I set up a website a long time ago where I was trying to post a 1000-word essay per month. I sort of let it go but over the weekend I went back and finished a piece I started a few months ago. (The reference to Hunter Thompson's death should clue you in that it's a little stale.) This is the website:
http://hometown.aol.com/johnyblood/myhomepage/index.html
and this is the essay:
On Some Dead Boys (and Some Living Ones)
When I lived in Boston, a long time ago, when I lived with Jimmy and Tracy we went to a Korean restaurant on Mass Ave near Huntington called I think Arirang. The meal was very good, I'd never had Korean food before and I quite liked it, and the restaurant was very pretty inside and the waitress was nice to us. Jimmy asked her what the name of the restaurant meant. I may have misunderstood at the time, or misremember now, but it seems that Arirang is a song you sing to someone who is going away and you know you'll never see them again. I may have it wrong, but anyway whether that's what's it's called or not it makes me think of “Caroline, No”, the closing track on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album. The piece ends with the sound of a train roaring by, and with singer Brian Wilson we say goodbye: Goodbye, Pet Sounds. Goodbye, Caroline. Goodbye honesty and innocence and sanity, goodbye. You said you'd never change, but that's not true. So long clangclangclang and then a dog barking, woof woof, and then the dragging sound of the needle in the outgroove, if you're listening to the record, or nothing at all if you're not. Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys intended to follow that up with what was to be American Sergeant Pepper, but instead he cracked up and never completed it, though many of the songs were released on Beach Boys albums throughout the late 60s. The train kept rolling, goodbye everybody, until finally, last year in the 2004th year of the Common Era, Brian Wilson returned to his (artistic) hometown and remade the album he was unable to complete in 1967, called as originally intended SMILE. It's a work as sweet and sad and pulled from despair and defeat as Rock Bottom, the incredibly beautiful album Robert Wyatt recorded in 1973 shortly after he was released from the hospital as a paraplegic.
The album has been much lauded critically, hearkening back to the “good” 60’s as much as Hunter Thompson's suicide this year might recall the “bad” 60’s. But if SMILE is a triumph over time, it's a defeat as well, because while Brian Wilson's voice is sweet, the harmonies lack two things: the voice of Dennis Wilson and that of Carl Wilson. Brian's two brothers died in the meantime and we the listeners suffer for the loss. Like the Everlys or the Carter family, the Wilson brothers were able to blend their voices in a distinctively sweet way, perhaps because their throats are made of the same stuff or perhaps simply because they sang together since they were children. Though SMILE is beautiful and structurally more interesting than any Beach Boys album since Pet Sounds, the individual songs (“Good Vibrations”, “Heroes and Villains”, even “Vege-tables”) fall short of their 60s versions. The triumph, of course, is in the trying.
An equally if more obscure instance of middle-aged men revisiting their past is Rocket From the Tombs’ 2004 release, Rocket Redux. (The album art is even lamer than the title.) Rocket From the Tombs was an utter obscurity from Cleveland, Ohio in the mid-70s, who weren't together long enough in their heyday to have released an album. Two very slightly well-known bands were formed by the members afterwards: the punk rock band the Dead Boys and the “avant-garage” (their term), patephysical, industrial-surrealist band Pere Ubu. The high-pitched caterwauling and yelps of Ubu and RFTT singer David Thomas (not the Wendy's guy; he's from Columbus) made "Psycho Killer"-era David Byrne sound like Perry Como. I saw the Dead Boys at Bogart's in Cincinnati in the summer of 1978, the day Dennis Kucinich resigned as mayor of their hometown of Cleveland, if I'm not mistaken. Seeing their singer, Stiv Bators (who as it happens was not a member of Rocket From the Tombs) I thought, gosh, this guy is a Catholic schoolboy who likes Iggy even more than I do. Hearing Pere Ubu's first album, just after spring break 1978 in James and Stephen's room made me think, aha. We are not alone. They were the first band considered punk that reminded me of the music my friends and I were playing, as psychedelic as if Man Ray had used the guitar the way he used a camera.
Some of the Rocket from the Tombs songbook I know from Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys, and the ones I hadn't heard before are in the same vein: aggression, alienation and depravity mixed with oddball literary and old movie images. The ghost on this album is guitar player Peter Laughner. Laughner was particularly adept at writing songs using a punk-minimalist scarcity of materials: "Amphetamine” has a two-chord structure, and in "Ain't It Fun" and "Life Stinks" the lines all end in words rhyming with "fun" and "stink" respectively. He died in 1977, before his bands had even released an album. I'm not entirely clear on whether it was suicide, an OD or medical complications brought about by a short lifetime of alcohol and drug abuse, but critic Lester Bang, who knew him, said he died of wanting to be Lou Reed, though this can't be considered Lou's fault.
The new album is premised on the absurdity of men in their 50s singing about self-hatred, suicide, drug abuse and other teen-aged topics. Yet when David Thomas sings, “My mom threw me out till I find some pants that fit” he doesn't sound like he's winking, or like he's singing an oldie; he sounds like a middle-aged man whose mom kicked him out for ill-fitting trousers. His interpretation of "Sonic Reducer" tops the only other version I know, the Dead Boys’ of 1977 from their album Young Loud & Snotty. The vantage point is quintessentially adolescent: I'm in my room looking out at people who ignore me, but I'm not just anyone. One day I'll be 10 feet tall, I'll be like a pharaoh, I'll show everyone. The exact nature of the revenge seems clearer to the singer than to the listener. It involves some kind of machine (I hear it as a “bubble machine”, though that seems a little preposterous even for David Thomas), a ‘lectronic dream, a sonic reducer. Stiv Bators sang it as a ball of raw, infantile fury. But what does it mean for a man in his 50s to be saying that?
Hunter Thompson recently showed us that suicide is an option for a man in his 60s as much as for a young man. Hemingway at 62 and Kurt Cobain at 27 both took the same macho, brutal, definitive way out. Alienation, frustration and fear of drying up creatively or selling out can apparently be a part of anyone's life at any time. Perhaps Rocket from the Tombs 1974 was merely being punkishly fashionable; perhaps they were no more serious than the Ramones singing about sniffing glue, cretinism and attacking children with baseball bats. Or perhaps they were really talking about their own lives, and perhaps Rocket from the Tombs 2004 still is, using the work of their youth as a way of speaking about the present. The Polish author Witold Gombrowicz's first book was called Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity, and both SMILE and Rocket Redux could carry this title. Though it's interesting in a sort of Entertainment Tonight way that they were able to go back and re-create albums that were never made, what makes both of them moving is their incompleteness, the gaps, the distance between past and present. Dead brothers and band mates, commercial and artistic disappointment and the hope for a better time that went away with Caroline on that train. The absence turns out to be the star of the show. Or, let me give the final words to the Rocket from the Tombs: "I want to know/ I want to know/ What?"
http://hometown.aol.com/johnyblood/myhomepage/index.html
and this is the essay:
On Some Dead Boys (and Some Living Ones)
When I lived in Boston, a long time ago, when I lived with Jimmy and Tracy we went to a Korean restaurant on Mass Ave near Huntington called I think Arirang. The meal was very good, I'd never had Korean food before and I quite liked it, and the restaurant was very pretty inside and the waitress was nice to us. Jimmy asked her what the name of the restaurant meant. I may have misunderstood at the time, or misremember now, but it seems that Arirang is a song you sing to someone who is going away and you know you'll never see them again. I may have it wrong, but anyway whether that's what's it's called or not it makes me think of “Caroline, No”, the closing track on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album. The piece ends with the sound of a train roaring by, and with singer Brian Wilson we say goodbye: Goodbye, Pet Sounds. Goodbye, Caroline. Goodbye honesty and innocence and sanity, goodbye. You said you'd never change, but that's not true. So long clangclangclang and then a dog barking, woof woof, and then the dragging sound of the needle in the outgroove, if you're listening to the record, or nothing at all if you're not. Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys intended to follow that up with what was to be American Sergeant Pepper, but instead he cracked up and never completed it, though many of the songs were released on Beach Boys albums throughout the late 60s. The train kept rolling, goodbye everybody, until finally, last year in the 2004th year of the Common Era, Brian Wilson returned to his (artistic) hometown and remade the album he was unable to complete in 1967, called as originally intended SMILE. It's a work as sweet and sad and pulled from despair and defeat as Rock Bottom, the incredibly beautiful album Robert Wyatt recorded in 1973 shortly after he was released from the hospital as a paraplegic.
The album has been much lauded critically, hearkening back to the “good” 60’s as much as Hunter Thompson's suicide this year might recall the “bad” 60’s. But if SMILE is a triumph over time, it's a defeat as well, because while Brian Wilson's voice is sweet, the harmonies lack two things: the voice of Dennis Wilson and that of Carl Wilson. Brian's two brothers died in the meantime and we the listeners suffer for the loss. Like the Everlys or the Carter family, the Wilson brothers were able to blend their voices in a distinctively sweet way, perhaps because their throats are made of the same stuff or perhaps simply because they sang together since they were children. Though SMILE is beautiful and structurally more interesting than any Beach Boys album since Pet Sounds, the individual songs (“Good Vibrations”, “Heroes and Villains”, even “Vege-tables”) fall short of their 60s versions. The triumph, of course, is in the trying.
An equally if more obscure instance of middle-aged men revisiting their past is Rocket From the Tombs’ 2004 release, Rocket Redux. (The album art is even lamer than the title.) Rocket From the Tombs was an utter obscurity from Cleveland, Ohio in the mid-70s, who weren't together long enough in their heyday to have released an album. Two very slightly well-known bands were formed by the members afterwards: the punk rock band the Dead Boys and the “avant-garage” (their term), patephysical, industrial-surrealist band Pere Ubu. The high-pitched caterwauling and yelps of Ubu and RFTT singer David Thomas (not the Wendy's guy; he's from Columbus) made "Psycho Killer"-era David Byrne sound like Perry Como. I saw the Dead Boys at Bogart's in Cincinnati in the summer of 1978, the day Dennis Kucinich resigned as mayor of their hometown of Cleveland, if I'm not mistaken. Seeing their singer, Stiv Bators (who as it happens was not a member of Rocket From the Tombs) I thought, gosh, this guy is a Catholic schoolboy who likes Iggy even more than I do. Hearing Pere Ubu's first album, just after spring break 1978 in James and Stephen's room made me think, aha. We are not alone. They were the first band considered punk that reminded me of the music my friends and I were playing, as psychedelic as if Man Ray had used the guitar the way he used a camera.
Some of the Rocket from the Tombs songbook I know from Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys, and the ones I hadn't heard before are in the same vein: aggression, alienation and depravity mixed with oddball literary and old movie images. The ghost on this album is guitar player Peter Laughner. Laughner was particularly adept at writing songs using a punk-minimalist scarcity of materials: "Amphetamine” has a two-chord structure, and in "Ain't It Fun" and "Life Stinks" the lines all end in words rhyming with "fun" and "stink" respectively. He died in 1977, before his bands had even released an album. I'm not entirely clear on whether it was suicide, an OD or medical complications brought about by a short lifetime of alcohol and drug abuse, but critic Lester Bang, who knew him, said he died of wanting to be Lou Reed, though this can't be considered Lou's fault.
The new album is premised on the absurdity of men in their 50s singing about self-hatred, suicide, drug abuse and other teen-aged topics. Yet when David Thomas sings, “My mom threw me out till I find some pants that fit” he doesn't sound like he's winking, or like he's singing an oldie; he sounds like a middle-aged man whose mom kicked him out for ill-fitting trousers. His interpretation of "Sonic Reducer" tops the only other version I know, the Dead Boys’ of 1977 from their album Young Loud & Snotty. The vantage point is quintessentially adolescent: I'm in my room looking out at people who ignore me, but I'm not just anyone. One day I'll be 10 feet tall, I'll be like a pharaoh, I'll show everyone. The exact nature of the revenge seems clearer to the singer than to the listener. It involves some kind of machine (I hear it as a “bubble machine”, though that seems a little preposterous even for David Thomas), a ‘lectronic dream, a sonic reducer. Stiv Bators sang it as a ball of raw, infantile fury. But what does it mean for a man in his 50s to be saying that?
Hunter Thompson recently showed us that suicide is an option for a man in his 60s as much as for a young man. Hemingway at 62 and Kurt Cobain at 27 both took the same macho, brutal, definitive way out. Alienation, frustration and fear of drying up creatively or selling out can apparently be a part of anyone's life at any time. Perhaps Rocket from the Tombs 1974 was merely being punkishly fashionable; perhaps they were no more serious than the Ramones singing about sniffing glue, cretinism and attacking children with baseball bats. Or perhaps they were really talking about their own lives, and perhaps Rocket from the Tombs 2004 still is, using the work of their youth as a way of speaking about the present. The Polish author Witold Gombrowicz's first book was called Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity, and both SMILE and Rocket Redux could carry this title. Though it's interesting in a sort of Entertainment Tonight way that they were able to go back and re-create albums that were never made, what makes both of them moving is their incompleteness, the gaps, the distance between past and present. Dead brothers and band mates, commercial and artistic disappointment and the hope for a better time that went away with Caroline on that train. The absence turns out to be the star of the show. Or, let me give the final words to the Rocket from the Tombs: "I want to know/ I want to know/ What?"
1 comment:
I don't really have a comment, except that I'm glad you finished the piece. I just wanted to break the 'comments' ice in the hope that we all begin writing long, pointless, and even picky critiques of each other's posts.
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