Detail from a magazine advertisement, 1964
R.E.M., live performance of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game”
I can’t figure out what 1995 show this recording is from—it was briefly a staple of their live performance. But it doesn’t really matter, this is the killer take that, had they heard it, they should’ve put out on the promo 45.
The Chris Isaak song, according to Wikipedia, only became a hit after a David Lynch-obsessed DJ in Atlanta got into it through Lynch’s Wild At Heart. The Roy Orbison mode, which Lynch dipped into regularly, you would think would be a bit foreign for chronic mumbler Michael Stipe but he shows himself to be at least equally capable as Isaak in crooning the shit out of it.
Wham!, “Last Christmas” (1984)
At the Ply Christmas party, this just plays on repeat as everyone drowns in whipped cream eggnog. Close attention to the acting in the wine sequence is well rewarded. Next year I’m going to make a special point of booking that ski resort double-date well in advance.
Still from an automobile advertisement, 1970s
Hold on to your hats, it’s a new issue of Terminal Boredom: in two installations: A-M and N-Z. Rich Kroeniss chimes in on the new Personal & The Pizzas single:
Personal & The Pizzas “Dead Meat vs. Joanie” 7” The Total Punk offshoot label of the Floridas Dying empire debuts with the latest two song lunch from Personal & The Pizzas (or Pizza, as there seems to be only one other band member here), and it starts with a Stiv-solo style leather jacket power-punker called “Dead Meat” that I think has a motorcycle chain solo on it. Tough as grease. “Joanie” mashes together “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” and “Swallow My Pride” (and maybe a dozen other Ramones cuts) with a ballsy little fuzz guitar thing for an ode to eating out and Happy Days perhaps (insert garage Fonzie gag here, harhar). Total ‘End of the Century’ vibes. Scum stats: 600 pressed, hand stamped and totally punk. “Peter Davis = dead meat”?! (RK)
Also includes reviews of Pygmy Shrews, Sic Alps, Nobunny, X-Ray Eyeballs, Thee Oh Sees, a new release of 1995 demos by Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, and lots of other indie gutter snipes. Go get em.
Johnny Kemp, “Just Got Paid” (1988, US #10)
Yesterday afternoon I tuned in to the reliably old school Kiss FM and caught the apex of its new jack swing segment. The DJ billed the set as a celebration of “homegrown artists,” underscoring the extent to which that particular sound became synonymous with black New York in the early nineties. The culture of new jack swing, with its aura of sophistication, seemed to augur the sort of bustling buppie urban life that awaited middle-class youngsters like me. That was our vision of adulthood.
The triumph of hip-hop, among other things,1 changed all that. Donnie Simpson went out and Joe Clair came in, though that’s a crude way to put it. New jack swing was, I suppose, the last great iteration of a certain kind of black urbanity. Its visual aesthetics were rooted largely in mid-century jazz and R&B culture—baggy, bright-colored suits, wavy or processed hair, goatees, horn-rimmed glasses, etc. The music itself combined smooth vocal arrangements and sunny keyboard vamps with funk breaks or loud, drum machine beats. Today it sounds surprisingly sprightly. In my mind, it also remains freighted with notions of what was or could have been, for the version of black city life to which new jack swing supposedly formed a sonic backdrop disappeared, by all accounts, a long time ago. The ideal, needless to say, lives on for some.
A few years ago I ran into Johnny Kemp at a house party in Hamilton Heights. I learned that he still performs in clubs and lounges uptown. New York is funny that way.
1. Crack cocaine, mostly.
Detail from an advertisement for a film, 1985
Sometimes I wonder what the eighties would have looked like, had the Boss been more like Prince. That’s not to say I wish he were more pop-star-ish, or a guitar wizard. But I think of him, like Prince, as was one of those pop-auteurs who appeared in 1970s swaddling and then went on to build interior worlds from virtually no preexisting parts (or from among the wreckage of the exhausted pop-rock idiom). For each, the central imagery and motive force remains so consistent across songs that, well on the way through a record, you can start to imagine living there. (If I weren’t already an obvious mark for “Dancing In The Dark,” the last verse always gets me with the detail that the struggling working-class speaker is struggling to write a book.)
For Bruce and Prince—and unlike someone like Bowie—this world remained essentially personal, and in each song’s narrative voice there is a mixture of isolated dramatic invention and a recurring, strengthening emotional arc. And I guess I imagine that if Springsteen had, like Prince, completely played, arranged, and produced his own work then the strength of that musical interiority would have been even greater. (I have to admit I can’t understand what the E Street Band is going for much of the time.) But I guess that’s a fatuous wish, since what he did record is already so good.
In “I’m Goin’ Down” (the sixth of seven singles from Born in the U.S.A.) Springsteen’s vision is more than usually a direct product of the vocal performance, which is one of his most relentlessly focused, refusing to wander, and perhaps for that reason makes the sax solo actually welcome.
The flip side (which on my copy includes a sprawling note in bubbly handwriting dotted with hearts and hoping “the same thing won’t happen in cross-country next year”) is this slight but—I think, lovely—B-side from those sessions, “Janey, Don’t You Lose Heart.”
Detail of a photograph in Life magazine, 1958
Tom Ewing writes in the Guardian of listening to Nevermind for the first time, in 2011.
We crave surprise: could there possibly be any left in Nevermind? A little, as it turned out. When I played it — finally! — what jumped out was Krist Novoselic’s bass sound and its constant malignant gravity, sucking songs down even as it keeps them brisk. It sounds, as it happens, very much like how I thought “swamp rock” might. I knew to expect a blend of ugliness and pop crispness, but I had to hear Nevermind to realise how little the two resolve, making the album sound alienated even from itself. I had some prejudices confirmed, too — the zombie lurch of Cobain’s singing is comfortably the weirdest thing about the record, and it seems a gloriously uncanny twist of rock history that it became so imitated. But I still can’t actually stand hearing it.
Still from an advertisement for candy, 1950s
A historical compilation project like Nuggets, designed for educational consumption, is going to have some inescapable problems. The main one, probably, is that it’s impossible to really dig out all the lost gems in any sort of objective way. Lenny Kaye, the guitarist for Patti Smith who captained that project, liked weird, generally 70s-predictive rollocking numbers, and they dominate the original double-LP (apparently the liners include one of the first appearances of the phrase “punk rock”). But the fact that many of the bands represented on Nuggets only appear with their most “freakbeat” of songs belies the fact the rest of their catalogues were generally much more conventional.
Wimple Winch was a weird band to be sure, with lots of modes, even in the span of a single song (“Atmospheres” lurches between the aggressive fuzz guitar and reveries of unadorned Brian Wilson harmonizing). And their loopiest tendencies were skimmed off for the second volume of the Rubble series (“Pop-Sike Pipe Dreams”), which was particularly focused on loopiness. This sort of thing, despite being educational, can just as easily complicate understanding, since for a band with wide popularity—the Beatles, say—the loopier songs were classified among themselves only alongside the simple, straightforward ones, which were often the best known. When a single individual attempts to digest an entire oeuvre for future generations it often happens the other way, and things like Wimple Winch’s “Coloured Glass” get omitted, since I guess they aren’t obviously innovative on their own; though might seem to wear a subtler meaning next to their more frequently collected numbers (e.g., “Save My Soul”).
Detail from an advertisement for financial services, 1992
This is my fucking anthem. Roky Erickson blasts through self-deception in a way so complete it could only be conceived by a schizophrenic. Unlike Syd Barrett, the other familiar martyr to psychedelia, his world did not crack gradually, in a musical way—it was already cracked all over. The metaphorical mode of his lyrics described from the start (when they were most fluid) the messy inner workings of the psyche. And even through the most drug-drenched stretches of his career, the music remained peculiarly grounded.
“Bloody Hammer” is one of the few self-eviscerating metal jams that, for me, actually makes convincing the gruesome vocabulary of its lyrics. The 1980 lead guitar and a wandering vocal repeatedly find themselves confronting mass-delusion, self-enforced with the “Bloody Hammer.” For everyone, the coping mechanism is to “hammer their mind out,” but Roky is the “special one”—and the B-movie set decor is a twisted (but ultimately true) world that he must confront, as one who refuses to “have the bloody hammer.” Roky was subjected to electroshock therapy in late 1960s by the government of his native Texas for drug convictions and presumably the alien quality of his unshakeable world-view. But before that he was already singing songs like 1966’s “Monkey Island” (written by fellow keep-Austin-weirdo Powell St. John) which stresses his fundamental estrangement from the conventional world.
Though the lyric is considerably less fractured than “Bloody Hammer,” it has the same radical self-conception that made Roky the outsider’s outsider. And disturbingly predicts his ordeal at the mental hospital with lines like “Well there’s one thing about these monkeys, baby / They don’t know I’m around / But that’s pretty good, ‘cause if they knew / They’ll probably come and put me down.”
Captain Beefheart sketched a plausible, genre-crazed parody of culture, as the homelessness-exploitation artist. But Roky redefined the parameters. He didn’t strip mine his difference for its surface appeal; he could do nothing but sing in its native tongue.
The Clean, “Odditty.” Live at the Rumba Bar, Auckland, 15 May 1982.
In honor of the 30th birthday of the groundbreaking New Zealand indie label, here are some highlights from the incredible show they put together in Auckland only a year into their endeavor:
A very early incarnation of the Tall Dwarfs backed by The Clean (wearing paper bags).
The Clean doing “Two Fat Sisters,” — prompting one YouTube user to declare them “New Zealand’s Velvet Underground.”
The Chills doing the very cut of “Flamethrower” that was pressed to vinyl (though the sound is not the same) and
A rowdy version of The Chills’ “Bite,” guest-starring a large part of the Nun roster.