LIKE THE OLD PUNK ROCKER SAID

jacob shelton and daniel biggins

the seduction

Another cycle around the sun, circled twelve times by the moon, 365 turns of Earth spiraling through what? Nothingness? Future? Space? Illusion? Cycles within cycles. I've seen my life in seven year cycles. They flow so evenly into the next, it takes awhile to see in retrospect. I've been aware of the seven year cycles long enough to have seen the changes and how seamlessly one flows into the next. The cycles are not evident until you notice them. It's been five years in this present cycle. The cycle started same year as I took up writing this daily blog. It was the next thing. It just happened. One day talking with friend of many years in her office, she said I should do a blog. What's a blog? She didn't really know, her daughter told her about blogs. She  told me how to connect with blogspot. I thought about it overnight. I liked the idea that everybody can have a forum to write for, arrange pictures for, make photographs for, speak your meaning without editors and sponsors. Freedom to write and not have to deal with publishers, contracts and money. I like especially that it's not about money in any way. I don't want advertisers and they don't want me. Early in this cycle, I made videos of bluegrass and old-time shows, put them on youtube and wrote about them. Now I'm making video at punk concerts and writing about them. It seems strange, but I see old-time fiddle and banjo music the same as acoustic punk. An old-time string band plays wide open, fast, charging rhythms, rhythms to put dancers on their feet. All the instruments play at the same time, nobody takes a lead and performs solo, nobody emotes physically or vocally. The only part of the body in motion would be forearms and the fingers on the strings.

daniel biggins, jonathan owens, brandon hamby

the seduction

the seduction

Old-time is the pedal-to-the-metal birthplace of rock n roll. Punk has similar driving charge to old-time tunes, though amplified considerably. In old-time, the songs are chosen from a long list of standards. In punk, the bands compose their own songs. My first summer in the mountains, I went to a fiddler's convention in Independence, Virginia, the next town across the state line. I'd been listening to punk a couple years. It was new and fresh. The fire had gone out of the experimental aspect of Sixties rock, which degenerated into REO Speedwagon, bands making pop of an initially experimental music. They rocked, but when I heard them, it was like, been there, done that. I wanted to listen to Patti Smith Group, Nina Hagen Band, the Damned, Generation X. The Sixties taught me to find music I wanted to hear that radio stations didn't play. Drug music was what it meant to them. Sponsors were freaked out by it. Rock was anti-war and conditionally patriotic. Punk came on in the mid-Seventies, seeming to me the natural next thing. The radio wouldn't play punk either, except college stations free of sponsors. It was twenty-five years before punk rose above ground. Billy Idol injected some punk attitude and rhythms into American Metal. It's strange now with punk mainstream. Talking with Daniel on the road to the show in Winston, I said, I only have two friends of my peers I'm aware of, who can tolerate a minute of rock I like to listen to, one in New York and one in Georgia. From here in the woods, high on the mountain where I listen to music, it felt good to be in the company of, surrounded by, with people who share an interest in good ass-kickin rock n roll.

the swamp

bask

I saw self a bit comic in a place where I could be grandpa to most of them and daddy to the older ones, grooving to the music wholeheartedly, music I've listened to longer than most of the people in the Garage had been living. Talking with a woman I met last year at the Milepost in Charlotte, a face so beautiful I felt like I died and this was the angel sent to guide me to heaven, Hayden, girlfriend of the bass player, she blew my mind to smithereens when she told me her mother was once a punk rocker. This coming Saturday, I'll see my friend I've known all her life, Eve, for lunch, whose mother is my New York punk rocker friend. Though my self-consciousness saw self a comic figure, no one else in the place seemed to. Everyone I talked with regarded me with respect I don't get other places. They think it's cool I've listened to punk since the beginning before they were born. Everyone I talked with welcomed me and thanked me for being there. I felt like everybody in the place was my bodyguard. It was the atmosphere. It was so for everyone in the place. All were safe in friendly company, would be helped in whatever ways needed, whatever might happen, immediately. I find punk rockers sincerely friendly, caring people, and not just to me, but all the way around in all their circles. Their styles are individual. To be a hippie, long hair was commandment number one of a long list of codes, evidence of commitment. A punk rocker can, of his own free will, wear a suit and have a barbershop haircut. His style. You're not even required to say dude. Some do. Some don't.

viajando

the seduction

The show Sunday night came to me as a result of a decision made in my late fifties. I heard self start two sentences, the kids these days. Hearing it the second time, I said to self with firm determination, the kind I use when I mean it, set it in motion that moment, this will not happen a third time. I'm done talking that shit. I decided to go to a rock concert of the present moment on my 0 birthdays. For sixtieth, a Papa Roach show at Ziggy's in Winston-Salem. It was what I needed. People packed  in tight, shoulder to shoulder, hopping up and down in place, the band right there in yer face. I got in among the kids these days and found them cool people. For seventieth birthday, Thrice in Charlotte at the Fillmore, and Animals as Leaders. Another situation shoulder to shoulder among the kids these days finding them cool people. By now, I'm drawn to the kids these days because white men my age these days gripe about nothing good on television anymore, opinions from Fake news and rant radio, waiting to die. They bring me down, make me worry that I'm going to die any minute of something, when I really don't care. Ok, I can die any minute. For me, it's not something to dread. I'm so curious about what's on the other side, I have to remind self not to have any accidentally on purpose accidents. I feel like it's the same me on the other side as it is on this side, so why not enjoy this side while I'm here. After the Seduction played, people talking sounded to my ears like they'd inhaled helium. I thought, yeah, just right. My life has opened up since I came to see this side of the veil the same as the other side and allowed it to be. Last year I said I'm going to celebrate every birthday with a concert. Still, three days after, the show Sunday night continues to occupy my mind's eye and ear. It's not involuntary, like buzzing ears, but quite voluntary. I want it in my mind.      

nick brown

viajando

daniel biggins

the seduction

*

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

*

    

     

BILLY IDOL DANCING WITH MYSELF

Closing in on the final pages of Billy Idol's autobiography, Dancing With Myself, and don't want to finish it. A dozen pages to go and I couldn't read on, save it for another time, make it stay just a little bit longer. He's quite a good writer and he tells a good story. He's even a rock star who reads books that are not easy to read. You'd never know it by his behavior. Pedal to the metal, full on, everything goes. His first song with his punk band in London, Generation X, was, Ready Steady Go. I remember when the London punk scene withered and Billy Idol came to USA. Of all the punk albums I have in the house, when I want to hear punk, I most often put on Generation X. I started reading his story from my interest in the years 75-77 in London punk. He gave a you-are-there account of his experience with rock n roll since his early childhood listening to the Beatles and the Who. The punk moment was just right for his age and generation. He embodied the punk spirit, just about as much as Johnny Rotten did. After some time of creating a stage persona with a certain attitude, the stage persona bleeds over into one's personality. Billy Idol took punk persona all the way for about twenty years. He managed to function with a heroin habit, cocaine addiction, both at once, and everything else that came along. It's a life full of consequences of stupid actions. He had a knack, like me, for making a fool of himself at a moment that turned out to be crucial. When he had his Rolling Stone interview, he was apprehensive they'd twist him around like they were known to do and trick him into saying things he didn't want to say. 

He was so anxious before the interview, he put himself into a stupor, then exploded in the interview yelling about how he hates Rolling Stone magazine, hated the interview, told them not to put it in the magazine, regretting he'd consented to the interview, put on a shameless rant that embarrassed him terribly when it was reproduced in the magazine, word for word. He said it was good for the short term record sales, punk attitude, but it turned all the rock critics against him. He had many such incidents in states of advanced inebriation, mixed with punk attitude and rock star arrogance. I like about his telling of his story that he owns up to his arrogance and his inner stupid, his addictions, his love for the never-ending party that is a rock band on tour. In his most self-indulgent time he threw away the love of his life and their child, the other love of his life. It got his attention. For awhile. He said when the most gorgeous, hottest babes he'd ever seen were all over him, what does a man do? Making music on stage meant more to him than his addictions. His addictions kept him going, even assisted him doing the one thing he loved most unto his guiding light. His dad told him when he told mum and dad he wanted to be with a rock band, he'd never make a living a rock musician. Not many years later, Billy went home to London to see family and carried with him his first framed gold record, gave it to his dad. In a time he'd made a major mess of things from too much of everything, debilitated by it, his dad and mum flew to LA to stay with him and nurse him back to health, his mother a nurse and Irish. In the course of his life, his dad was the friend who stuck with him all the way along. 

I never bought any Billy Idol albums after Generation X. I liked what I heard that he was doing, White Wedding, Eyes Without a Face, Dancing With Myself, and the great song, Rebel Yell. He told of a time in a NY recording studio complex, the Stones were in there recording at the same time he was. He and Ron Wood were friends. He and his band went and hung with the Stones awhile during time out for refreshments. He said Keith and Mick were drinking Rebel Yell. He started thinking about it as a song and asked them if they had any plans to name a song Rebel Yell. They said no. It was his to do. He wanted to make it sexy and did. He brought punk rhythms into American metal and made a difference. He tells his own story by album recordings, the tours that follow, and the time in between of resuming the other life of wife and kid he loved like crazy, but found it ultimately impossible to fuse the two lives. He didn't say it directly, or I forgot, but his story tells that his time writing songs, putting them together with the band, recording them, the album release and five months on the road doing what he loved more than anything in life, on stage charging up an audience with some killer rock n roll, was his life, all else peripheral. I like his spirit, his attitude toward life. He tells his story with an enthusiasm the equal of how he lived it. He gave himself to his life wide open, committed. He wrote his story in the same spirit. He had two motorcycle wrecks. The second one almost ended his career. Came close to having his lower right leg amputated, the bone crushed, broadsided by a car bumper. He's a high-energy dude with a lot of it to burn off. He willed himself healed in time for the next tour and did it. 

Not many people confuse rock musicians with artists. I'm one who does. Reading Billy Idol's life is the story of an artist the same as reading a life of Vincent Van Gogh. A good piece of music of any variety is art. I would call the Kronos Quartet playing Terry Riley compositions art the same as I would call Billy Idol's albums and performances art. He's a musician, songwriter, composer, vocalist and a performer. I'm one who sees theater alive and thriving in rock concerts. This coming Friday night I'm going to Charlotte to hear/see four hard-core punk bands, Daniel Biggins' band, The Seduction, one of them. I thought about Daniel quite a lot reading Billy Idol's story. Daniel is doing the only thing he ever wanted to do in his life with his band. He is one happy dude when he's on stage giving it all he's got as loud as he can make it. I think it's through Daniel I had some insight into Billy Idol, the kid who wanted to be in a rock band and nothing else all the time growing up, learning an instrument, looking for others with the same dream, put a band together and do whatever a kid can do, a step at a time. I've come to believe knowing Daniel helped Billy Idol come to life for me in the telling of his story. I was stuck in the middle of a thousand page biography of Van Gogh, needed a break. Read three Chris Hedges books, writing you'd read in The Nation magazine, documentary looks at contemporary history. Then I wanted a page turner. Went to amazon, Billy Idol's Dancing With Myself popped up as a suggestion going by purchases past. I knew on sight this was the book I was looking for. It fulfilled its promise. I don't believe I'll buy any of his music, unless it would be a Generation X album from 1976. I never took to his American metal period. I appreciated that he injected punk rhythms into metal, but I wasn't a fan of 80s metal and still am not. I liked his hits, but have become wary from experience of buying an album because I like one song. I can find Billy Idol on YouTube any time I want. 

billy idol 

*

   

THANKFUL FOR LITTLE RICHARD

I went to YouTube to find a video of Little Richard singing Jenny Jenny. Found several and watched three, shaking my head, cracking up, loving it, jamming to Little Richard again. It took me back to high school years listening to Little Richard on 45s, buying the new one as it came out as quick as I could get it. Jenny Jenny was one of his rockers I liked a lot. It was 1957 punk. In that time, I could have had only Little Richard records and been satisfied. I listened to the other music because it was there, but Little Richard satisfied my soul. Seeing him today, fifty-eight years later, half a century, I have a donkey named Jenny and sometimes say to her, Jenny Jenny Jenny, hearing Little Richard in my head. His songs are tattooed on the inside of my skull. Seeing Little Richard perform in 1968 was not quite the same as Little Richard in 1958. In the ten years between, he'd left rock n roll, threw a big diamond ring in a river and went to preaching. Later, he went back to rock n roll, fell in with cocaine and a Sixties rock star lifestyle until it wore him out. He left rock n roll and went back to preaching. I think it was in my second winter in the mountains I saw in the Winston-Salem Journal that Little Richard would be preaching at Winston-Salem State College. Of course, I drove to the city to hear this. I never had a chance to see Little Richard perform his music, and here was a chance to see the other side of Little Richard, the preacher. He was good, had stage charisma to the max. He walked back and forth along the edge of the stage, dressed in black, looking like a black leopard pacing back and forth behind cage bars. He didn't do emotional religion. He talked rationally, a man who thought about things. 

little richard

He was down on rock n roll, saying it was of the devil, that he was serving the devil when he was playing rock n roll. I didn't fall for that one, but I wasn't there to agree or disagree, only to see Little Richard preach. I felt like he made a little over-much of it. I saw a man with a pendulum swing inside that went from one extreme to the other and back again. He was sincere in what he was saying. A few years later, I was at somebody's house and Oprah or something like that was on, Little Richard the guest. He was complaining about not getting enough royalties for his songs, having been ripped off in the original contract. He was talking about being the king of rock n roll. His face was stretched so tight from face-lifts I was thinking you could play drums on his face. I don't care that he lobotomized himself with cocaine, bounces back and forth between extremes in his private life, and comes across on tv like he's nuts. The first concert video I watched a few minutes ago was in b&w. He totally gets into the music. He was singing, standing at the piano pounding it with both hands, facing the audience, bouncing up and down, his face behind the mic, hopping up and down. I thought this a marvelous demonstration of multi-tasking; bobbing up and down, pounding a piano with both hands, standing up, singing into a mic, attention on an audience of several thousand. I felt a mild awe at his performance. I saw Prince in one of his amazing performances. It was rock n roll in the raw. I saw Billy Idol with his band Generation X. I saw punk rock, the match that started the fire. I saw Joe Strummer of the Clash, Richard Hell, Perry Ferrell. I saw that Little Richard sounds as good today as he did then. 

little richard

Rock n roll has moved on in new directions since the 1950s, though it has not moved beyond Little Richard. It's like he's the North Star of rock. I was thinking, while he was singing Jenny Jenny, I'd like to hear a punk band cover it, a band like NOFX. Johnny Winter came to mind singing, I was raised on rock. Rock n roll started when I was 13, just ready for some music of my own. I went on YouTube to a concert called Little Richard and Friends--Legends in Concert. I think this might have been 1968, a big concert in London. It started with Little Richard playing several songs, then Bill Haley and the Comets played Rock Around The Clock, Jerry Lee Lewis playing Hound Dog and Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On, and an extended Chuck Berry concert. Soon after it started, I saw it was forty-one minutes, thinking I'd listen to one or two Little Richard songs and go on. Little Richard kept me listening, then Jerry Lee kept me watching, then Bill Haley totally held my attention, more Little Richard, and then Chuck Berry sang several songs. These were the people who pulled me into rock n roll in my early teens. I watched all of it. I remember when  Bob Dylan took up rock n roll and it became rock. The English sound happened and the rock n roll that went before suddenly became oldies. Now, oldies is 80s and 90s rock. Sixties rock lives in today's heavy metal. Punk continues. Punk started approximately 1975 and has been going ever since. The first twenty-five years, punk was only played on college stations. Commercial stations were afraid of it. Then it became "mainstream," commercial radio. 

From the moment I heard Patti Smith's first album, I was wanting to hear more. New Wave was the New York style of punk, and Punk in London was sending records over here. I listened to both. The English punk took hold of me in a don't-let-go kind of way. From all the kinds of music I have in the house to listen to, I tend to go to late 70s English punk when I want to rock. Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Clash, Generation X, and out of Berlin, Nina Hagen, the Mother of Punk. Nina Hagen's bands on every album did it right. Punk started just as I was leaving the city for the mountains. Upon arriving in the mountains, I found the NPR FM station WFDD in Winston-Salem. From ten til midnight a college student dj, Didi Thornton, called herself DDT, played fresh new punk every night and I taped several of her shows. They put her off the air after a year or so. The people who contributed money to the station revolted against her. It was the same as adults shutting down the Fifties period of rock n roll, calling it communist, subversive, African therefore devil worshiping. It was the black influence in the music that drove the white grownups nuts. The other claims were smokescreens around the central issue: white kids were listening to nigger music. Dick Clark did his best to deflect interest to Italian pretty boys and doo-wop groups, and there came a time rock n roll was fading to the background. Then the English sound happened, the Dave Clark Five, Spencer Davis Group, Rolling Stones, and it's been on full blast ever since. Going into the last days before Thanksgiving, I have to say that I am grateful for rock n roll.   

little richard grown up

  

AT HOME PUNK CONCERT

richard hell and the voidoids

This is my night for a spontaneous punk concert. It started by seeing a couple of Richard Hell videos on YouTube a few days ago by chance, or subliminal marketing suggestion, whichever, I don't care. I remembered I had not played any Richard Hell music in several years. I found a cd recorded in a London club in 77 and at CBGBs in NY in 78. What a great choice it was to satisfy a yearning I'm feeling to give some attention to my favorite period in rock that I never hear enough of. I don't play it much, because I don't play any music or radio except sometimes to hear 5-minute headlines. I have no choice but to listen when some music is on that I like, the only kind I have in the house. It takes me over right away. It's immediate with punk. So many good bands. Twenty five years later punk was mainstream and already had its history, the early punk bands a bunch of old guys now. The Richard Hell shows were uncompromising punk, raw, straight-ahead pedal to the metal, smoking tires down the drag strip out of control, forgot the parachute, no problem. I sat through both shows on the one cd, sound just below icepick in the ear volume, nobody home. By the time it was over, I was talking to myself about doing this more often. Instead of paying so much attention to what politicians are doing, when I know that no matter what it is, it is against me and all the other working people, and there's nothing I can do about it, it's a game for players, I'm not a player, I'll listen to more punk.

 

richard hell, elvis costello, bob quine at cbgb's 1978

 

Punk is my favorite form of rock. I've loved it all from beginning to present. The Sixties sounds coming on were exciting, one album at a time, Pink Floyd, Big Brother and Holding Company, The Who, the Beatles and the Stones leading the way as the yin and yang, the good guys and the bad boys of rock. And out by himself, Bob Dylan went to Nashville. The great guitarists like Jimmy Page, Hendrix, Clapton, went far beyond anything the next generation could carry further or even match. By then, rock was virtuoso guitar, Carlos Santana, big arena rock, football stadium rock. Audiences got too big all wanting to see the Stones, what could the next generation do? Next generation went to hundreds of overnight bands cutting loose, back to three chords, no lead guitar with pretty solos, faster beat, down and dirty, the style being street kids. Initially, punk was making music the way you wanted to make music, whatever that was. Siouxsie and the Banshees had a very different sound from Generation X, the Damned, the Clash, the Sex Pistols. In a way, it was like expressionist painting, putting a band together and make rock outrageous and new. Patti Smith was the beginning of my ear leaning into punk. In New York they were calling it New Wave as if London had the copyright on punk. Nonetheless, the punk was happening at CBGBs, the Cramps, Elvis Costello, the Talking Heads, Lydia Lunch, and a very long list of bands never heard of again. Some took the downbound train of heroin and had to leave that world or die.

 

 

I decided this evening I will make it a point to give myself at least a weekly sit down with an album of some hard rocking punk that I love, but don't listen to. If I put something on once a week and sit and enjoy it all the way through like watching a movie, I believe I'll have more delight in my life. I have a 3-cd set of the Clash playing live on Broadway. They did not want to play in a big arena in New York, but too many people wanted to see them for a smaller place. They chose to play three shows at a smaller place. The move in punk was away from big into small. Places to hear punk amounted to cinderblock boxes painted black on the inside with a kinda stage. They were not dangerous places to go into, but they looked like it. How it came about, who knows? But it happened  in the big cities all over the world at once, like it was in place ready to go, and not many of the young ones playing with a new sound were aware of others searching too. It was like when abstract expressionism was the apex of the art world, pure art, several young artists in New York were making hard-edged, even comic strip characters, and using advertising art, which then became Pop Art. At the same time came minimalism, the yin to abstract expressionism's maximalist yang. Soft-edged Sixties guitar solo arena rock was followed by a sharp-edged fast beat that was about pushing the sound, driving it forward.

joy division

 

new order

The Richard Hell shows were exciting. They charged me up. I remembered I have a dvd of a big outdoor concert by New Order, recorded June, 2002. New Order is Joy Division minus vocalist Ian Curtis. Ian offed himself the day before their American tour was scheduled to begin. The guys in the band were distraught, of course. They decided not to be defeated. They did the tour and established themselves as New Order same tour. In this dvd concert, they mixed Joy Division titles with New Order titles. One of my favorite songs in rock is in the concert, Transmission. I remember the first time I heard it. It caught my attention like little else. Found the LP as soon thereafter as I could. They did Joy Division's She's Lost Control and Love Will Tear Us Apart. At the end of Close Range, I clapped. I maintain at this time of my life the same as I did in the 1970s, a rock concert is a new form of theater. It doesn't invalidate the old forms of theater, but rock concerts are such exciting theater, I hold with it as valid theater. The Ramones is the only band I can think of with absolutely no theatrical presence on stage, but for their loud blur. I'm not asking for glam-rock, but still, a little stage performance to go with it is what rock is about. I don't like to criticize rockers for their style, but Joey wears me out with boredom looking at him. I don't mean to take anything away from the Ramones, but I can predict they will not be a show in my at-home concert series. Only because they bore me. And I don't have any of their albums. An hour, or however long, of a loud blur is cool as an idea, but I have a hard time sitting through more than one Ramones tune at a time. That don't slow me down none. It's no different than playing Fifties music and leaving out the Four Seasons. There is so much more. Next show: The Clash.  

 

 

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PATTI SMITH AND NINA HAGEN ROCK

     photograph by robert mapelthorpe

Having myself a rock concert at home. I've not sat and listened to any rock albums in several years. I tend now to want to hear Kyle Creed play banjo and Willard Gayheart sing, Alternate Roots, bluegrass, old-time, mountain music. Turning inward to home, focusing on the music as it is made in the immediate world I live in, the culture of this spot on earth. It pulled my interest away from rock, as I knew it would. My first discovery of old-time in 1977 was so dynamic, I knew if I started paying close attention, I'd lose interest in rock. Punk had just begun in 75 and it was gradually trickling out into the world at college radio stations, and that's it, for about 25 years. Sixties rock (classic rock) was not played on the radio stations. Sponsors wouldn't have it. The radio played Motown and disco in the time. Off the radio, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother & Holding Co, the Velvet Underground, Cream; none of them would ever be heard anywhere around where I lived. In mid 70s came a big sound of the next generation, like Ted Nugent, Bon Jovi, REO Speedwagon. They were big on the charts, but I'd already been there, done that. These bands made Sixties rock into pop.


Punk happened in 1975 and, again, no radio stations played it but college stations. Punk became a culture different from the pop mainstream, which was just starting to get used to the Sixties sound of the slower rhythms that can't be danced to (except hippie dance), sit-down music; then punk happened with high-speed rhythms like old-time fiddle tunes. It's stand up and jump up and down in place music. For the next quarter century I was listening to bands nobody around me had heard of, like Generation X (Billy Idol's London band), Siouxsie and the Banshees, Nina Hagen, Joy Division, Patti Smith, the Clash, the Damned, et al. Earlier this evening, while writing the first paragraph, I was hearing ARTIST IN THE AMBULANCE by Thrice. Had to crank it way up. Finally in the later years of my life I have the ideal sound system I've waited all my life for. It cranks way up and delivers satisfaction. Caterpillar went out the door. Now it's Patti Smith's RADIO ETHIOPIA that was new when I went to my first fiddler's convention. In Patti Smith I heard an artist making rock the art way. This album did very poorly for the band. Critics didn't get it and it was such step off the edge of pop culture into art that it left its audience. It probably defined for the band the line between what works and what doesn't work with the people who became fans by HORSES. A demanding audience. How do you follow one of the great albums in rock? And it your first?

     patti smith group

Lenny Kaye's guitar is one of the great ones in rock, too. Plays a Fender Stratocaster. He may not be a big name in the pop world, but I'd guess in the rock music world he's very well respected. PSG, Patti Smith Group, continues in my ear to be among the very finest bands in rock where musicianship and and plain all out rock and roll is concerned, done in a new, artful manner. I'd say they could raise an audience into ecstasy. I've not had the opportunity to get to a concert, because that meant going to New York and one thing and another, several hundred dollars out of pocket per day, 12 hours each way. Not me. I don't drive to NY to hear some poet, say Molly Peacock, read at some intellectual hangout. Alas, all the art in New York has to go unseen by me. Photographs have to do. And that's ok. I can't see Patti Smith in concert. But I can see Burning Spear in concert at Ziggy's. That's worth a lot. Winston-Salem and Charlotte have a lot of rock venues. I can see anybody I want. But it's not that important. I'm happy hearing Patti fill my head with vibrations I like to hear in the familiarity of home.


Radio Ethiopia is going now, ten minutes of Lenny Kaye's guitar, JD Daugherty's drums, Patti's voice working with Kaye's guitar. It's been a very long time since I've heard Radio Ethiopia. It is still as great as I heard it in 1976. This screeching of guitar strings, doing it something like Velvet Underground could have done it, is what ran off their sales. Velvet Underground was an art band, not a pop band. So was PSG. When I heard it, I didn't know anything about critics and sales. All I knew was Patti Smith had a new album and I needed to hear it fast as I could get my hands on one. I felt like the entire album was an excellent next thing after HORSES; they'd followed their artist ears and reached out into fusion of poetry and sound. It helps to be one who appreciates poetry itself and can find it in unexpected places, like punk rock. Rock is the popular poetry of our time, and I have to say, there are some truly superb poets in rock. I'm looking at a Nobel Prize for Bob Dylan if he doesn't die too soon. He may not. Possibly when he puts out his apex album. The last four of Dylan's albums I can't help but think of as the best Dylan I've heard all along the way. And I've heard him from Man of Constant Sorrow on his first album with just an acoustic guitar. Every one of his albums is as much a work of art as a book of poems by Wallace Stevens.

Patti Smith has the name of the first punk rocker, the definer of punk, whatever. Nina Hagen is called the Mother of Punk. She says in one of her songs, "I'm the mother of punk! So what the funk!" Nina Hagen was another one who was out there on the edge making art rock. Punk is not one sound. Punk is your own sound. Punk is the music you want to make. We tend to think of the Sex Pistols and the Clash as the definition of punk, but it's not like that. I've put on Nina Hagen's second album UNBEHAGEN (translates: restless). She's playing African Reggae, a great reggae song, anyway in my way of hearing. It's not Black Uhuru, for sure, but it works. It's punk. Nina Hagen is somebody you either get it or you don't. Like the Tao te Ching in that way, though different. Nina Hagen cannot be explained. Her albums always have artist musicians, mostly German, They never hesitate to rock. Caterpillar came in for a morsel of catfood between albums. When Nina started, out the door Caterpillar went. She's not used to this kind of thing happening here. TarBaby loved it. I could play Rocket From The Crypt really loud and TarBaby would be lying in front of a speaker happy and comfortable.


Nina is singing in German on her first albums. I don't mind not understanding the words. I've never paid a lot of attention to the words. Most rock is sung such that I can't make out words. Like THRICE. Also THE USED. I don't understand any words from the Thrice album. Didn't understand any words at the concert. The twenty-somethings around me were singing words like those were words the vocalist was screaming. Oh well. I read words to a song I don't understand, if they're included in liner notes, and am satisfied not understanding them. I've found pop lyrics largely boring. Then you get people like Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Siouxsie Sioux, Lou Reed and a very long list of others, who write lyrics that equal contemporary poetry. I'm not one who thinks of rock a "lower art form." Rock is where theater and poetry have disappeared into. The rock concert is contemporary theater. You say there's no story. We don't need a story now. We do anecdotes now. Quips. We don't live stories anymore. I tend to think of this album I'm listening to now by Nina Hagen the same as reading a dozen poems in a book of poetry by somebody like Philip Larkin, Ron Padgett, Elizabeth Bishop. The guitar at this moment on Hermann Heiss Er, is great as a rock solo gets.

     nina hagen band

I've needed this. It's like a cleansing of the spirit. This is music I love intensely and have loved for the second half of my life. Have not given it much attention over the last dozen or so years. Maybe this is return of long-term memory coming back. Like first time I heard Patti Smith's HORSES. It was one of the greatest moments of my life. Not long later I'm hearing Nina Hagen's Superboy and TV Glotzer, delighted to hear somebody tearing it up in rock again, this time in a new way. Nina Hagen Band is there with Patti Smith Group in the realm of great rock and roll bands that applied the cutting edge. This album Unbehagen is as current as Five Finger Death Punch, minus the rap influence. It was from 77 or 78. I've never had a chance to see Nina perform live, though would have loved it. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. It's just another experience with the music. They're finishing up the album with No Way, an instrumental of how punk rock is played by musicians who don't let up. I've never had the chance to see The Who, another band I'd have loved to experience from the audience. They were said to play at the loudest decibel level of any band. I heard the Cars and wondered if the Who could actually be louder than them. Who knows? Who cares?


Caterpillar came back in.


*

GROUNDHOG HOLES AND VIDEOS

I find television very educating.

Every time somebody turns on the set

I go to the other room and read a book.

---Groucho Marx

Fog this morning, the kind you can see through for a little ways, the kind that makes a white background for shapes and images in the foreground. Saw the above out the window to the east. What sent me outside in the rain with an umbrella was the shapes of the leaves against the fog. It was Asian; Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Persian. Fog gives the picture a suggestion of watercolor on paper. I like everything about the fog but driving in it. I don't mind a fog with some visibility for driving. Today's was an easy fog to drive in. As long as I can see if a car is coming around the next curve, I'm ok.

Have you ever had a moment driving along in a perfectly familiar place and not know where you are? Yesterday I was driving on Wolfe Road, shortcut between Pine Swamp Road and Frasier Road going in to town. My mind was dwelling on something and I came out of it in a section of road with trees along both sides, no houses in sight. I realized all of a sudden I'd better watch it. My mind about went someplace besides driving a car 30mph, and I had no idea where I was. It was like setting me down on a mountain road anywhere in these mountains I'd never been. That was a bit alarming considering it was awhile before I knew where I was. I came around the curve and saw Betty Roupe's mailbox, Oh, Wolfe Road. Of course, it's Wolfe Road. I turned down Wolfe Road. Duh. The mind is playing tricks on me like that more and more. I don't mind it a bit. It's part of the process. Sometimes I think ginko tea might help, might taste good too. Most of the time I think it doesn't matter. Gives a bit of drama by surprise to the day. The one today was actually somewhat alarming, because it was like I'd woke from a sleep and found myself driving. I was too present in the thinking of the moment. I mean it must have been the same as dreaming awake. Mind off on its adventures while the body is driving a car.

I knew I knew where I was, but it would not come to me. I wasn't lost, but it was the same as lost when it comes to the familiar. Woods along the sides of the roads do have a way of looking alike. If I'd seen a house when snapping out of the dream, it would have been familiar. I'm not complaining about it. The momentary disorientation was fun. Like the way a house of mirrors feels walking through it. Also a little unsettling. Like, Whoa! What was that? The same has happened before and when I come out of it, I'm immediately aware of where I am. But not today. Talking, sometimes I see the next thing to say fade away before my eyes, like a big fog rolls in and it's gone. I call that falling down a groundhog hole. Today's experience was like thinking I'm awake in the morning, seeing TarBaby walk in through the open window and lie down beside me on the bed. I reach to pet him, wake up and he's gone. The very same kind of experience, but today it happened awake. Evidently awake needs qualification there, like somewhat, a little bit, slightly, only the least little bit, not at all.

Maybe in the course of this blog you can watch me slowly lose my mind. Maybe it will turn into Surrealism and that could be very interesting. To give an idea of what I mean by Surrealism, the title of one of poet Andre Breton's books was Soluble Fish. From there, anything can happen. Fairly liberating. I'm thinking Lady Gaga is today's Wendy O Williams of the Plasmatics. Another time, another style. I've discovered Plasmatics videos on YouTube and they are everything I'd want them to be. All out. Totally cut loose. The only limits being the size of the stage. Punk in the beginning was a kind of anti-commercial expression. The Plasmatics went all out commercial, were on tv, made the charts, made a lot of money really fast. They went on for about 10 years. Wendy had been a tv wrestler before she became a rock stripper. It's not quite right to call her a stripper, because she'd start a show as nearly nude as she ended. She didn't have anything to take off. I emailed my friend Lucas I went to school with, "We doubted the artistic integrity of the Plasmatics." Looking at them 35 years after, and actually seeing them for the first time in motion, only still photos before. They are delightfully outrageous.

After seeing several Plasmatics videos, I switched to Nashville Pussy. It's a Southern rock punk biker band. Plasmatics again. This time not blowing up cars and cutting up guitars with a chainsaw. After several of their videos, I went to Jane's Addiction. There was the Plasmatics again in a new style, their rebellion more in words than going at a television with a sledge hammer while the guitars are going apeshit. Perry Ferrell was Wendy O Williams in his own style. He had the same fascination with public nudity. By the end of every concert he'd be down to his bikini. He was arrested in Honolulu about 1991 for taking it off. There's more than one way to make headlines. Like take your clothes off before 50,000 people and at least a hundred cops. I dropped in on some friends a few weeks ago. Their 3 little kids were going about free of their clothing. I felt like I was at Woodstock. I esp liked Jane's Addiction's Ocean Side video, a guy on a surfboard riding a big tsunami wave from the time it's swelling up and eventually breaks, he rides in front of the foam fast as he can go, but it catches and consumes him and he comes riding out of it like it was nothing. The time I saw Jane's Addiction at Raleigh, I recall that video playing on a gigantic screen above the stage. It was unforgettable. The music is a soundtrack for that ride.

It's so great to be in a time where I don't have to go to New York to see what's going on in art. I've never had access to so much rock visuals where I can see any band I've ever heard of in concert, some like they're made with a cell phone in the audience and some with good sound and visuals. They're all good. And there are old-time bands galore, and again, some good, some bad, all good. I can't even start the thinking to figure out how all that is on YouTube is possible. But I'm still stumped by how a telephone works. It wouldn't do for me to waste time trying to figure out something like that. The big social changes occurring now seem to be of a psychological nature, finding new ways of thinking, and it's changing really fast. It's all beyond me. It's happening to the young kids, another generation gap.

I'd guestimate at least a half dozen generation gaps between me and someone graduating from high school. It's something I can't fathom from this end of it and the other can't fathom from the other end. When I'm around someone of late teens, early twenties, I see the chasm of all those generation gaps and turn my attention to staying out of them, paying them no mind, all attention to whoever it might be, the person I'm talking with, not the generation I'm talking with. We can talk easily person to person over the generation gaps such that they aren't there but in the pop culture we pay attention to. I like the younger people I know to turn me on to the music they listen to. Rufus Wainwright is a recent discovery. Without sounding at all like Dylan, he has a similar spirit to what Dylan had in his early years, plus that distinctive something that says this guy has something to say worth hearing. At the end of the day, I have to say I am truly happy among the people I know. It may not show in effervescence or effusive gushings, but I feel it inside.