rock and roll musings by Tim Byrnes

Interview with a Flawed Desire

I am haunted by Lester Bangs, that is my idea of Lester Bangs. I didn’t know the man, although I heckled him one drunken night at CBGB , when he was fronting Birdland back in the 20^th century. I was the schmuck who kept yelling "Lou Reed was right" throughout their set and if any of the 16 other people who were there that night are reading this, I apologize. Anyone purporting to write about rock and roll in this day and age works under the shadow of Lester Bangs. He is our Shakespeare, and when I say our I don’t just mean music journalists. I mean all of us. Lester Bangs saw through the soul of man and told the tale with unblinking honesty and with buckets of love in his heart for us all, even as he waved us goodbye some time before his death in 1983.

The search continues. I attempt yet another trans-dimensional excursion to snag that interview, to find out what questions wind up getting asked and answered. This time, though, I stayed away from storefront psychics who need to make appointments (shouldn’t they just know when you’re coming?) and hooked up with the spiritual center of the Eternal Saturday Night, a convenience store clerk named Steve. Steve had me arrive at the Quikeez at midnight with 12 bucks and a bucket of hot wings. He led me down a long hallway behind the coolers. Much longer than the store itself. A door to my right flew open, bathing the hallway in the cool blue light of a thousand black and white televisions. Steve disappeared in a puff of purple smoke and I was suddenly sitting on a plastic chair in a prison visiting room with a phone in my hand looking through bulletproof glass into the red rimmed, beaten eyes of Kurt Cobain.

Who spoke into the phone that was in his hand.

"Lester doesn’t........"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah .... doesn’t want to speak with me, I know," I answered. "How have you been?"

"Good question," he smiled, "I’ve been better..... I think. It’s hard to remember now. ‘Been down so long it looks like up to me.’ as the song goes."

"‘Been down so long it looks like it’s up to me’‘s the way I try to take that curve."

"In the best of times, I suppose?" he countered archly.

"Well, yeah" I said weakly , "That approach only works when the son is shining."

"And in the dark hours?"

"Kill them all, just like everybody else."

"So how, when the dark hour just never ends, do you kill them all?"

"With a shotgun in your mouth?"

"Bingo."

"But you swore you didn’t have a gun."

"I lied."

‘Yes you did. You lied and you lied down and I’m not sure which one was worse or hurt worst."

"Why is it your call?"

"Good question."

"Why is it your call? Hell, why is it even your concern? So you bought a few records....."

"Actually, I only ever bought one."

"Oh, really," he thought for a few seconds, "Which one?"

"‘Nevermind’. Got it used on cassette. I was curious, you’d gotten a lot of press, you know."

"Tell me about it. So, what did you think?"

"Honestly?"

"No, lie to me, sweetheart."

"Ok, loved ‘Teen-Spirit’, especially the video. but I always thought you sounded like you took the Pixies and the Replacements and threw them into some kind of Tom Scholz/Boston classic rock cuisinart, diluting the spiritual intent of those vital bands and distilling it into snake-oil angst custom made for Wal-Mart America."

"Christ, you are a rock critic, aren’t you?"

"Yes, thank you."

"It wasn’t a compliment." He shoots. He scores.

"You’re right. I’m intellectualizing things I know nothing about, nor have any real connection to other than some feelings engendered by listening to a record. It was your life in those grooves, as they say, and while our continual second guessing can get a little old or seem a little cold at times, don’t you see any value in others attempting to maybe find some personal answers through your work and life?"

"But you said it, man, it’s my life...."

"Then why did you throw it away?"

A hush fell over the dream sequence.

"To end the pain."

"What about the joy?"

"What joy?" he smirked.

"Good question." I smirked back.

"Well, what do you know of it?" He was getting riled now.

"I have my.... sources." I tried to say it like Lugosi and I think I pulled it off.

"SOURCES!?? What the fu....." He was going all cartoon now.

"Sources." I hoped the word fell like a hammer. "Sources of pain, yes. Sources in my life of pain. Physical, mental and spiritual pain. Ghosts of words and deeds and failings that still wake me up nights hating myself and, yes, wanting to die, but I’ve taken the time and done the work to also find sources in my life of joy and strength and love and hope. Yes, some days, hell MOST days, it looks like evil’s going to win but we have to fight it. Each of us. All of us. Every minute of every hour of every day. That’s why they call it the never-ending battle between good and evil, you idiot. There are no god and devil duking it out on some transcendent plain in technicolor over ownership of our souls! There’s just us! Me, you, them, us, dammit."

‘What, your hyper stylized ‘rock and roll community’". He sneered. For a moment I hated him. If only for that sneer.

"No," I spoke calmly, " Life. That which is in this world and strives to understand itself. That which defines both good and evil. That which is capable of love, which is stronger than death. Everything you left behind."

"Courtney." He sighed, "Frances. I love them so much."

"I think they know."

"But, you know, if you’re looking for a reason, let alone a good one, I think you gotta file this one under ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’. I don’t think I died for anybody’s sins but mine and I don’t think I died for my sins either. It’s not that grand, man, it only gets that gothic in the movies. I just couldn’t go on, no matter how terrific you or anybody else thinks I had it. It’s easy to say, ‘Man, if I was a big rock star I wouldn’t kill myself, man, I’d spend all that money and have all them women and do all those drugs and party all those parties and just sit back and love being loved by millions’. Yeah, millions of strangers who all want a piece of you and half of them see you as nothing more than a money-producing monkey while the other half are electing you Jesus for their half-baked ‘generation’. What the f#$K is a ‘generation’ anyway, really? 7-8 years, tops? Gotta have a Jesus! Gotta have a Dylan! Gotta have somebody to tell you how to dress for Gap commercials in the freaking future, man. It’s not that damn important. It’s rock and roll music, for chrissakes."

"Apparently it was important enough to you that when it failed you, you murdered yourself, no?"

"Christ, you are a rock critic."

‘Yes, thank you."

"You’re welcome. This time. Is rock and roll ‘big’ enough to need a Jesus?"

We both said "Good question" simultaneously.

"Well maybe it do and maybe it don’t," He Kingfished, " But if’n it do, den I’m not him is all I’m a-sayin’".

‘Well, Kingfish", I countered in the character of Andy Brown, " Dat’s not entirely up to you now, am it?"

"Meaning?" He said, himself agin.

"Meaning the savior is the invention of the saved and not the man at all."

"So they can turn me into...."

"Number one, who’s ‘they’? Everybody else, right?", I didn’t wait for an answer, it was a rhetorical question, "Number two, they don’t turn you into anything. We turn your work around in our minds and our hearts and our souls and we decide what we get from it and we confer whatever power you have on our lives to your name and name alone. You have nothing to do with it."

"Not anymore, that’s for certain."

"Not ever. Not really."

He looked at me with eyes like the outstretched hands of a drowning man. He started to speak and stopped. He pressed his free hand against the bulletproof glass and tried to speak but stopped again.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Never mind." He said and, with a dismissive wave of his hand, was gone.

Again.

Posted by: timbyrnes at 00:20 | link | comments

Awkward Christian Soldiers: Marilyn Manson’s Adventures in Outer Faith

My buddy Rob and I were sitting on his couch one night in 1996 watching MTV with Rob’s then 7-year-old son Zack when Marilyn Manson’s "Sweet Dreams" video came on. We had been, that night, more or less good-naturedly dogging all the video artists, trying to get a rise out of the boy, much like our parents had dogged the Beatles on Ed Sullivan trying to get rises out of us. The tradition continues because, as we all know, each generation thinks it invented everything

Awkward Christian Soldiers: Marilyn Manson’s Adventures in Outer Faith

My buddy Rob and I were sitting on his couch one night in 1996 watching MTV with Rob’s then 7-year-old son Zack when Marilyn Manson’s "Sweet Dreams" video came on. We had been, that night, more or less good-naturedly dogging all the video artists, trying to get a rise out of the boy, much like our parents had dogged the Beatles on Ed Sullivan trying to get rises out of us. The tradition continues because, as we all know, each generation thinks it invented everything and each successive generation’s culture is crap. Watching the scene where Manson, wrapped in a thin, clear plastic sheet and little else, lurches spastically down what looks like an alley in a very bad neighborhood, twitching and grinning, all red eye/white eye crazy menace, spitting the words to the Eurythmics’ (suddenly) oldie-but-goodie, Rob leans over to me and whispers, conspiratorially, "This guy kinda really creeps me out." "Oh, come on," I replied, "It’s just Alice Cooper with money. It’s nothing to worry about." Which seemed to be the end of that, but I was impressed that Manson had the power to ‘creep out’ a fellow old dog like Rob.

Having remained blissfully childless myself, I have never taken into account any sort of parental response when it came to rock and roll, but isn’t that a big part of it? Isn’t p***ing one’s parents off a hallmark of rock and roll? And ain’t it a kick in the head when we become the p***ed on. Time’s a b***h, man. Like I used to say when introducing our band to the cowboys at our local saloons "We used to be your parent’s worst nightmare. Now we’re just your parents." But, Manson had clearly struck a nerve. I started seeing local kids walking around with Manson tapes and CDs as well as the usual concert t-shirt. Walking around the little town of Fowler, Colorado, going in and out of the 66 and the video store with CDs at the ready, wanting to be asked about them, wanting to talk about them, to declare themselves allied with Marilyn Manson. In this era of musical hegemony, where faceless and interchangeable talent promise to jump through all the necessary hoops in order to serve the master MTV, this level of identification is no small thing. This is not your father’s Alice Cooper.

The slings and arrows started flying predictably at Manson’s death’s head as more and more kids showed up with t-shirts and CDs and white-out contacts with hair dyed black and, most dangerously, new thoughts. Thoughts perhaps more black, and no less dyed, than the hair. Thoughts that might lead to the revelation that we’ve been lied to from birth about pretty near everything. Thoughts that might lead to other thoughts that could eventually shake off our convenient fictions and ultimately result in it’s young eating America and not the other way around.

Something had to be done!

Manson courted controversy, to be sure. Shredding the Bible and miming sexual acts on stage, being ordained a minister in Anton LeVay’s Church of Satan, flaunting quasi-Nazi imagery, homo-eroticism and graphically violent images in a deliberately confrontational manner really is asking for it, but asking for what? On the surface Manson appears to be anti-EVERYTHING and as such an easy target for the morally outraged. But upon further inspection it becomes apparent that Manson is more than just another non-talent who makes up for deficiencies by using shock for shock’s sake, no, much thought has gone into Manson’s presentation. There are reasons for every last drop of blood, every crucified go-go girl, every abortion vid-clip, every bondage outfit, every shard of broken glass, every ravished Bible, every poisoned youth; ‘poisoned’, like Adam and Eve, having eaten from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, fruit brought to man by the devil himself. Manson, much like the film ‘Natural Born Killers’ tells us more about ourselves than we are comfortable considering.

If I met an alien from Outer Space, who knew nothing of our ways and this alien asked me to explain America, I would take him/her/it to see Marilyn Manson "cause it’s all there, Zardog! All the filthy spectacle of the home of the brave and the land of the freebase, where the white gods live in palaces of commerce and cathedrals of mass hypnosis while the faithful worker ants below kick and scrape to survive long enough to collect on their reward in heaven. Manson artfully (and the man has few, if any, purely artistic peers. His technique matches his vision and each are equally potent and disturbing) combines the iconography and tools of past power structures (the Church, the Nazis, Sex, Violence etc.) with stylistic touches that speak to the isolation and alienation felt by those among us who feel that something is drastically wrong.

From the screech and bang of heavy metal to the pomp and wasted grandeur of glam rock to the shadowy decadence of the German cabaret, Manson gleans bits and pieces of each and through considerable synthesis creates a whole that’s much more than the sum of it’s parts. Marilyn Manson, the band, is a sleek, chrome-hearted machine that blasts out concepts and alternative viewpoints with every power chord and sequence. By giving his audience the benefit of the doubt and refusing to talk down to them, by refusing to insult our intelligence and not challenge our perceptions of everything that counts like god, country and family, Manson proves himself, again and again, to be an artist actively engaged in his art, cognizant of the responsibility to say something of meaning when one has this many people’s attention.

But there is always of course the ‘kill the messenger’ contingent. Manson has been hounded and vilified on the Net and elsewhere by Christian groups at every turn. State legislation has been enacted to ensure that Marilyn Manson receives the rights guaranteed him, as an American citizen, in the Constitution. Ridiculous lies about his stage performance and personal proclivities have been posted all over the Net. The anti-Mansonites had a field day when, after shooting 13 people at their high school, it was revealed that the shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were among other things, fan’s of Manson’s music. Rather than take a good, honest look at what caused this tragedy, which to my would have to rooted in the day to day dealings between the shooters and the shot, the community of Littleton, Colorado were awfully quick to lay the blame at the feet of, you guessed it, Marilyn Manson.

It dishonors the memory of all the dead, including Eric and Dylan, to willfully ignore the societal pressures that set the killing spree in motion and confer responsibility to a musician. It’s easier, sure, but still dishonorable. If one has to bring Manson into this equation then maybe all would be better served if the questioning went a little further, like maybe why were these kids listening to Manson? What were they getting from the music that they might not have been getting elsewhere? Approval? Identity? Strength? Respect? We’ll never know now how Dylan or Eric may have answered, but it’s still not to late to ask the question of ourselves. And, permit me a tasteless moment here, I swear, if I ever snap and feel compelled to shoot something up before offing myself I will be wearing a Walkman with a ‘Best of Wayne Newton’ tape playing in it just to cause that old geezer some grief. Now, see how ridiculous that sounds? To state a belief that merely listening to the music of a particular artist can drive a person to mass murder is the statement of an idiot.

Marilyn Manson is well aware of the idiocy out there, he takes it on every day with every move he makes, fighting the good fight for intellectual freedom and elevating rock and roll to the level of International Debate and, in my opinion, continually p***ing off the right people. Can we ask more from a ‘rock star’? We probably should and, rest assured, if and when we do, Marilyn Manson will be up to the challenge. This man and his work are the real deal, ladies and gentlemen, and one of few such combinations of heart and mind to grace our current rock and roll landscape today. A keeper and a Keeper of the Flame.

Posted by: timbyrnes at 00:18 | link | comments

You’re Going To Lie About This In the Future: We’ve Lost the Afghan Whigs

I’ve already written about the Afghan Whigs and specifically Rick McCollum in previous posts and I’m a-gonna keep on writing about them until there is a statue of Greg Dulli and company in St Peter’s Square at the Vatican because it will be at such time, and not a second sooner, that I will know that we have truly, finally, overcome and it’s ok to stop talking. If haven’t heard the band, get something NOW. My personal recommendation would be, of course, Gentlemen, their 1993 masterpiece. If you have heard the band then you know why I’m all het-up that they get their due, either that or you don’t get the Whigs. This is understandable as the Afghan Whigs seldom offered anything in a simple or even pleasant manner, much less the sort of bite-sized, stylized anaesthesia wrapped in pretty paper sung by the impossibly beautiful that we reward so grandly in America today.

The first time I heard of the Afghan Whigs was through a review in some magazine that said Gentlemen sounded like Big Star doing Lou Reed’s Berlin, two references that are sure to make a wannabee rock critic such as myself take notice. I had seen print ads previously for their Congregation album, but no real press, nothing to acquaint me with their music. Which is sad because every Tom, Dick and Trouser Press was hipping me to Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Pearl Jam and Nirvana and just everybody! In any event I’m glad I caught that review because it made me buy the record. It sound nothing like Big Star dong Berlin to me (Though what a great concept! Somebody get me Alex Chilton on the phone. Alex, this is Tim. Listen......) But it sounded big. And real.

Sorta like Alice Cooper doing Like a Rolling Stone.

Greg Dulli is the ultimate Tomcat, raw sexuality radiates from the sounds of the music. His voice at turns that of a conniving child and a rabid preacher, every consonant and vowel leered at, licked and spat out in an acid wash that corrodes the costumes and customs of our civilized world, stripping those artifices bare, down to the ragged bones and hanks of hair, down to the self-serving survival mechanisms we are. And you can dance to it. What I got from the Afghan Whigs, but especially Dulli, was that it was good to recognize the baser instincts and to give them a little rein now and then. By denying them, by making the dark places secret, you gave that part of you, that part of life, more power than it deserves. What struck me the most about the band was it’s honesty. Unflinching takes on the nature of men and women where no one was innocent and no one quite guilty, depending on one’s perspective. Just like real life.

No, more like Steppenwolf doing The Rites of Spring.

Lest I paint too narrow a picture of the band by concentrating on their lyrics, let it be stated that the Afghan Whigs were black hearted soul men of the first order, growing from the ramalama punkisms of Up in It to the rolling well-oiled New Orleans funk of 1965 with stops at Tamla/Motown/Stax-style jams and what can only be called Vampire Gospel at points in between.

And now that I think about it Gentlemen sound more like the Dead Boys playing Sympathy For the Devil.

The Afghan Whigs did things that no other band did. The out of tune background vocals that are just right. The slide guitar/cello duet on ‘The Vampire Lestat". Dulli bellowing the words "Do you think I’m beautiful? Do you think I’m evil?" and not sounding the least bit ridiculous, and for the record, the answer is yes to both questions. Beautiful because he sounds like a force of nature finally set free, evil because it’s all a front. Like all rock and roll is a front. Like we’re all fronts. But in the grinding gears of the Afghan Whigs dream machine we can sweat like the animals we are but can’t allow ourselves to be, while Dulli and McCollum and Curley and the drummer beat the super ego into submission and gives the id a little time on the dance floor.

Make that like Prince doing Blank Generation.

Dulli is, if not a more significant figure in punk rock than Johnny Rotten, than he’s certainly the greater artist. With the Afghan Whigs he presented a fully formed vision, cinematic in it’s scope and sweep, that communicated real feeling and addressed the more complex issues of life and death; love, lust, murder, guilt, shame, arson and the cool breeze confidence of the true sociopath. And Rick McCollum is the reason god invented the wah wah pedal.

Like Sigur Ros doing The Theme From Shaft.

We have, however, lost the Afghan Whigs. We lost them to indifference and, I’m guessing, poor record sales because the word did not get out. Not enough. And if there were a band currently making records that I felt this strongly about, I’d be happy to write about them. There just not out there. But it’s not too late to save the work for posterity, do it for the children, people! Face it, all you rock critic types who missed the boat will be lying through yer teeth in 10 years time about how much you adored the Afghan Whigs back in the 20^th century and "isn’t it wonderful that they’ve attracted so vast an audience this far along, like the Velvet Underground in the 70's". ‘Cause we can make this happen, people. But we gotta stand up and look the devil in the eye! Avoid the rush and get on board this train! I’m going to continue to tell the world what a great band it missed because it was afraid to look in a mirror and urge, yes brothers and sisters, urge you to move, to go to that record store and buy you some Afghan Whigs!

They sound like Da Vinci doing the dishes.

‘Cause if you don’t, well then the terrorists win....... or something. Just buy the damn records, you’ll thank me for it later. I was right about Sonic Youth in 84.

Posted by: timbyrnes at 00:15 | link | comments (1)

The King and Queen of Rock and Roll:

Ladies and Gentlemen, Little Richard

We interrupt the golden age of rock and roll to travel back in time. To December 5, 1932, to be precise. Now there was no star in the East that cold night, but maybe there was a sequin, because that night Richard Penniman was born to walk among men and atop pianos yelling "wooooooooooo". Without this madman from Macon, Georgia, not only would there be no Elvis Presley (as the man said, MY king of rock and roll never ‘did the clam’), there would be no rock and roll.

A rash statement perhaps, but, really, who else was there was lifting tables with his teeth in strip clubs in 1951? Who else was wearing eye make-up and singing about ‘good booty’ in 1954? Nobody but the originator, he innovator, the architect of rock and roll, and if you don’t believe me, ask Richard, he’ll tell you.

Between February 1956 and December 1957 alone, the man did the following: released ‘Tutti Frutti’, ‘Long Tall Sally’, ‘Slippin’ and Slidin’‘, ‘Rip It Up’, ‘Lucille’, ‘Keep A Knockin’‘, ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’, ‘She’s Got It and "Jenny, Jenny". He also appeared in the movies "Mister Rock and Roll" with Alan Freed, ‘Don’t Knock the Rock" with Bill Haley and "The Girl Can’t Help It" with Jayne Mansfield. And how does he follow that amzing run? By denouncing rock and roll, throwing his jewelry into the ocean and enters theological college and becomes a minister. But not before recording ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’.

The ‘can’t serve 2 masters"’ school of though has afflicted rockers from Dylan to Jerry Lee Lewis, the sacred vs. profane debate will rage forever, but Little Richard brought a religious fervor to rock and a rock fervor to religion. When he would preach he would also play piano and well, you can take the piano player out of rock and roll......

Meanwhile Art Rupe of Specialty records, Richard’s record company was not a stupid man. When Richard decided to leave rock and roll for Jesus, Rupe convinced him to record some tunes which he released on a piecemeal basis until 1962, just in time for Richard’s return to the rock and roll stage. He ignited audiences in Europe and showed, among others, the Beatles how it was done. While playing on the same bill with the moptops in Hamburg (November 1962) it’s been rumored that the cute Beatle asked Richard how to sing in that style. I’d like to think Richard uttered his famous "Shut up!’ and walked away. Maybe going ‘wooooooo’ for good measure. And let’s not forget, he was also part of the ‘Live Peace in Toronto" rock revival show that also featured John Lennon and Yoko Ono (and one can only imagine the magic that Richard and Yoko might have made together, I mean talk about ‘woooooooo’)

Suffice it to say, the man was/is an original, no-make that THE original. He had it all, rock-king wise; black, gay and outrageous-that takes care of the outcast factor. He tapped into the spirit of wildness required of all great rock and roll and, too this day, he don’t give a rat’s ass what you or I or Dick Clark thinks about him.

My favorite Little Richard story is the one where he’s at the Rock Awards, announcing the winner of Best New Talent. Resplendent in white satin and mirrors, Richard walks up to the mic and says "The winner of Best New Talent is..........ME! That’s right..Little Richard! How come you never gave ME no awards! I created it all, baby. SHUT UP!’

My second favorite story is when Dick Clark’s American Music Awards, in their infinite wisdom gave Richard a ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ and Richard accepts by saying "I’m glad that Mr. Clark saw fit to give me this award while I’m still alive."

A sore winner! Now if that ain’t punk rock, I don’t know what is, certainly not Billy Idol or Johnny Ramone or any number of pretenders to the throne. Don’t let the phone commercials and Disney movies fool you, Little Richard is the King and Queen of rock and roll and even though he’s 70-something years old, he can still kick your ass, my ass and Johnny Rotten’s ass.

Recommended Listeneing: Everything the man ever recorded!

Posted by: timbyrnes at 00:12 | link | comments

Belsen Was an Atrocity: How the Sex Pistols Blew It

Consider the Sex Pistols, on one hand they are undeniably one of the greatest rock and roll bands to ever strap on guitars and drums and spit into microphones, perhaps the greatest. Yet for a band that set out, loudly, to destroy all that was bloated and useless in rock and roll and, by extension, society itself, they looked pretty comfortable preening for the cameras on the god awful Jimmy Kimmel Show last week, being treated like the second coming of the Beatles by kids who didn’t know any better. These were, after all, the Sex Pistols, and didn’t they, like, do something great a long time ago? All the material says they’re legendary and wow, it’s the Sex Pistols!! Which one’s Sid Vicious? Hi, mom, I’m on TV......... with the friggin’ Sex Pistols!

Yeah, yeah, yeah..who am I to begrudge Johnny and the boys from finally getting paid in cash and notoriety? I’ll tell ya. I’m (one of the) guy(s) who fell victim to the Great Rock and Roll Swindle, I believed, and truth be told-still believe- in the promise of punk rock. That promise, to me, was one of staying true to the classic rule of the spiritual anarchist, the one that states there are no rules. I always thought that, once the initial rage and anger of punk, which was necessary if only to get us to move, passed that there would be a punk-invented new framework, an art-driven societal model of repair and reparations of and to the disenchanted. A New World Order (and don’t get me started on New Order, I mean Ian Curtis died for this?) free from hype and hermetically sealed personalities, strutting their thievery and mocking us with their riches and unavailability. And, who am I to dog the kids in the audience ‘cause I think they’re spoiled, clueless, lethargic little Woodstock burning down m***********s?

I’m an old guy, that’s my job.

As stated before, the roots of punk go way back, maybe to the caveman who knows? Conventional, that is East Coast, wisdom claims the 74/75 CBGB explosion to be punk’s true roots and maybe so ( My take on this: the Ramones go to England with the Heartbreakers, Johnny steals Richard Hell’s fashion sense, Sid steals Johnny Thunders’ drug habits, Steve and Paul swipe that drivin’ beat from the Ramones while Malcolm confers his New York Dolls marketing plan onto these kids in his clothing store and the next thing you know, they’re cursing on tv and vomiting in airports and so are every other band to come out of the woods for the next 15 years until Cobain swiped the Replacements rock and the Pixies’ psychosis and succeeded himself all the way to the Shotgun Shoppe), but there was nothing but a common stage that linked those early CBGB bands. There was no code, no uniform no requirements then, only fierce fire burning in a thousand hearts. Punk was a movement of self with communication at it’s core, the point was to do it yourself, find that space where truth spoke louder than fact and rock with it. Or scream at it. Or chant. Or tell stories over drop beats. Cover your face in swaddling clothes, be so strange you’re normal, be so normal you’re creepy, it didn’t (doesn’t? shouldn’t?) matter. The watchword was originality. The promise was possibilities. What happened?

Much like the crash of the Aquarian Dream, where my generation got too stoned on it’s own (idea of) beauty to actually create the land of peace and love we envisioned, Punk was hoisted on the petard of it’s own anger. This anger, while righteous and good at first, slowly turned to the dread ‘nihilism’, which means that the intellectuals got a hold of it and dressed it up to the point of posture, an end to itself. This is where the rot sets in, people. Once it becomes cool to be angry about the state of things, all the cool people will do is stay angry. Yes, things are f****d up, always have been, and as long as we as the people continue to respond to these feelings by dressing in black and perforating ourselves with safety pins, and such like nonsense, then things will always be f****d up! The refrain of ‘No Future", taken on face value and celebrated as a way of life leads to just that: No Future. But when critical thought is brought to bear on the concept the first question to come to mind must be "What can we do to avoid this No Future? We get it, life sucks, everything sucks, what are we going to do about it?"

I’ve gotten no answers from Johnny Rotten and Sid’s too dead to speak. In a sense, Sid was the ultimate punk rocker in that he paid the inevitable price for following the scene’s scent, for believing and trying to live up to his publicity. Sid was stupid and vulgar and on drugs, perhaps he even murdered Nancy Spungen though I don’t think so, I mean that act would require a level of commitment that Sid was probably not capable of. I saw him at Max’s Kansas City weeks before Nancy’s death. He was stranded in New York, suddenly an Ex-Pistol and trapped by fame into performing with a pickup band consisting of Jerry Nolan and Arthur Kane of the Dolls and a guitarist who’s name escapes me now, but it was NOT Steve Jones, as intimated, hell, claimed at the Pistols own site. I was, as I was usually in those days, drunk to the point of seeing double, but even in my condition I could tell that Sid (both of them) was in worse shape. Thin, pale and shaking with dead eyes too tired to even cross as he weaved back and forth in the vicinity of the microphone, mumbling old rockabilly tunes as Nancy screamed drink orders in a harridan voice all the while. This man could no more commit murder than loud music could change the world. But, the saddest thing about Sid’s story is that it didn’t have to be that way. Sid Vicious was a human being, a kid named John Simon Ritchie who fell into the rock and roll circus with all it’s gifts and temptations only to be used up and left to die by Malcolm McClaren, John Lydon, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, EMI, WB, Virgin, the underground media, the overground media and, finally by you and me, ‘cause we watched this poor kid’s demise like it was entertainment. Which it was presented to us as, but Christ, why couldn’t we see through it?

So the Pistols begat the Clash, who begat the Damned, who begat the Dead Boys and so on and so forth until we got Joe Strummer’s ghost in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the whole ‘stone-temple-of-the-alice-in-the-pearl-bush’ department of Doors impersonators passing as the new New Wave. And wither the Sex Pistols? Well, the once ‘last, best hope for rock and roll’ have turned into the very machine they were born to hate; the massively bloated rock machine that elevates itself from us - where all the power truly comes from - and plows through old songs for old people, no matter their age.

Posted by: timbyrnes at 00:08 | link | comments

Interview with an Empire: Lester Bangs Rides Again

Lester Bangs, American Writer, Drug Punk, avuncular avatar of the avant garde, taste shaper, trailblazer, raconteur, hell raiser, the conscience of a generation or two. From 1967, until his death from a reputed Darvon overdose in 1982 at the age of 33, Lester Bangs wrote intelligently and passionately about life and death, love and hate, man and woman and their responsibilities to one another as human beings. He wrote of God and devil and good and evil, all the major themes of Great Literature, except Lester hid his light under the bushel of the record review.

He wrote about an album’s soul, the soul he invested it with, seeing each new offering from....... whoever, the Stones, Bowie, Black Oak Arkansas, ABBA, it was all the same, as a link in a chain of forever, an expression of a spirit he held holy. He’d want to know what made the record tick, what, if any, were it’s motives and goals? Was it a Good Witch or a Bad Witch? He’d make you want to know, too, and he wrote so well he could make you care about music that didn’t even exist, as in ‘Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung’ his semi-fictional history of 60's garage band the Count Five. His writing dug until it found, if not truth, then at least more satisfying facts.

There is a very good biography of Lester Bangs available. It’s called ‘Let It Blurt’ by Jim DeRogatis. Buy it. There are also two collections of Lester Bangs’ various work from Rolling Stone, CREEM, Village Voice, etc available. One is ‘Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung’ edited by Greil Marcus and ‘Mainlines, Deadlines and Blood Feasts’, edited by John Morthland. Buy them both. Lester Bangs was one of the great writers of the late 20^th century. Period. He wrote about his passion, music, and in doing so, became a chronicler of a period of history when the mode of the music was changing, and shaking the city walls.

Here’s what happened when I went to my landlady’s cousin’s house. The psychic, remember?

..........................................so I walk into this adobe like hut on the edge of what looks like a cliff and there’s hawks making circles in the iron plate sky and the door kinda opens and there’s a woman inside in an Indian blanket with a crooked tin smile and she hands me this pipe and she hands me some fire and I give her 20 dollars and she says ‘Close your eyes........................

I open my eyes and the woman’s gone. The adobe hut and the circling hawks are gone. Yet I can still feel the warmth of the walls and I can still hear the echoes of the great bird’s call. I’m standing in a completely white space, no ceiling or floor, no walls or windows or doors. I’m pretty sure there was no time. I sense a presence behind me and turn, expecting to be face to face, at last, with the great Lester Bangs.

Instead, there stood my father with a suitcase in his hand.

My father passed away in 1976. The last thing I had said to him was that I was going to kill him. I was drunk. Hell, it was the Fourth of July, the Bicentennial for chrissakes. In any event it’s safe to say that we had unresolved issues. I looked at the man who brought me into this world and asked him if he had seen Lester Bangs.

‘Lester doesn’t want to speak to you."

I was a little shocked at that.

‘I’m here to do an interview with him. I got this nifty new web site and I’m writing about rock and roll and I thought it would be cool to do like a ‘beyond the grave’ type thing, like he did with Hendrix....."

"Lester doesn’t want to speak with you."

"What are you talking about?" I cried, " I set this all up! With the landlady’s cousin or sister in law or something! This is my imagination talking! You can’t deny me my interview! I’m his biggest fan! I cut my teeth on Lester Bangs. He taught me how to think. Why, he was more of a fath..." I stopped, realizing how pathetic I sounded, how weak was the insult to this good man, how much I dishonored both good men. I started to sweat and my father turned to a yellow mist, which slowly reconstituted itself into the shape of my mother.

"Lester doesn’t want to speak with you." she said. She smiled my mother’s smile, the one I hadn’t seen since she passed away in’67. I was 11 when she died and I never forgave her. I denied that particular cliche under twisted logic. She didn’t mean to die, I can’t possible be mad at her for it. But in the instant I looked in her brown eyes I knew exactly how much pain I had been in for all those years, because I could feel it all melting away at once. The interview was slipping my mind.

"Lester doesn’t want to speak to you ‘cause the sucker’s old and tired," it was my Grandfather, Chris, his white hair righteously spiked, wearing the mantle of the punk rocker, a black t-shirt and a red Flying V. "He’s all Stones and Miles, And Miles and the Stones, and Iggy, Iggy, Iggy. No imagination anymore. Won’t even come into the Soundgarden."

‘You mean Soundgarden, like from Seattle?"

‘Heavens to quaaludes, no! The soundgarden is where you go to listen to the music of the spheres. It’s all the rage in Heaven."

"Is this Heaven, here?"

"No, John," he always used to call me John, "this is like you said. This is your imagination. A little space you created to work some things out, I suppose. Now who was it you were looking for, again? Oh yeah, Lester Bangs. Gonna do an interview. You know, old Lester gets about 100 of you guys at a time, wanting to do interviews. Something about ‘the gunslinger mentality’, I don’t know. That old goat can talk for days, with thousands of commas, can’t really follow what he’s saying most the time. What was it you were gonna ask him?"

"I hadn’t really given it much thought," I said, because I hadn’t. "I guess I really wanted to tell him something. Something like how much his work means to me. How I’m still finding things to think about in it and that I am thinking about things, and with the web site and the CD I’m putting out, I’m finally doing something with my thoughts and music and that his work helped me get to this place and that I’m grateful. I wanted to say thank you. Oh, I guess I’d ask him what he thought about the Afghan Whigs."

"Oh, hell, John," my grandfather laughed and started playing Gloria on his V, "He knows, and so do I and so do your mom and dad. We’ve all been keeping an eye on you, even Lester. He uses a lot of commas but he thinks you’re ok, and you’re absolutely right about the Afghan Whigs. We sent them for you special."

And with that I awoke to see Iggy Pop fronting Sum 41 on Lettermen. There’s a lesson in here somewhere.

Posted by: timbyrnes at 00:07 | link | comments (2)

LURID: Shooting Craps with the Bard of Syracuse

My Lou Reed can beat up your Lou Reed. We’ve all got one, whether we call it Lou Reed or Satan or America or whatever name one gives to their dark angel; that other that we invest with a self defeating mix of hatred, admiration and no little recognition. Rock and roll has always been a refuge for the outsider, and there was nobody more outside than the Velvet Underground during the Summer of Love, unless you count the people to whom the Velvets’ music spoke most directly. Like a 13 year old boy who ran away to NYC in 1968, expecting that Aquarian Dream he’d seen on tv and instead found soup kitchens, speed freaks, junkies, sexual predators and the Velvet Underground. The pitch of their screed was a soundtrack that made sense. The noisy rush of Heroin mirrored the combination of fear and ecstasy that accompanied this young man’s introduction into real life. Sunday Morning sounded like what waking up in a crowded basement in an abandoned building on 14^th Street felt like. The Black Angel’s Death Song, all rushed phrases through clenched teeth over skittering viola captured perfectly the dazed and somehow wrong reality of a sleep-deprived teenaged boy, freshly raped and bleeding, making his way down 2^nd Ave toward the next revelation.

Lou Reed elevated rock and roll to the level of Literature, not Dylan. Lou Reed was the most exciting and innovative guitarist of the 1960's, not Jimi Hendrix. The Velvet Underground were the most influential and important band of the 1960's, not the Beatles. With their debut record, 1967's The Velvet Underground and Nico, Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker punctured the balloon of the psychedelic era’s love-fest to itself with songs that spoke (and screamed and screeched and clattered) with authority of the harsh realities of life. As this balloon was filled with the worst of hot air, narcissistic denial, this puncturing was a good thing. No, the record wasn’t a hit at he time, far from it, but this record was, and is still, more than product. The Velvet Underground and Nico was/is nothing less than a call from one hyper-intelligent soul in pain to another. And another. And another. It’s taken 35 years but we’re as much a religion as you Elvis and Beatle acolytes and, no, I’m not entirely convinced that this is a good thing.

Teenagers, as well as people, have a right, from time to time, to hate the world. The world comes with it’s own sets of problems every damn day. There’s no justice in the woods. Merit often means less than nothing. Some days it feels like it’s never going to change, a night of denser dark’s about to fall and take you and everything you love with it. What you going to do? Shoot heroin or listen to it? Throw yourself off a bridge or wrap yourself in the barbed wire drone of a band that understands the anti and creates war cries and lullabies for it, giving the hardened soul a little mood music for bad moods? Sometimes that’s all the space one needs to avoid the abyss and I speak from experience when I say that some rock and roll can, indeed, save lives.

As you might have guessed by now, the Velvet Underground are my Beatles, or as my wife would say, my Jesus. Lou Reed was my Dylan and Hendrix rolled into one blinding flash of art and noise and inspiration, if not example. If not role model. Which is where I got it the most wrong.

Basketball great Charles Barkley once remarked that just because he could play basketball, that didn’t mean he should raise your kids, a wise and direct rejection of the role model straitjacket worn so righteously and seemingly effortlessly by folks like Michael Jordan. Charles Barkley is a wise and direct man, and if I still had heroes, he’d likely be one of them. But I’ve come to the conclusion that hero worship only places unreal expectations on someone you don’t even know, and all focus placed on someone else’s behavior ultimately removes that focus from yourself, so nothing gets done and you’re not to blame. Neat racket. One gets the self satisfaction of appreciating greatness without ever having to lift a finger to attain it. I once remarked to a friend, upon the release of Let’s Dance, that I had lost all respect for David Bowie. My friend, Paul Martino of Dem Mudbone Boys, turned to mean and said "He doesn’t care, Tim". He was right, of course, and I was a fool to think different and perhaps a bigger fool for thinking it mattered, thinking that it still matters. That rock and roll is anything more than a bunch of bored kids with guitars, looking the devil in the eye and approaching with song. Now, is that noble or ridiculous? You tell me.

Being a fan of the Velvet Underground’s like being in a secret society/chess club. You can content yourself with your perceived hipness, but on many levels you’re still a dweeb in the face of the high school in-crowd of the mainstream. No matter, Lou Reed was my hero back, as the kids say, in the day and remained so until the early 1990's. Not surprisingly the longer I was sober, the less drawn I was to Reed’s music. The Velvet’s reunion of 1993 was, of course, a letdown. No human beings could meet the expectations of my comic book brain that had transformed an exceptionally fine rock and roll band (no small thing) into the cleansing vortex of ritualized envy and agony that rose from the subway stations of a gloriously tortured youth, forming a cloud of faith and fear and greatness, coalescing into the very face of god! That’s a lot to hang on a rhythm section and a guy with a six note vocal range.

But the ideas! The though that went into the lyrics and the musical presentation as well, from the Velvet Underground to his solo career, mark Lou Reed as one of the greats, a true artist.. From the tinsel pop time capsule of Transformer to the Grand Opera sweep and scope of Berlin (the best album of the 1970's, not Never Mind the Bollocks, which is admittedly a close second) Reed took a mass audience from the top of the charts to the depths of hell. Berlin is a cinematic CD, telling in painful detail, the story of two expatriate Americans living in Berlin and tearing each other apart through the sin and disease of being human. Perversely replacing the guitar throb rock and roll of previous work with heavily arranged orchestration and a harrowing chorus of screaming children, Reed created with Berlin the first ADULT rock and roll record. Which of course was too much for most of us, especially the reviewer at Rolling Stone who claimed to be physically sickened by the record. Rock and recoil? This is communication!

After Berlin, Reed backed off and gave us Rock and Roll Animal, the Lou Reed record for people who don’t like Lou Reed. A live record, Animal presented classic VU tunes along with cuts from Berlin played in a rather heavy metal manner by a back up band featuring the guitar wankery of Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner. While a fine band who played the tunes’ new arrangements tightly precisely, in my opinion they lacked the sheer (ironically enough) animal commitment that best serves Reed’s music. Once again, Lou couldn’t give a rat’s ass what I think. Funny how that component of the artist’s make up is only cool when he or she is pissing someone else off. With his next record, the magnificent Metal Machine Music, Reed pissed just about everybody off.

MMM, for the uninitiated, is a two record set of electronic feedback, split completely into separate left and right stereo channels. No songs, so lyrics, just 2 records worth of pure White noise stretching on into infinity (literally, the last groove on Side 4 loops back into itself, never leading the needle off the record. The record will not end until you remove the stylus from the disc. For all you CD kids, I know this sounds like ancient history, but it was still a cool move). The record’s packaging made it look like another live album along the lines of Rock and Roll Animal while the liner notes were, I assume, speed driven ramblings that led me to believe that when I got this record home and played it that I would find absolutely nothing in it’s grooves. Which might have been an even bigger rip on his fans, except that MMM, in all it’s pristine cacophony had the cultural edge of being the prototype for bands like Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine and thus directly influencing rock and roll history. Again. This revelatory album was followed by Coney Island Baby, a collection of love songs, an apology of sorts. All was forgiven as Reed created a record of a sweetness rarely seen in rock.

The punk years brought Street Hassle, a tough minded, beat poet/electronic high mass. Reed was experimenting with a recording technique called Stereo Binaural Sound, the physics of which escape me, but involved two microphones embedded in a plastic head. Listening to this record (and it’s follow ups, The Bells and Take No Prisoners), especially through headphones, was like 3D sound well before the advent of the 5.1 systems so prevalent today. You could almost tell where the musicians were positioned in relation to each other, and on the live Take No Prisoners, you could here people talking at the table behind you between songs. Take No Prisoners is perhaps the greatest live record ever, and certainly the greatest live Lou Reed performance. That it was recorded is a blessing, that it was released, a miracle. Over a fine tuned band, although one that can swing as opposed to the Animal trackers, an admittedly drunk Lou Reed throws down to an audience of worshipers. Calling us out as cowards regarding rock critics who get in free (‘Why do you put up with this? Go to another club?), cutting us off at the pass as we try to bask in his glory ("I can drown you out" after bashing a power chord to silence a heckler, "If you write like you talk, no one reads you" to another in a moment worthy of Dorothy Parker), telling tales out of school about himself and friends in a devastating monologue over the chord changes to his biggest hit Walk On the Wild Side ("Little Joe.......... was an idiot!), taking us all to church on a transcendent version of Coney Island Baby’s title cut, Reed brought a brutal honesty to the stage. I wish there was a video of this show, what a miraculous thing, a rock star abrogating the responsibility of being nice to his audience, to be something other than a vessel for their failed aspirations and having the nerve, not to mention common sense to utter the following to a particularly annoying heckler.

"Oh, leave if you don’t like it."

A great moment in rock and roll history and perhaps the greatest thing ever said from an artist on stage to the crowd in the pit. Leave if you don’t like it. Take some responsibility. I’ve always read the title of Take No Prisoners as meaning, not the Professional Wrestling like allusion to murder but a rejection of letting the audience into your head and leaving them, in their entirety, back at the ranch when the show’s over. Leave if you don’t like it. Priceless.

Lou Reed has always attracted dirty dark wannabees all trying to out ‘decadent’ the perceived master. I’m sure many people have used heroin in a misguided attempt to be like Lou Reed (or Charlie Parker, Keith Richards or Johnny Thunders), but you can’t lay those hurt or wasted lives at his doorstep. Hearing the song Heroin kept me off the drug, and I was something of a garbagehead in the day, it was that little laugh between the lines ‘It’s my wife" and "It’s my wife’. I never wanted to be on the other side of that laugh and, as a direct result of Lou Reed, have never put a needle in my arm. Maybe it’s time he started getting a little credit for that influence. By dispassionately describing the world of the junkie, he provides the information for one to make an informed choice. Can’t blame him for everyone who made the poorer one.

The 1980's brought Reed’s work into a tighter focus with the formation of the band that featured Robert Quine, guitar hero extra ordinaire and Fernando Sauders, he of the fretless bass which sings like angels. The Blue Mask and, to a lesser degree, Legendary Hearts, were the last time Reeds flame burned this hot. By taking the re-evaluation of self that all of us go through when we first get sober and giving it voice and a back beat, Reed produced some of the most honest work of a carrer steeped in the bleakest honesty. The direction he seemed to be heading toward, this time, though, was one of hope and the search for some kind of redemption, implicit in all his work dating back to the VU seemed to be closer than ever to positive fruition. This struggle between self and substance struck a chord with me, as I was in a similar situation at the time, trying to clean up. I was rooting for Lou, as much, if not more, than myself to make it. So far, we both have,

Through the 1990's to the present day, Lou Reed has taken great pains to reposition himself as a man of letters and a serious voice in American Literature, sometimes at the expense of great rock and roll. It’s a shame to me, that he feels the need to deny the sex and drug adventures that built the house of his career. I get it Lou, you were never gay, never really a junkie, never really a drunk, it was all poetic license. No, you are, and have always been a Great American Writer and you can line up all your records and get The Great American Novel in sound. You are a genius. Genius enough to walk away from the Velvet Underground not once, but twice. You’ve got your henchmen and music stands and professorial glasses and demeanor and your acoustic guitar and your sights on a place in Legitimate History, as if your involvement in the evolution of rock and roll from kid’s stuff to high art wasn’t enough. Maybe too much clean living washed away the dirt from your hands, it’s certainly washed the blood from your art.

So, I’m going to leave, because I don’t like it.

Posted by: timbyrnes at 00:05 | link | comments

A CHILD WITH A LOADED GUN: THOUGHTS ON BIG STAR THIRD

Big Star Third is a crippled kitten of a record, it’s attraction the warm glow of a b/w tv set rather than the kaleidoscopic explosion of the more heavy acts of the 70s. While Mott and Bowie and the Dolls etc reveled in their strangeness, celebrating the geek as a power source, Alex Chilton ( who by the time ‘Third’ was released was Big Star) stood, barely, as all raw nerve, exposed and shivering in the cold of his own isolation.

Big Star, for the uninitiated are, perhaps, the great lost band of the 70's and Alex Chilton our great, lost genius. The fact that their ‘In the Street’ has found a twisted fame at the hands of Cheap Trick as the theme for ‘That 70's Show’ feels more like the final shovel of dirt on the grave than any deserved, though belated, recognition. Their 1^st two records 1972's #1 Record and 1974's "Radio City" were unadulterated power pop gems, strangely unsuccessful in their day. But the true masterpiece was the Third album, alternately called "Sister Lovers", recorded in 1974 but not released until 1978. From the baroque pining of ‘Stoke It Noel’ to the childlike joy of "Jesus Christ" to the harrowing visions of ‘Holocaust’ and ‘Kanga Roo’ to the sheer loveliness of ‘Blue Moon’ and Chilton’s cover of the Velvets’ ‘Femme Fatale’, Third is a magnificently human album, soaked in and reflecting a panorama of emotions. Like a drunken friend who can shift personae at the drop of a shot glass, the Big Star of Third laughs itself into a crying jag, congratulates itself with petty jealousy and rocks you, like a hurricane, to sleep.

Repackaged beyond recognition, the original intent of Big Star Third has been, for all intents and purpose, lost. Chilton’s not talking. In recent interviews he writes this work off as lightweight ‘kid stuff’. If only more kids were this lightweight. Third is a record that seeps into you, if you let it, if you have the nerve,,,y’see Third is the sound of the damaged heart, the last line of the suicide note and all the more beautiful in it’s opaque desperation. Third calls to mind the bleak landscape of the beaten down, a soul so weary, just fucking tired of

this black plain that passes for life. Yeah, rock and roll is about escapism, about ‘rising above it all, maaaaan", well let me tell ya, that whole ‘hammer of the gods’ crap is entirely false and ultimately insufficient in the face of a world full of liars and failure and the broken promise of genius + hard work= love and happiness, and I’d rather have the comfort of the good cry, which this album is the listening equivalent, to the mindless bravado of a thousand Led Zeppelins braying ‘I’m a Man’ as if that, by itself, meant something.

The warm, oval cellos of the sad song sung in a silent night to the soul in need of solace is a far greater contribution to the world than all your houses of the holy combined.

Posted by: timbyrnes at 00:02 | link | comments

He Fell in Love with It’s Eyes: The Unbearable

Lightness of Being Daniel Johnston

 

Daniel Johnston was born in Sacramento, CA sometime in 1961, the youngest of 5 children in a strict, Christian Fundamentalist household. His earliest memories of music involve ‘banging around at the piano, making up horror movie themes’ when he was about 9. He then progressed to making up and singing songs while mowing the lawn, developing his madcap craft in the privacy of the lawnmower’s roar. Like most of us of that age, he was blown away by the Beatles and continued to make up songs through his High School years, only now he was committing them to tape and trading them with his friends. After High School he enrolled in an Art program at a branch of Kent State near his parent’s West Virginia home, where the family had moved and where Daniel lived in the basement, depressed and recording his songs on a $60 Sanyo boombox.

Daniel’s depression receives more notice than his work, and although that’s a shame, it is understandable as Daniel does not go mad quietly. Stories abound of his setting apartments on fire, becoming suddenly violent and striking out at family and friends, he reportedly threw, or chased, a woman out a window in Maryland because he thought she was the devil. For a man who has spent as much, if not more time in various mental institutions than he has in the studio or on the road, Daniel Johnson has, over the last 20 years, produced a body of work that shines with the naive genius of a Hank Williams or a Robert Johnson. Yes, his work is that essential.

The fact that Johnston refers to ‘making up’ his songs, rather than use the more portentous word ‘writing’ tells you a lot about the way he approaches his craft. Daniel sings what he thinks, in all it’s embarrassing honesty, in all it’s easy-to-ridicule purity. Truth be told, the man has a voice like a hinge, but looking past the technical ‘imperfections’ of his voice, one is rewarded with the touch of the true believer, a saint of rock and roll. While living in that basement (1982-83), he recorded two cassette of tunes, dubbed ‘Songs of Pain’ and ‘More Songs of Pain’, a 2-part collection of heartbreak songs about a woman named Laura, who spurned his love for another (reportedly an undertaker) which he then proceeded to hand out to people in the street. One of my prized possessions is an original cassette of ‘More Songs’, with it’s cover and label hand drawn and written by Daniel himself. I bought it at the CBGB Record Canteen and annoyed my friends for months. ‘You gotta hear this guy’ I would say and I will say it again unto you and yours that, if you’ve lost even a little bit of faith in the power of rock and roll to heal and bring joy to a sad, sad world you need to hear this man’s music.

Between 1980 and 1990, Daniel recorded 11 odd tapes of beautifully damaged, visionary work. All on that $60 boombox which, from the resulting lo-beyond-lo-fi sound, was resting on top of his piano, giving the mix a decidedly reverberant quality. All the sympathetic vibrations of the piano’s strings and the cheap recorder gave the tapes the feel of a fevered dream sequence, like a visitation of a spirit from the otherworld. Daniel sang about the hole in his heart, in his life with such achingly honest words, such beautifully simple music as to create works of art far beyond the concerns of the marketplace or even individual tastes. To give you a frame of reference, compared to the purity of Daniel Johnston, Jonathan Richman is a card carrying member of Bon Jovi and on the Clear Channel board of directors.

Moving to Texas in the early 80's, Johnston continued to make and pass out his homemade tapes for free. It was during this period that he recorded the monumental "Yip/Jump Music" and "Hi, How Are You?", all of which are currently available on CD, complete with tv noise and his mother’s admonitions to eat something from upstairs in the background. It is this type of realism and immediacy that draws me to Johnston’s work when I need to hear real music by real people and get away from the bulls*** of modern life. After an 8 month stint selling corndogs in a carnival (and, boy, I would’ve like to have been a fly on the wall on that trip!) Daniel settled in Austin, again handing tapes out on the street. Austin is a great rock and roll town, a fact that did not escape MTV and their ironically titles 80's show ‘The Cutting Edge’. Most Austin bands were impressed enough with Daniel to hype him to the then new music channel, who profiled him on a 1986 special, complete with an interview and several performances. When the show itself aired, however, Daniel was once again in the Austin State Hospital, this time for attacking his manager.

That’s a large part of Daniel’s story and sadly, often surpasses the originality and loveliness of his music. Maybe we’re all so conditioned to expect music to be played and marketed a certain way that when anyone comes in from what we’ve been led to believe is left field, we don’t know how to react. But a crazy guy making silly records? That we can handle, usually by dismissing after the requisite amount of glad-it’s-not-me ridicule, and this is a disservice, both to Daniel Johnston and ourselves.

Throughout the late 80's and 90's, Daniel recorded many CDs, now that MTV had given him their seal of approval, with the cream of the alternative crop. ‘The Continued Story’ with Texas Instruments, the 1994 Paul Leary (of Butthole Surfers) produced ‘Fun’, which includes the wonderful ‘Love Wheel’ the closest thing DJ’s had to a hit single, and duet records with Jad Fair of the unhinged Half Japanese. Various people, including Yo La Tengo and Kathy Waller covered his tunes and various record companies have reissued his very early work. The point I’m trying to make is, having been exposed to this music has made my life better. All these ‘producers’ and record companies have been tripping over themselves to keep Daniel Johnston working and getting his music out to the world. Such devotion to an artist is uncommon, especially when one doesn’t know when said artist is going to freak out and push one out a window because one might be the devil.

And you know what? One might be the devil. Or at least be the devil’s billboard, or the devil’s advance man, bringing pain and negativity into the childlike world view of this boy genius, and if we can’t respond to the innocent beauty of a man giving all of himself in the service of (his own) truth and beauty then maybe we all ought to jump out that window and spare Daniel the bad Karma accrued when he has to do it himself. In any event, the best album of 2003 is, hands down, Daniel’s ‘Fear Yourself’ released on the Gammon label and produced by Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse. A review of this CD is found below. For a complete discography and more information about Daniel Johnston go to .

Daniel Johnston- Fear Yourself

(Gammon Records)

***** (5 stars)

Daniel Johnston is the crackpot/genius that everybody tries to sell us Syd Barret as. True, Barret did some wonderful work on the 1^st Pink Floyd album, his crystalline visions of the early psychedelic era were all Lewis Carroll whimsy in lysergic sauce and very real milestones in rock history, but after that and 2 wildly erratic solo records, Barret folded up his tent and has been surviving as both living legend and Roger Waters’ muse since, what, 1980? Johnston has been releasing records of homespun decency and manic innocence for nigh onto 20 years now, each one better than the last. After a 10 year run of voice and piano solo tapes, recorded in various basements and bringing new meaning to the words ‘lo-fi’, Daniel ran through a gamut of producers in the late 80's and through the 90's to varying degrees of success.

For the most part the production values consisted of garagey bass and drums and way too much reverb. Johnston’s songs, however, have always been too powerful and direct to be hobbled by weak production, but with ‘Fear Yourself’, Johnston’s best work in years, he’s finally been matched up with a truly sympathetic producer. Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse douses most of the record in reverb also, but it’s the right kind of reverb, lending these songs of failed love, but unbroken hope a baroque majesty, a misty moor of solace and civility. The addition of what sound like sleigh bells, a small thing but a touch that turns a backing track into a soundscape, on a song like ‘Must’, is the type of detail so lacking in earlier work. The CD is by no means a Def Lepperd tangle of overproduction, no 752 guitar overdubs for our boy, but it is the 1^st DJ record, to me, that was given the respect it deserved from the get go. Linkous is quite empathic to Johnston’s muse, giving ‘Fear Yourself’ the smoky glow of the campfire ghost story and giving Daniel Johnston the shot at massive recognition he so richly deserves. There will be a special place in heaven for you, Mr. Linkous, cause if god ain’t a Daniel Johnston fan, well he oughta be.

In this time of the world, with our Commander in Thief (thanks RH) declaring war on basically the rest of the world, with religious tensions broiling away far across the map, with every institution from Wall St to the Catholic Church threatening to burst into flames any minute now and all of us standing around wondering just who it is we’re supposed to hate and fear, Daniel Johnston hits the nail right on the head. We need to Fear Ourselves, ‘cause all that’s good and all that’s evil in this world comes from us, if not from direct action than from our response to the direct action of other’s. We need to step away from the race toward mutual destruction we all seemed so hell bent on winning and look at things through a pair of honest eyes.

Fear Yourself can be purchased at amazon, barnes and noble and, if yr lucky, at a record store near you. Do yourself a favor and let go of that Cannibal Corpse/NuMetal/Popdiva crap that’s been poisoning your heart and catch the new sensation. A crazy man is trying to save the world (again), we have only to listen.

Posted by: timbyrnes at 00:00 | link | comments