UNCUT ROCK N ROLL: THE SEDUCTION

the seduction @ the garage

Nothing is more punk than being self-determined

and respecting the self-determination of others.

                                                   --graffiti

I got my rock n roll fix at the Garage in Winston-Salem Sunday night. The place was a powerhouse of energy from 9 til 2. My friend Daniel Biggins' band, The Seduction, played in a show with three other bands, The Swamp, Bask and Viajando. All played hardcore punk in their own particular take on it. All the bands were good and all the musicians stellar. They were unafraid to make some noise. The band, Viajando, turned their guitars up to screaming, then started. A three-piece band, the guitar was all over the place. The bass gave the guitar a surface to dance on that, itself, was a dance. The bass player's fingers hopped all over the strings and I could hear what he was doing. The sound system was just right. The lead guitar, Nick, played kind-of melodic, abstracted sounds beyond description. Viajando had an almighty drummer, too. He was the vocalist. Talking with him after the show, while the bands were packing instruments and electronic equipment into their vans, I asked him the source of their name, Viajando. He said it's Spanish for a journey, they felt like they were on a journey as a band, and they liked the word. I made it a point to express my appreciation to one person in each band, and everybody in the Seduction, through the course of the night between bands. On the road to the show in the van, Daniel played a cd with some music by Bask and Viajando. Taking I-40 into the city, I told Daniel, if this is what we'll be hearing, I am ready. I was anyway. He said they are bands difficult to follow onstage, and he loves it. They make him play all the harder. 

viajando

bask

The van parked in front of the band entrance door, everybody in the band did their part unloading a major sound system in several parts from the trailer and transporting them to the stage area, placing them out of the way, allowing the first band to put their equipment on the stage. Between bands, the band just finished removes their sound equipment, the next band sets up theirs and wires it all together. The beginnings of each of the band's sets, they played sounds they use to check out the system of wires and tunings. I loved it. It brought to mind an orchestra checking out their tunings before a concert, conditioned intro to some good music. The sounds are quite different, the only likeness being they're the same thing. Each band had their own such intro. By chance, I made video of the Seduction checking out their connections. I thought they were starting the first song and pushed the record button. Catching on that they were checking the sound, I thought, what a waste, then thought, it's digital, no waste, no problem, and thought, wow, this is cool, glad I got this. I stayed near the "merch" table throughout the show, allowing Nolan, who was taking care of the table, a chance to go outside for a smoke from time to time. There was no way I could leave one of the bands once they got going. For my own personal taste in rock, I'm awfully particular about what I listen to, these four bands delivered full satisfaction. I wanted cds by all of them, but only two had cds for sale. Before the show, I spoke with the guy setting up Bask's merch table, who turned out to play guitar and do vocals, and bought their cd. He didn't have many and I didn't want to chance waiting til after the show. Haven't played it yet, but am itching to. To play it now, I would not be able to carry on here until it finished. While they were playing, I felt like a treasure was in my pocket.    

bask

the swamp

The merch table between Bask and the Seduction was the Swamp's section. The guy setting it up and working it turned out to be the vocalist with the Swamp. Like everybody in all the bands, he looked like just another guy who might be in there. His tshirt said, channel your inner catfish. I told him my car's name is Catfish. He told me how he found the shirt. Adam, if I remember correctly. It's his story for him to tell, not me. It's personal, neither vulgar nor intimate. It's his own story, a good one. I enjoyed our brief conversation. As with the guy from Bask, Zeb, it felt like conversation with artists. I already know why, because they are artists. It's the artist in them I appreciate. It's why I was there. They are songwriters. They are musicians, who really are musicians. They compose and arrange songs. It is the art in punk that has drawn me to punk since it's beginnings in the New York Dolls, Patti Smith Group, Nina Hagen Band, the Clash, Richard Hell, a short list. Like punk in London in the Seventies, every band had its own expression. The musicians, the bands make music the way they want to hear music made. Punk is not so much a sound as an attitude. The attitude creates the sound. The attitude is raw American individualism. The code in punk circles, I just want to be myself. The bands playing at the Garage Sunday night were what we call hardcore punk, what I think of as post-Black Flag punk. Punk has evolved infinitely since its beginnings forty years ago. American punk came out of the New York Sixties bands, Velvet Underground, Mothers of Invention and the Fugs. Before them was Bo Diddley and Buddy Holly in the Fifties. Punk has been a line running through rock n roll since the beginning. By now, every city in the country has multiple punk clubs and bands to keep them going every night of the week.   

the seduction

brandon hamby

the seduction

Talking with someone before the show started, I was asked what band I was here for. It came to me from out of the blue. I said, All of them. I want to hear them all. I'm here with the Seduction, to hear them is the reason I'm here, I want to hear all the bands. The Garage is a comfortable place with great sound. I'd seen the Seduction back in September in awe of what I heard then, a giant step beyond their previous cd. What I heard Sunday night was a giant step beyond last September. I don't know where I could put my finger on what has improved about them. Their delivery, their approach to the songs, their extensive stage experience since then. I can't say more or better of anything than before. It felt like it was a fuller sound, a flow from familiarity with what they're doing, their flow with each other evident in their music making. It's what they do on weekends while they work full-time all week. Jacob's bass I did not hear in September like I heard this time. He was cranked up loud, his noting fingers jumping all over the strings. I felt like the playing of all four of them has freed-up somewhat. Not that it didn't have freedom before, they flowed together. The sound was so good I could hear each of them, individually, and the whole band at the same time. It was loud, too. Just right. The drums, I felt were stronger than before. Everybody in the band has more power than before, they're stronger, like Jonathan Owens, the drummer. Perhaps this is what I hear that makes me feel they've taken a step I can't put my finger on. It takes time to build up the physical strength, the stamina, for what they do. The drummer is an athlete. He is stronger and more practiced than he was eight months ago, like everybody else in the band. I like this band, like what they're doing, like the band members, four very different individuals together making a dynamic entity called rock n roll. I like their hope.  

jacob shelton and daniel biggins

the seduction

the garage

drummer with the swamp

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MOSH PIT PARTICIPANT

adolph gottlieb

It has been an odd day with a smooth, even flow. Turned in last night late, up early, drank coffee, talked with Carole, looked at facebook and went back to sleep for a few hours. Woke refreshed, almost ready to go. Put on a dvd from netflix that arrived yesterday, Punk Is Not Dead. It was made in 2007. I had the impression from its blurb that it would be the English punkers from the mid 1970s. Turned out it followed the American West Coast hard core punk bands like Black Flag, NOFX, Adicts, the Cramps. The film was concert footage and interviews with people from the bands of late 70s and the 80s into the 90s, people from the bands who are grown up now and still love the music, some still playing it. My particular liking for punk is from London in the mid 70s and New York in mid 70s. I was looking forward to a documentary of the London punk scene. They are very different. London punk was largely people who went to art school, where the kids went who wanted to get a band going. The Clash met at art school. Siouxsie Sioux went there. The London punkers had an arty air that was taken for anger by the press. It was also a scene of street kids with parents they left to live on the streets. Like one pop generation after the other, they needed a style that would freak out authorities and adults in general, as well as the generation before them. Their style was every bit as abrasive to the adults as the hippies before them and psychedelic rock. After 40 years of punk, Sixties guitar solo psychedelia sounds to my ear what I call orchestra rock. I still like the Allman Bros, Santana, Blind Faith, Led Zeppelin, the Stones and many others, but when I want to put on some rock, it turns out to be what came next, the punk period and its influence. At the time Bob Dylan went electric, the music was in the last days of the Fifties period. He cranked it up, a new sound and it became "rock," rocknroll being left to define the Fifties sound. 

adolph gottlieb

Hardcore American punk has a different attitude and a different feeling. It comes from a different culture. London and LA are very different cultures, though also somewhat similar. Both cities have a lot of street kids. The hardcore punk is about "slam dancing" in mosh pits. Big guys, high school and college football player kinda guys, the white ones, bash each other with everything they've got. I wondered for a few seconds how many of them were college campus rapists; guestimated a large number. It was a big angry knot in frenetic motion. You have to be big just to stand on your feet in a mosh pit. It's an interesting phenomenon to witness. I saw a big one in Charlotte at an all day into the night outdoor concert, none of it punk, though some of the bands had something of a charging rhythm sometimes. The mosh pit was huge. I went to stand in the big circle of people watching from outside the frenzied knot. It was amazing to me to see there were so many young guys who get their kicks banging into each other furiously with the hardcore rhythm and guitars pumping them into a frenzy, the people our society calls normal. I saw the corporate execs of the future doing their wild thang, memories to tell and laugh about at cocktail parties in twenty years. In the air above the mosh pit a phenomenon was occurring I'd never imagined ever seeing and will never see again. People from outside the pit were throwing plastic bottles of water and other drinks, cans too, into the pit. People in the mosh pit were throwing them out. A dome occurred over the mosh pit of thousands of bottles flying from the circle around the pit into the pit and thousands of bottles flying out of the pit into the circle around it. Somebody's Birkenstocks were in the mix. At one moment I saw a full water bottle flying in my direction. It was like being in a gun fight and seeing the bullet in the air on its way that was mine. No time to duck. Direct hit in the solar plexus. It was about like a donkey kick, a solid thump. It didn't hurt. Nothing to do but pick the bottle up and throw it back into the pit. Thus my mosh pit experience. 

adolph gottlieb

We had a misty drizzle of rain much of the day. It was the kind of misty rain that makes the slickest ice there is. You can't even stand up on it. I can't say I enjoyed the documentary a great deal. I liked the music. Interviews with guys in their late 40s with freaky hairdos, a chain around the neck with a lock, looking too much like old guys trying to look young, like all the white pony tails with bald heads down front at a Rolling Stones concert in recent years. Everybody wore cool tshirts. I have a hard time looking at somebody fifty done up in teenage style. Makes me doubt their credibility for anything. I remind self these are city guys, the women too, who have spent their entire adult lives in teen styles to the point it's their own personal who I am. From the perspective of almost 40 years in the mountains, city styles make me shudder. The style in the mountains is poor-man. Wear dressy clothes and your friends look at you askance and wonder who you're trying to impress. They'll let you know right away you don't impress them. They know you too well. In mountain tradition you don't dress better than the next man. It's seen as showing off, something that gets inhibited in mountain kids in their first year. You can show off having a bigger pickup than the next guy; it shows you can afford the payments. But you don't dress better than the next guy or dress to stand out. I've lived in this culture, in this style so long it has become my own personal who I am. I liked the concert footage, the bands jerking around, flinging their heads about, assaulting the guitars, making them scream in-yer-face attitude to the rhythm of a woodpecker on speed. The old guys with several piercings in their noses and ears, lips, hair cut some dramatic way cracked me up when they were talking about the punk scene in the days it was happening and new. My automatic response when I see somebody fifty dressing like a teenager on tv, it's about the same as hearing somebody say epiphany for epitome. One of those things you pretend not to hear, but can't get it out of your mind.

adolph gottlieb

Right away I saw the film for the day was not going to hold my attention very well. The music was ok, and the talking was historically interesting, but no more. Henry Rollins doesn't trip my trigger. I saw his band Henry Rollins Band in 91, his band after Black Flag. I'm inclined to his kind of music, but his persona is beyond anything I can take an interest in. Big city tough guy needs anger management help, bad, covered up in tattoos like he thinks he's a dragon or something awesome. A rock star. He's an actor playing the role of somebody out of control bi-polar with prison in his near future. The Marine bad guy. I saw him in one of the Wrong Turn, West Virginia movies -- this is not a recommendation. He has some one-man rants available on netflix. I saw one. The first five minutes of it was enough, though I sat through it. I simply find his persona boring. I find Bruce Springsteen's persona boring too. Rollins band could rock and roll for sure. It was just his Marine Corps pretend that threw me. That mind fails to impress me even when it's not pretend. At the beginning of the film I saw it was West Coast hardcore and lost interest. A couple days ago I cut a rhododendron branch that had been dead a few years, cut it to length for a walking stick and shaved the bark from it the full length, whittled the knobs and both ends, rounding and smoothing them. I arranged a place on the floor at my feet to catch shavings and went over the length of it again shaving off everything missed taking off the rough part. It was exacting, detail work, making for good focus. I let the music play and I heard the talk without looking at the forty-somethings locked in their cases of arrested development. I shaved the rhododendron stick down to bare bone and smoothed it with the pocket knife. I went over it with three pieces of sandpaper, wearing each one out, made the stick flawless to the touch. The film over, I wiped the dust off the stick with a dry washcloth, applied the first coat of tung oil by hand. I did not know what to expect of the rhododendron all along the process. The tung oil gave it a touch of honey.

       

adolph gottlieb

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