Jay’s, man, how could I forget? It was at Virgil and Santa Monica, across the street from the 7-11 where you’d see crack sold in the open out front (the 7-11 nearby at Normandie and Sunset had ass sold in the open out front), and then on the other corner back a bit was the Garage, the club of the moment. Used to be a bar for the LACC profs, the name of which escapes me, and then a bathhouse called the Bunkhouse–you could still see where the baths had been–but all those guys died and it eventually became a rock’n’roll bar. There’d always be some shit band on the bill somewhere and while they were playing me and the Pope (aka Greg, but known to all as the Pope) would suddenly get the munchies and split across the street for the eats. I always got a burger and two milks, which the Pope found funny. (Milk? Really? A big guy like you?) He got two burgers and a soda. If Fyl was there she got her burger without chile, but everyone else got the chile. Better than Tommy’s, we’d say. Everybody said that. Jonathan Gold said that. It was an old school burger joint with seats on the outside and there was a bit of a gang war going on in the neighborhood and at least once the place was swept with bullets, so you kept an eye out for slow moving cars full of evil types. But then you did that anywhere in LA back then, it was Murder City USA for a few years. Hard to imagine that now.
It’s also hard to imagine a Jay’s now…hamburgers are hip things, upscale, odd. And the neighborhood is too, mostly. Hard to gangbang when all your neighbors are lawyers and actresses. Sometimes the neighborhood is so safe I feel alienated. I’m not, really, but nostalgia softens edges and bodies in the street become less dead and more just a thing blocking your way to the Coconut Teaszer. (Though it’s harder to forget the hot air leaking out of the bullet hole in the skull into the chilly night air.) But that was in Hollywood, and Jay’s was in Virgil Village, or used to be, it’s all Silver Lake now. Not even Silverlake, but Silver Lake. Two words, as if that upper case L gave it class. I suppose it does, if that’s your thing.
Jay’s went under a long time ago, way back before the recession, when the landlord had some demented idea for a ghastly mini mall. Ugly thing it is, with what used to be Jay’s now a taqueria. The 7-11 is nice now, clean, crack free. The Garage is now a way hip bar the name of which escapes me…sometimes you’ll see nice young people in line outside, waiting to get in. Kids are so nice anymore, so polite. They just had their burger–without chile, sometimes without even meat–at Umami over on Sunset, which is fine. A nice place, tasty, but no Jay’s Jayburger, chile squeezing out from under the bun, a couple hotter than hell peppers, and a milk to settle it all down with. I drive home now late from some jazz spot and sit inevitably at the light there at Virgil and Santa Monica and remember the taste of the burger, the tough guy talk, the laughs, the music loud as hell at the Garage. Scenes are so alive at one point, so vital, it’s like they’ll never end. But they do, with a whimper, never a bang, like they never were. It’s always been like that, and always will be. When all us old geezers gather round some cheap beer we tell tales of those times, a lot of them funny, some even true. None of them important, really, but we tell them anyway, and sometimes I write them down, like this, which makes them history, sort of. I never tell anyone that I’ve written them down, though. Because memories are fun, but being history hurts.
I remember that night. They wouldn’t let us in. Even with our tickets. I guess they thought there was gonna be a riot. Which there was, later. We weren’t in it, though. We were over at the Firefly on Vine, where my wife punched a dude out. Sent him flying. He was asking for it. Those were the days.
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….”
Heard several tracks in progress from Charmaine Clamor’s new recording last night. Quite a selection of tunes–none of the usual jazz standards at all. Instead there’s a remarkable take on “Imagine” (a tune that rarely survives covering) propelled by some really striking rhythmic piano by Laurence Hobgood. There’s a surprising “O Shenandoah”, a George Harrison tune, a Carole King, a take (in Spanish) on a Mercedes Sosa tune, which she nails, and at long last she’s recorded her knock out interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. Think we heard eight tunes in all, none of them straight copies or scatting jazz jams. Each is a wholly new interpretation. Originality and creativity and great playing coming together. Laurence Hobgood’s arrangements and piano are deep, he’s taken her to a whole new level, and Charmaine matches/surpasses. Very passionate vocals even by her standard–that’s always been her thing, the passion–and she’s showing subtleties untapped till now. The sound is full and warm and rich. This thing has crossover potential I think (KCRW and that end of the dial definitely) without selling out to commercialism even one iota. Ernie Watts by the way, sits in and kills it, and drummer Abe Lagrimas picks up the ukulele in about as uncliched way as you can imagine. One of my favorite pianists around town, Andy Langham, even takes the bench for a couple numbers. And while I can’t say enough about Hobgood’s presence here, it’s Charmaine’s record through and through, it’s her feel, even on the instrumental passages it never gets away from her. Anyway, I totally dug it. This is major label stuff if I ever heard it.
Charmaine Clamor (photo by Maan Palmiery off of charmaineclamor.com)
Alan Broadbent is playing the groovy electric piano, it’s his tune. Frank Tiberi and Sal Nistico are back there on tenor. Woody is playing the soprano sax. Dig he and Bloomfield dueling it out past the 3:30 mark. You can hear Bloomfield at the top of his game on this record….it was all downhill from there. But then Herman had seen all that before, four brothers’ worth.
According to Ralph Gleason’s liner notes, Bloomfield was a huge fan of swing bands, especially Herman’s. Gleason suggested him to Woody who jumped at the chance. He was always filling the ranks with kids, and his band had a sixties rock’n’roll energy to it. Lots of rock covers, not all worked, but even those were noble failures. Herman confided that the band never got around to sending the charts to Bloomfield, who was freaking. Woody told him not to worry about it, it’s all the blues and to just come in and wail.
Which is how it happened. On the opening cut Bloomfield seems kinda nervous, but he opened up as he went along and by the end of his four tracks he was burning the place up. I don’t think he ever played with the band live, however, which is a drag. But then Bloomfield was a mess by then. I’m sure Woody Herman would have loved to do a whole tour with him. Woody Herman and the New Thundering Herd featuring Mike Bloomfield. Imagine the possibilities. It could have turned kids onto a great, hot band that didn’t sound like their dad’s record collection. And it might have revived Mike Bloomfield’s career. It hadn’t been too long since he’d played on Highway 61 Revisited, or helped Dylan outrage Pete Seeger at Newport. He’d blown minds with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band on East-West in 1966, played Monterey with the Electric Flag in 1967, went gold on Super Session in 1968. He was everywhere in 1969. Nowhere in 1970. By 1971 he was nearly forgotten. Hearing him here with Woody, though, each driving the other up in intensity, it’s hard to imagine that by then he was no longer one of America’s most influential guitarists. But he wasn’t. He was heading toward oblivion. Most people didn’t hear his name at all until ten years later when he was found dead in his car. He hadn’t died in his car. He’d died, rather inconveniently, at a party. So they put him in his car and drove him to another part of town and left him there. No note, no nothing. Police found him in the morning. It was in all the papers. Mike Bloomfield, I remember him.
When this album was released it got some airplay on jazz radio, as Woody Herman albums always did. Rock radio didn’t even know it existed. Oh well. Another of those what ifs that no one even knows was a what if.
Brick's Picks 