THANKFUL FOR ROCK N ROLL

It's been a fun day and I've really done nothing. Started the day when the mail brought the dvd of a movie made in 1978, BLANK GENERATION, starring then-current punk rocker Richard Hell. The film was an effort to make a somewhat avant-garde film of the day, the time of Andy Warhol films, Nick Roeg's PERFORMANCE, that had Mick Jagger in it and was pretty good. It was a time when all that went before was regarded "irrelevant" and some artists were seeking relevance in "youthsploitation" film making. This one was like a European attempt to make a film using a New York punker. The film had a French element, not only in the lead actress being French, but it had a French quality in the making, in how it looked, in how it progressed. It had an avant-garde German sense too, influence of Fassbinder, director Ulli Lommel being German and associated with Fassbinder. And there was plenty of Andy Warhol influence. He included Warhol for a short scene. Italian director Antonioni attempted an American avant-garde film in the time of protest and hippies, Zabriskie Point. The film missed the target. I suspect Antonioni was interpreting American youth from a European intellectual perspective, which doesn't apply in America. As in Lommel's film, I felt the European intellectual director was only able to see the emptiness in American youth. They don't have enough American experience to understand American motivations, especially in the young. I felt like Ulli Lommel found in Richard Hell's song, The Blank Generation, his own interpretation of what he saw of the American young in New York. His approach to Hell's character, Billy, was to point out his blankness by way of Lommel's take on the meaning of blank; uncommitted, indifferent, short attention span, impetuous, nobody home.

Though it had the quality of a homemade movie and a script not even thought out, it had a charm about it, a freshness, even today, thirty-five years later, that held my interest. The more I place it in its context of the day, the more interesting it becomes. I see Warhol films of the time, John Waters films of the time, Nick Roeg's films of the time, Jim Jarmusch; Blank Generation is coming to me more and more as a French/German attempt to make an American punk film. It's a stretch imagining a German intellectual filmmaker having a punk attitude. He didn't. Yet he made a punk film. He did that very well. Making a film without a plot was new in that time. Today, it seems like plot is a thing of the past. Melody has gone out of rock. Rage Against the Machine from the 1990s flew in the face of melody. The film without a plot seemed perhaps more contemporary now than it might have then. Warhol was a "pioneer" in that regard. Boring was avant-garde in that time, too. Films had avoided boredom before. It was the time of Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theater. Their Paradise Now can be seen on YouTube. And it was the time of Andre Gregory, best known in My Dinner With Andre, where the conversation is around that time in New York's avant-garde. Looking at Blank Generation in its context, it becomes more interesting. I'm re-seeing it in my mind's eye without any memory of a time in the film that didn't hold my interest. I don't want to see it again soon, would rather digest what I saw first time around. I remember thinking when it was over that this is a film that would reward a second viewing, going into it knowing what to expect and paying more attention to photography, which was often extraordinary without trying to be. First time, I paid attention to the characters. Next time I'll see more. I believe another viewing is in order, though not soon. I'll wait months, until the images have left my head and I don't remember more than a brief slide show of still scenes.

the rolling stones

All the rest of the day I've been playing the Rolling Stones' album Black & Blue, 1976, Ron Wood's first album with the Stones. I play it over and over. I gets louder and louder. Hand Of Fate is playing now. I had most of their albums on LPs that don't get played anymore. I don't want to replace all my Stones albums on cd, so I only have on cd a few I really love. I bought Stripped on cd, live, very small venue, very bluesy. Later, I bought their first album, also very bluesy. Black & Blue has that emphasis on blues the Stones do so well. It's been in my mind for a few years, remembering how well it satisfied my liking for Stones music. Their blues is the aspect of the Stones that turns me on. It's the core of their sound. Mick Jagger is one of the poets in rock. His song on this album, Memory Motel, is beautiful songwriting. I hear the Stones best when I put their stardom out of my mind and hear a bunch of guys making music. Ron Wood's lead guitar is just right for the Stones. I saw him and Keith Richards in a brief interview where Keith was asked which of them was the best. He said, Ron would say he's the best, though neither one of us is very good, but put us together and nobody can beat us. He did not exaggerate. In the time of Sixties rock, the Rolling Stones hard rocking was It for me. Their live album, Get Yer YaYa's Out, my neighbors heard far more than they ever wanted to. The Stones were my Little Richard of the Sixties. It started with their first hit, Time Is On My Side. I've always associated it with James Brown's first hit, Try Me.

In this time of the life, I'm enjoying looking over the music I've loved along the way. It's a great variety that includes Baaba Maal of Senegal and Five Finger Death Punch. Rock n roll has been the thread that ran through all the experiences of my life from its beginning unto my end. Bob Dylan was in there since his beginning. I loved his acoustic sound and loved it even better when he went to rock. He transformed rock when he plugged in. His readiness to change kept him fluid. His willingness to step outside the mainstream, whichever one he's in at the moment, came to his most recent five albums, my favorite of the whole progression of his music. I felt like he came into what he'd been working toward. I'm glad Dylan and the Stones are making music into their seventies. Before their generation, only black musicians were appreciated into their old age. Rock n roll is a very strong interest in my life, not to play it, but to appreciate an art form with what seems like an infinite range of what can be done with it. It absorbs every music that gets near it, adds a new sound, constantly changing, every generation making big changes. I remember someone I knew who was a Sixties rock old hippie, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Neil Young. When his boy was of an age that he was hearing his own music, he found some late Seventies punk, Adam and the Ants, Devo, and dad said, in my hearing, "That's not music! The Beatles are music!" It threw me back to jr high listening to early Elvis, being told from on high, "That's not music! Glenn Miller's music!" I said to peer speaking to his child, "Did you hear yourself?" He had heard himself very well. I just shook my head. Whatever. I saw Frank Sinatra in concert, 1988, and enjoyed it. I was so drunk I saw two of him through the whole show, unable to pull the images together into one. I say I saw Sinatra twice.

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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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