book, everywhere, weird and brilliant and spinning and not talking and grunting and maybe high a little too much. Being Monk, just Monk, pure Monk, monkishly Monk. Monk.
Green Chimneys was it, the last tune, and after Green Chimneys all was silent except the water trickling through the aquarium filter–the fish are moving but silent–and the sounds of these words coming out the keys, tap tap tappity tap. Tap. In the middle of the big bad city and all you can here is the tap of words, letter by letter, tap tap tap. Continue reading →
Someone shared a link. Public Image Ltd.’s single “Public Image” was released on this day, October 13, 1978. Wow. Going back. Way back. It was such a huge thing, that single. The buzz during the wait was incredible. When we finally heard it, it blew all our minds and you’d hear the song everywhere. People couldn’t stop playing it. A whole new style music was born. You can’t tell the impact it had anymore. You had to be there. But I’ve noticed at parties at our house, when someone puts it on, and that bass line starts to rumble and groove, a certain age group stops talking mid-sentence and listens, and just for a moment they’re lost in their memories, and then they snap out of it and they’re back at the party again. It’s a cool thing, that. A fantastic song. You can listen to it here. Though you’re probably hearing it already. Hearing it and moving to that bass line. It’s in our DNA.
We waited for this the way hippies eleven years before waited for Sergeant Pepper. And it had the same impact. On us, not the whole world. But on us it did. It changed everything. Punk was now art–serious, grown up stuff.
Still got the single. Man….those was the daze. I’m remembering looking through my uncle’s collection of 45’s that same year,1978. Elvis, Jerry Lee, Little Richard, Chuck Berry. They were ancient…a stack of twenty year old records. And now my Zeros’ single is thirty five years old. Funny how relative time gets. Then it runs out.
I seem to remember picking this up in a Licorice Pizza in Orange County. There was some guy in there who kept ordering ball these punk rock singles, probably more than any other store in Orange County. He put it on. About six chords in I said I’ll take it. He said listen to the whole record! I said OK, but I’ll take it anyway. It was such a great record, all you needed was a couple seconds and you knew how great it was. I bought a bunch of other records that day too, but I couldn’t tell you what.
It was all about singles back then. For the first couple years punk rock was a 45 rpm seven inch music. Albums eventually took over, but we liked our punk in furious little two and three minute bursts in the early days, usually so short you couldn’t even sit down before you had to put on another. Not that we ever sat down. There was too much electricity in the air, too much wild energy, the music dared you to sit still. You couldn’t do it. Not even stoned. This was music to move to. And back then your punk rock hipness was measured by your singles collection. You’d show them off, especially the rarities no one else had yet. To this day I have them in a separate rack, and when people come over to party the geezers ignore all the jazz and whatever and go right to the punk rock singles, and it’s 1978 again.
Apparently this is the only known live footage of Squirrel Bait, one of those hugely influential bands no one remembers anymore. But if you were around in 1985 and into the punk/post-punk/whatever scene–the rock’n’roll underground basically–you certainly do remember them. That self-titled debut 12″, especially, was incredible. It came out of nowhere, putting established bands like the Replacements to shame, musically and conceptually, and even had Hüsker Dü back on their heels because, well, Squirrel Bait were such better musicians and had such a natural grasp of composition and dynamics. But it was just raw talent. I read an endless interview with one of the guys that was done back when people would read endless interviews (the internet has changed everything) and it was apparent that the band didn’t really know what they were doing. None of it was planned. They’d always played this way, they just got better at it, and always written tunes that way, and just got better at that too. It wasn’t something special from their point of view. The five of them were just guys in a band making music. None of which would have made any sense to us at the time. We all assumed the obvious, that Squirrel Bait had been a well kept secret around Louisville (where?) for years and were about to be the biggest band ever. The fact that they were a bunch of high school kids (and had formed their first band in sixth grade, I think) was unknown to probably everyone on the coasts, not that we would have believed it. But it’s true, they were a local party band, basically. They didn’t get along too well, some of the guys were bookish intellectual types and some of the them were jocks into chasing girls. The nerds thought the jocks were immature, the jocks thought the nerds were, well, nerds. I’m serious. Just typical high school stuff. Yet they impacted us, or a helluva lot of us, in a major way, the way Nirvana impacted everyone else five or six years later. But in Squirrel Bait’s case, it’s as if Smells Like Team Spirit was right there on Bleach. Like the whole explosive Nirvana package on one goddamn debut EP. I have neither Squirrel Bait’s LP or that EP anymore, who knows why, but that EP especially I played every single day for a year. Before work, after work, late at night. Sun God was probably my favorite tune on the thing. And it’s still one of my favorite tunes thirty years later.
Squirrel Bait busted up after the LP (Skag Heaven) came out in 1987. They weren’t entirely happy with the results, you know how those things go, and then a couple of them went off to universities back east. The others I think still had a year of high school left. They’d played a couple dozen gigs, toured a bit, called it a day and broke up. I don’t even think their turn in the spotlight lasted much over a year. Maybe two years. There was still mystery in those days, there was no internet, no Google or Wikipedia, and information and news in the rock’n’roll underground was mostly by word of mouth or gleaned from dog-eared fan zines that got passed around. Squirrel Bait just appeared, out of nowhere, flamed brightly and were gone. By the time Nirvana came around five years later no one talked about Squirrel Bait anymore. No one played them on the radio, or pulled out the records at parties. As DJ culture rose they remained undiscovered. David Grubbs, one of the guitar players (who may have actually written Sun God, I’m not sure) actually went on to have a very productive career in Slint and other memorable bands. Yet Squirrel Bait remained forgotten, their records never reissued. If they were reissued no one noticed. I certainly would have had the CD, but I don’t. And when after thirty years in somebody’s closet this video began popping up on YouTube, kids thought it was OK, but not very original. Just another Nirvana wannabe was the complaint. The singer thinks he’s Kurt Cobain. I suppose it needn’t be said that when Cobain put Nirvana together back in 1985, he was (according to the Melvins) nuts about that first Squirrel Bait record. We all were. It was in the air. They were the American band that knocked all the other American bands on their asses that year. They were incredible.
So here it is, the only known footage, Squirrel Bait playing a rough version of Sun God somewhere in Kentucky back in 1985. It’s an animated crowd, you can smell the sweat and testosterone, and it’s obvious the PA sucks and the band can’t hear anything over all the feedback. You can tell that they really were just a high school party band, not professional in the least, which is kind of charming, actually. It’s also an intense and ferocious performance, and as the tune and as the band powerdrives the riffs to their smashing climax it’s hard to believe that these were just teenagers who had to find someone’s mom to drive them to the gig (the singer thanks her.) And then the tune comes to it’s sudden end, unresolved, leaving the listener hanging, unrequited. That’s an old bossa nova trick, leave the melody hanging in the air like that. It’s just not something you hear often in rock and roll, and you certainly never heard it in punk rock. Their heroes Hüsker Dü hinted at it in, say, Celebrated Summer (which always reminded me of Sun God, for some reason, or is that the other way around), but then Bob Mould resolves it in with his little acoustic coda. But Squirrel Bait take you right off the edge at the end there but there’s no finish. You can even here the finish in your head, you’re tapping it out with your foot, air drumming the heck out of it, except the damn things not there anymore. It’s over. It’s disconcerting as hell. It’s unexpected, it’s wrong, and you would have a helluva time finding another rock’n’roll band then or now or even before then who would have stopped that tune cold like that and watch all the air guitar players and air drummers topple into space. It’ll work with prose too, though I never figured out how to do it until I was past fifty. And not because it’s hard to do, but because I didn’t even realize it was possible. In American music and American prose we like our endings solid and punctuated, we like our sentences and melodies and ideas and even our movie endings to work themselves out. It’s tradition, going back centuries. It’s in the cultural DNA. And João Gilberto didn’t dream up that unresolved ending to his classic take on the Antonio Carlo Jobim tune Ligia on his own. Those couple notes on guitar and voice that hang there glinting in the sun, that that’s old Portuguese musical tradition, right out of fado, the ancient Portuguese ballad form that traces its own origins back to the Moorish occupation and the music of the Arabs. To this day you’ll hear Arab pop music leave melodies hang like that. Jobim reveled in it, and Gilberto just adapted it to his stripped down sambas where it worked beautifully. It was all a natural ethnomusical progression from the court music of medieval Moorish Spain to a very stoned Joao Gilberto in 1950’s Brazil. On the other hand, Squirrel Bait were in Kentucky listening to Ramones records.
There, I just did it again.
(You might check out the studio version of Sun God–it’s all over YouTube–to hear the tune as we heard it on record in 1985. I can hear that ending in my head as I type this, hanging there. Pretty hip stuff for the time. My fave Ligia is the take by Joao Gilberto and Stan Getz from 1976, and after Stan takes as gorgeous a saxophone solo as you swear you have ever heard he lays out and João takes up the verse again, the words in soft Portuguese, and you wish the thing would go forever, but it doesn’t, and the end is exquisite, guitar and voice glinting in the sun. It’s all over YouTube, 5’22” long. Please don’t tell anyone that I mentioned it in a discussion on punk rock, however.)
I remember doing drugs with Darby Crash. Only one time, I think–joints don’t count–and it must have been 1980. We–me and my wife, or wife to be at the time–were at the Capital Records swap meet. If you were in L.A. back then you’ll remember that scene, a parking lot full of record geeks and Hollywood freaks. The Capital Records building towered over us just like marble, a huge concrete stack of 45’s. We were new in town but knew people who knew people who knew everybody. We were hanging, a bunch of us, nicely stoned and digging the weirdness when up walks Darby Crash. He was already legendary by that point, a superstar in the tiny punk rock world of Los Angeles. Scenesters and heavies circled round. Someone–a chick with wild dyed hair and black nails–pulled a jar full of variously colored pills from her purse. We all reached in for a few and washed them down with warm beer. No idea what they were. The night swirled by in slow motion and euphoria, colors and weirdness and sounds. Strange notes hung in the air from a hundred portable phonographs. As the witching hour drew near the event began to break up. People followed Darby over to Oki Dog. We wandered off on our own, down Vine past the weird bars and the drag queens dressed just like Garbo. There was a strange, giggly bus ride home. Sex all night. We were young and punk rockers and in love and L.A. was crazy and exciting, and the matter that ran through our heads was too concerned to fall.
Great shot of Dave Vanian, singer of the mighty Damned, 1977.
My wife and I blasted “New Rose” out of the stereo at my folks house the day we were married. That was our life back in 1979, punk rock. Punk rock and craziness and falling in love somehow. And there we were, a year later, on November 29, 1980, borrowed rings on our fingers, hitched. Feeling goofy all decked out. Someone dropped the Damned 45 onto the turntable. Is she really going out with him? Then that monster nasty riff, a big huge punk rock ugly slab of guitar, and then those crazy frantic drums and then heaven. So fast, so unrelenting, so barely in control. Was it even two minutes long? Did it matter? Two minutes a side almost seemed too long for a tune. Everything was so packed and concentrated then. We were young, it was a crazy time, the music was a zillion miles an hour. Louder harder faster. Us dressed to the nines with the Damned bouncing off the living room walls. My wife–how new that must have sounded that day, my wife–danced across the floor, her dress flouncing. The drums made me antsy, like grabbing a live wire and hanging on for the rush. The guitar was huge, gigantic, and Vanian jabbering away over everything. He had a new rose, he had it good. A punk rock love song. That’s why she picked it. Everyone else had Nights in White Satin, but New Rose was our song.
Posted by Zora-Lux Burden with her sublime caption “a damask Dave in 1977 he’s got a new rose for you….”
(Bloomfest in the Arts District of downtown Los Angeles, July 21, 2012)
Burrito wagons. That’s what was missing. Burrito wagons. Taco trucks. Back in the day that is what that stretch of Alameda Avenue was all about: artists, punks, winos and burrito wagons. Besides, their food was way better.
Spent the whole say at the Bloom Stage with all the geezers. We knew all of them. Beautiful time. Perfect. Saw some ex-Betty Blowtorch thing that shredded, Carnage Asada were loud and pounding and better than ever and ya gotta love frontman George. Saccharine Trust are one of the great bands of our time. I remember seeing them at Al’s three decades ago opening for the Misfits. (I remember seeing them for the very first time at the Cathay in 1981, but that’s another story). Mike Watt and the Missingmen doing double nickles on Hyphenated-Man. The Gears had a slam pit going for chrissakes with big huge inner tubes that people went crazy with and they bounced and bounded and knocked shit all over the place and watching some of the dads out there skanking was a trip…I hadn’t seen that in decades. Just no one gets hurt now. No bloody lips or black eyes or broken bones. Just good clean fun. Al’s Bar was a time warp. Surreal. It looked just like our Al’s Bar–it was our Al’s Bar, but it’s so clean now. So clean it was almost eerie. They sweep the floor now. They painted over the graffiti. The hole in the wall is covered up. The pool table is gone. The photo booth is gone. (Did that photo booth actually work? I just remember people fucking in it.) The wife and I had our 20th anniversary at Al’s Bar, I remember. That was forever ago. I had my 40th birthday party in there. That was forever-er ago. I smoked dope with Kurt Cobain there out on the back patio, and he’s been dead forever and ever. Continue reading →
In 5th grade, Robert Omlit brained me with a copy of Little Women. Hardback. You don’t make fun of Little Women.
Robert Omlit was still Robert Logan at the time. Aside from Louisa May Alcott, I can’t remember what we talked about. Books, I’m sure. We were both constant readers. I’d plunder the library’s history section–Bruce Catton was a favorite–and dinosaurs. He read the classics. Each of us read a book a week, at least. We were unlikely best pals on the schoolyard, skinny funny-looking little Robert and me already five and a half feet tall at age ten. I suppose I kept him from getting beat up. I don’t think we hung out that much after school. Probably lived too far from each other. But I don’t know. He had a Stingray, I remember. I had a Schwinn.
My family moved to Virginia halfway through sixth grade and when we moved back to Orange County a year later it was to another school district. So I sort of lost track of Robert Logan. I remembering hearing from another friend that by junior high he’d gotten a bit hippie, wore an armband to school during the Vietnam Moratorium in 1969. Developed what they used to call a consciousness. Certainly smoked weed before I did, way before. But we both turned into rock’n’roll fanatics, though he was a ahead of me on that too. I was still listening to AM when he was already deep into FM. Continue reading →
Found this tucked away in the drafts folder, not sure how old it is. Someone told me the corner is now a hole with a subway in it. I remember the city was trying to sell the building for a dollar. All you had to do was move it. Maybe they were asking too much.
That Senor Fish on the corner used to be the Atomic Cafe. Had dinner there with Darby Crash. We’d been next door at the Brave Dog. Probably summer of 1980. Darby had the wiener gotcha, a dude in a blue mohawk eating wiener gotcha. My wife got fried chicken. Banquet. I watched the cook open the box. The service was awful, food worse, it was wonderful. Wouldn’t last a week now. Hipsters want only the best food. Jonathan Gold made it impossible for any more Atomic Cafes. No more wiener gotcha. Now it’s overpriced ethno-hipster slop from food trucks. Oh well.
Atomic Café in the daylight. 1980’s. The Brave Dog was this side of the Imports place.
Saw a brilliant power trio last night at Cafe Nela that was so inexplicably original I tried for half their set to come up with a point of reference but the only one I could think of was Otto’s Chemical Lounge. Who? Yeah, big help. I talked to the band as they tore down. They’re called the Kidneys, from Cypress Park. The best new rock band I’ve seen in a long, long time. They’re all twenty years old or so. Goddam kids. Frantic, with crazy harmonies, crazier rhythms, crazy good playing. They’re so brilliant they probably have no future whatsoever. But if you want to see a new band that doesn’t sound like every other rock band these past thirty years, this is it. I’m just hoping there’s all kinds of bands like this out there, fresh out of high school, full of new ideas and trying not to be successful. Just playing crazy music and bugging all the boring people who wrecked everything.
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