This might be my favorite song out of all the songs from the incredible 1980’s underground rock era that infested dingy bars and dangerous night clubs world wide…one of the most exciting and creative periods in the entire history of rock’n’roll, a gloriously analog time that is almost completely forgotten for that very reason, because we now live in a digital universe. Only those who were there remember it, just as only those who were there remember the days when vaudeville or radio or live television was the most happening thing ever. Digital lives forever, analog disappears as records become unplayable and cassette tapes disintegrate. Maybe one tenth of one tenth of one tenth of all the music of that time survives on CD or YouTube. Entire scenes have disappeared without a trace. It’ll take archeologists to dig through all the basements and storage bins and closets where the remains lie, in worn out old 45’s or piles of flyers or boxes full of mix tapes. We called them compilation tapes then, and they’re like time capsules. You find one and if it still plays you can hear your past life. I have this song on cassette, one I put together, all this ancient music pouring out. I still have the 45 too. And I have my memories. It was a glorious time to be alive–those of us who survived it, anyway–and for some reason, it has all crystalized for me in this one song, which I first heard some thirty years ago when this record magically appeared in the mail all the way from Melbourne, Australia, and I slipped it on the turntable and listened to it over and over and over.
In one of those mysteries of social media, I now get messages from Keith Levene on LinkedIn. So do lots of people, I imagine, but the idea of getting messages from the guy who played the post punk Ur-riff on “Public Image” now on a platform so hopelessly square as LinkedIn is surreal. It’s like seeing Allen Ginsberg in Reader’s Digest or Tim Buckley on Lawrence Welk. Anyway, he sends us these chatty little messages, thoroughly unpretentious, and sometimes includes music. I just listened to his latest, “Never the Same Thing Twice”, and damn, it’s really good. It’s got a real analog, 1977 feel to it, and though it doesn’t sound old, it sounds authentic. Real. Alive. And that, I seem to recall, was what it was all about back then.
It’s off his new release, he says, Keith Levene’s Commercial Zone.
Had a ball last nite watching old pal Billy Vockeroth with his Angry Samoan (just the one) at Cafe NELA. Seen him and Lizzie plenty of time at our xmas bashes over the years, but we haven’t seriously hung out (or been to their rural digs) in hell, a decade or more. I’d forgotten what a perfect drummer he is at this stuff, a tutorial in how to play punk rock not like an idiot or like a good drummer slumming or exactly like the Ramones. Better yet, you can’t name him stylistically–he doesn’t sound like anybody except, well, happy crazy Billy Vockeroth. I hadn’t watched a rock drummer that knocked me out just being a rock drummer in a long time, not like I do the jazz and Latin cats. But Billy is great, a blast to watch and when called for, he shreds. When not called for, he can sit back, every backbeat and splash and perfect little fill completely in the pocket, as they say, tight where it should be tight, with natural precision. And it wasn’t even his kit. Fifty years of drumming and you learn a thing or two. He even sings and plays, like Moulty or Karen Carpenter. The three non-Samoans are perfect, too, tight but with an edge, the two kids on guitar nail it as well as take most of the vocals, and bassist Mike Villalobos (aka Mike V, a creative cat, here solid as always) was loving every second being half of a rhythm section where the drummer is always there. (It was also Mike V’s birthday bash, a good one.) They did all the hits and people spun around crazily bopping into and off each other when the music got frantic, old style, though nothing–beer bottles, equipment, bones–was broken. They finished up the set with My Old Man’s A Fatso and the place went into Brownian motion again, and when they encored with a couple ancient Black Flags tunes, Wasted and Nervous Breakdown, the crowd went even more nuts, bouncing off each other like crazed eastside dervishes in a miniature pit. It was all harmless fun, though. This stuff ain’t scary anymore, it’s not menacing or dangerous or bloody or revolutionary. It’s not even angry. It’s just thoroughly entertaining, and everyone went home happy and exhausted, even the old geezers who thought they’d never write a punk rock review again.
Spent a weird hour once at the Wiltern utterly bored by Nick Cave while in every direction around me women had orgasms. He would sing about death and drunkenness and being naked and they would squeal and gasp and want him. He pounded a piano and groaned and recited bad poetry and they squirmed in their seats and wanted him. He looked like a weathered old junkie in a nice suit and they ignored their boyfriends and wanted him. He sang about negroes and blues and corruption and love gone horribly, tragically bad. Knives and guns and Stagger Lee and the gallows. Death and despair and doom and damnation. Beautiful dames who’d plunge a knife right in your back. Still, they wanted him. They quivered. They gasped. They ran their fingers through their hair. He would sing about murder and they could discuss Jacques Derrida and oh how they wanted him. I fled to the lobby and waited for the after party. It was dull. Outside the fans lined up along the driveway to the underground garage. A black limo emerged, and they squealed.
My standout musical memory of the Sunset Junction Festival was Universal Congress Of…it was the year they held it in Echo Park along the lake and as usual back then the festival was great but the music bland and then UCO hit the stage and were intense. Play some more of that outside shit! somebody bellowed, and they did, Steve Moss screaming on the sax, Joe Baiza just gone on electric Ornette, and Jason Kahn’s self-taught drumming driving it all ahead. They got so funky the people danced. I also remember Pigmy Love Circus ending the event year after year…loud, fierce, drunken, funny as hell. Once Spaceland took over and pulled them ya knew it was the beginning of the end. All those poppy “Silverlake Sound” acts they’d book…. That wasn’t the Silverlake sound we remembered. Our’s was much harder and weirder, but Spaceland slowly squeezed that out of the Sunset Junction. But it was also fun to always see your friends play there, though usually in the lesser slots (11 a.m.!) I remember my brother Lex’s band last ever gig was there and they were awesome. My brother Jon played there I don’t know how many times. It was all punk and cholo and aging hippies and leather boys back then…and you couldn’t go twenty paces with running into someone you knew….glorious times. I used to love that fair. For years we lived on Edgecliffe three doors up from the little triangular park where Jack Zinder died….back then our pad was party central, three days non stop partying all Memorial Day Weekend year after freaking year. The best stage back then was right there at Edgecliffe & Sunset. One mellow afternoon I went down and caught Jesters of Destiny and Universal Congress Of back to back. I have that on tape (I had a blaster and recorded everything back then…I have hundreds of hours of stuff from about ’85-’90). A lot of the other music over the years blends into each other now in my grey matter; nothing specific stands out. Once they began bringing in rock stars, though, they fucked it all up. And the booths got so expensive local vendors couldn’t afford them. No more Silverlake Militia selling tee shirts, no more local merchants. No more people you knew trying to sell their art or their music or whatever local people sell when a booth for the weekend only costs a couple hundred dollars. We moved over the swish alps to where we are now about 1991 and in the mid-nineties the Sunset Junction weekend partying switched to our pal Sketch’s pad off just off the Bates stage and early on they had great bands there and the cover was a voluntary $2 then $3 then $5 which we paid. Cool hangs at Sketch’s….best ever time there was maybe twenty years ago and getting there at noon and parking in front of his building (Fyl would cab it later in the day) and it was so hot we wound up hanging inside all day…DVH showed up early too and pulled out a jay and then another and another and I got soooo high when we finally went through the gate it was like Checkpoint Charlie and I was gripped by paranoia and all the colors shimmered and the sounds were like Charles Ives or “Section 43” or heavy heavy dub and it was like being at the Festival on acid….
(What a difference twenty five years makes. The Sunset Junction Fair is dead, killed by greed. And if I smoked three joints now my brain would melt.)
I don’t know where the hell I was back in 1990 but I never heard this before. Too bad, man, I woulda flipped. Woulda been something else to bug the fuck outta the neighbors at 3 a.m. Saturday nights. We were the worst neighbors ever. Threw great parties though…nearly every weekend….The things you can get away with when you’re six and a half feet tall and wear cruel looking military boots besides. I’m 55 now, though, and quite sweet and wear regular shoes. Anyway, this is the only version of TV Eye that I’ve heard that does the original justice. It’s freaking awesome. Turn the volume all the way up, however.
(Liner notes from the various artists compilation album Gimme The Keys, the band is Lexington (aka Lexington Devils), the tune “Wisconsin Death Trip”, 1987)
I can remember the first time I heard “Wisconsin Death Trip”. The band was playing in a biker\bar in an industrial stretch of Anaheim—you know, all parking lots and dumpsters and broken glass. The club was an immense pool hall, really, row after row of billiards tables surrounded by bikers and their women, punks trying to look like junkies and junkies like punks, old hippies with beads and bellies, barmaids with them perfect asses. Typical rock’n’roll environment. Lexington was playing to an indifferent crowd, the crowd being those who stuck around the stage long enough for them to do a song. They had a bunch of loyal, even fanatical fans who squealed and yelled to everything they did, especially the tight little Replacements-like numbers: verse, chorus, verse, lead, chorus, Thank you, “Singapore Sling”, “Mama Wants Her Baby Back”—good songs, don’t get me wrong, damn good songs. But the band looked so weird. I dunno. Not so much the way they were dressed—Frank in that James Dean / Monterey Pop Jimi outfit and that trashed little Les Paul in his giant Mexican hands; Derek like Keith Moon might have looked like if he had played for Gene Vincent, with those giant sticks he launch off his ride, actually hitting and hurting people; Eric, beautiful, serene, stoned, even if he weren’t, fingers snaking across the frets bloozin’, jazzin’, rockin’ it—and Lex, that crazed rasping voice belied by the almost pretty face El Greco’d in the shitty bar lighting, body twisting, rolling, writhing, staggering—drunk off his ass, pounding his head on the mike stand, laughing laughing laughing, the pretty pink scarf draped besodden round his neck billowing in the breeze blown by Derek’s giant floor fan. Frank is in the middle of some bloozy rock shuffle (“Lord of the Highway”) and it is an audience favorite, they’re digging it at the pool tables, shaking their cues to the beat, when he starts strangling his guitar, I mean choking it, trying to kill it, you can hear its feedback screams over everything, and he doesn’t stop and it just screams and screams and Eric just digs it and nods to Derek who brings it down, way down, all closed high hat and rim shot, and Lex struggles to his feet, kicks one of the toms laying around across the stage, and just stares at Frank, watching, studying, waiting, catching a breath. Frank’s playing with the guitar now, moving it around in front of the amp, making funny feedback noises. Eric stops, Derek taps out a quiet blooz on his shut high hat, its jagged shattered edges sticking out in all directions. It goes on like that for a while, seconds, minutes, this electric squeal and garbage can tapping. The audience doesn’t get it, a few applaud, some hoot, a big drunk biker yells something unintelligible. The band stands there. The breeze from the fan blows Lex’s scarf. It quivers a little, barely alive. Frank pulls his fingers off the guitar’s neck. The feedback expires. The stick taps arhythmically, slowly, even more slowly. The bar is hushed. Billiard balls clack. That biker mumbles. A lady with beautiful legs is walking round by the bar, looking antsy. People hit furtively from the joint being passed around. What a weird way to end a set.
I remember the next few seconds in slow motion. Frank bolts upright and turns on us, some freaked out “Foxy Lady” triplet riff distorted beyond belief explodes out of his amp and then the whole band follows, punctuated by Derek’s tom tom blasts and it’s a freakin’ Motorhead/Hendrix/Zeppelin hurricane, Lex is screaming and it goes on like that for a minute or two, the audience rockin” out or just staring frozen wondering what the fuck has just happened when it stops just–like–that except for Derek’s out of time descending roll skin-crackingly loud and it hangs there, just for a minute, then BOOMP BOOMP BOOMP BAM and what’s this? Weird guitar, soaring, building on an incredible bass line that just goes on higher with an almost intolerable suspense, drums one two three four five six one two three four five six and Lex on the floor writhing and hurting, first almost in a whisper “Saw your face in the paper…” oblivious to us, to everything but the band, “You know you looked so fine” the vocal melody alien, fragile as a child’s noodling on the piano, or a fragment of a birdsong, recorded and slowed down a hundred times. Frank is chording now, big guitar chunks smashed together, following the bass line, then leading it, then staggering away crazily into feedback then back into he melody again, Derek’s drums grow louder, Lex is walking across the stage, bumping into Frank, away from Eric, tripping on chords, kicking aside pieces of drums and empty cans, yelling into the microphone, yelling at someone in the song, , then screaming this curdling blues howl into the cacophony of drums, guitar and bass blasting this twisted “Dazed and Confused” riff till the remains lay scattered about the stage and the band asks for a beer for Lex. “He looks thirsty. Come on.” The crowd stood silent for a moment, and then screamed.
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