The Tris McCall Report
Missed them by that much -- The Somnambulants played Sunset Boulevard on our getaway day.
I've been fed lines about Los Angeles all my life. Since some of them are funny, and all of them reinforced my sense of East Coast supremacy, I'm ashamed to admit I was happy to parrot them. Plenty of the myths about Southern California come with academic legitimacy; I'm thinking now of those who use City Of Quartz and other leftish critiques of Los Angeles to paint the city as a complete dystopia. Those are fun to trot out, too, and since it's so amusing to anger Californians, I was always willing to perpetuate their circulation. Thus I was totally and willfully unprepared for what I encountered in Los Angeles. To spare you the same embarrassment, let me run through a few of these myths and tell you about what I actually encountered.
Myth 1: L.A. is a great big freeway.
No more so than New Jersey, or even New York. There are arterial highways throughout the city and Southern California, but there are arterial highways in every metro area. Sometimes I think New Yorkers honestly believe that Robert Moses never happened, and they exist in a city without the BQE, the FDR, five thousand auto bridges and tunnels, and bumper-to-bumper traffic on Houston Street pretty much 24-7. We've got the terrific subway system, sure, but NYC is an auto city, too. The parkways and freeways in Los Angeles were no less plentiful and intrusive than our own. Here in New Jersey, we protect the Turnpike as if it's our state flower, and I think we sometimes lose sight of the fact that it's a road. And the most heavily travelled one in the United States, at that. Southern California has nothing on North Jersey for asphalt ribbons.
Corollary 1 to Myth 1: L.A. sucks because public transit there is nonexistent.
Yes, we've all heard this one. True, Southern California does not have a subway/train system that compares with the MTA, or (I suppose, though this is probably a myth, too) the heralded Paris Metro. But what other city in America does? C'mon, don't say the Boston Metro, I know you can't mean it. To hear some people talk about Los Angeles, you can't move from block to block without hitching a ride. I found that completely untrue -- not only do busses and light rail trains run the length of the city, but there are alternative metro lines that knit the city into a functional whole. From where we stayed in Claremont, it was a short trip to an Inland Empire passenger rail train (always full, as far as I could see) making local stops in small downtown centers from Rancho Cucamonga to Pasadena. Across Sunset Boulevard were stops for the Big Blue Bus lines to Santa Monica, Venice Beach, and Hollywood. Public transit in Los Angeles isn't perfect, but it's just as good as, if not better than, public transportation in any American city I've visited besides New York. Others may have the flashy subway trains and stations that superficially resemble ours, but then they don't take you where you want to go. Public transit in L.A. only appears to be crappy to those of us who can only imagine functional transit systems in cities that look like postcard train towns.
Corollary 2 to Myth 1: You can't walk around in Los Angeles; you need a car to get anywhere.
It depends on where you are. But I didn't see any main streets without sidewalks, so the physical act of walking from block to block couldn't be called impossible. Don't laugh, this is what plenty of people have told me. I wouldn't guess that it's a thrill a minute walking on Wiltshire Boulevard, but there are plenty of blocks in Brooklyn that are similarly wide and unforgiving to pedestrians. And to my surprise, there are many neighborhoods in Southern California that are explicitly designed for walkers and shoppers. Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade is closed to automobile traffic (something we don't do in New York anywhere), and is still a bustling four-block outdoor mall. Pasadena's old town, Claremont, Azusa, the southern extension of Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills, West Hollywood -- these are all neighborhoods that invite pedestrian traffic with a layout that would be familiar to anybody accustomed to traditional downtowns.
Corollary 3 to Myth 1: Every road is a traffic jam.
We drove I-5, I-10, the Ventura, the San Bernardino Freeway, 210, Sunset, Crenshaw, Pico, even Route 66, all in rush hour and off-peak. We hit some congested stretches, but no standstill traffic (or drive-by shootings). Our empirical account of one week in July proves nothing about long-term traffic problems, but it suggests to me that the hysterical cautionary advice about driving in Los Angeles is mainly fable. We experienced nothing akin to the recent snarls on the BQE and the Gowanus, and nothing as persistently troublesome as the area around the Big Dig in supposedly pedestrian Boston.
Myth 2: The architecture is a chaotic mishmash and is mostly terrible.
This is a matter of taste, but I have to vehemently disagree. We saw countless unique and interesting buildings in Los Angeles. They didn't look like that traditionally stately architecture of the McKim, Mead & White variety, but should Southern California really be punished for refusing to copy New York? Angelenos don't need elaborate eaves, gutters or imposing frontage; it never rains out there. Angelenos have developed a wide-open style that adapts to the physical realities of a semi-arid climate. To an East Coast eye, many of the buildings look incomplete, unfinished. But that's because we've developed an architecture based around the expectation of inches of rain and snow. We've also had guided planning across flat stretches; hence, many of our city blocks look and feel uniform and classy. Los Angeles is built on natural terraces that break up the line of sight and discourage a continuous development aesthetic. From a distance -- up on the freeway, say -- the inital effect is jarring; the city seems to be splattered across the hills. On closer inspection, though, a trace logic can be followed. There's more leeway for individual architectural expression, sure, but structures do interact; for instance, take the odd edifices on Vine that borrow in varying degrees from Mexican sources and cheap Hollywood glitz. We only caught a glimpse of U.C.L.A., but what we saw was legitimately breathtaking. Best of all, Los Angeles has more screwy looking fifties-style ranch shacks, ancient decrepid stores and one-shot fast-food restaurants than any other city I've ever seen. If that's your thing (and many New Jerseyans claim it is), you can't beat Los Angeles.
Myth 3: Los Angeles has no sense of identity.
East Coast development hardliners go on and on about generating a sense of place. But frequently, what we East Coasters mean by "sense of place" is "it looks vaguely like Europe" (or what we imagine Europe to be like, anyway). There's little or no Old World influence in Los Angeles; personally, I don't miss it at all. This is a relentlessly American city, and it's very coherent and consistent in its adherence to American specificity. Were I an Angeleno rather than a Garden State booster, I would find countless artifacts and phenomena to take property in. But I don't think that Southern Californians feel quite as defined by their neighborhoods, blocks, or communities as New Yorkers do, and that probably reads to us as a lukewarm endorsement of their city. It isn't; it's just a slightly different value system. We're much closer to Europe and have retained much of its regionalism and parochialism -- not to mention the football hooliganism that goes along with it. Californians are more quintessentially American in their studied rootlessness. We think Dodgers fans are wishy-washy when they leave the game in the fifth inning to beat traffic, they think we're psychotic (and maybe a bit barbaric) to go to the Stadium and stick it out through nine innings of atrocious weather. I have more regional pride than all of you put together, but even I can step back and see my NYC-Metro flag-waving through the eyes of a detached and cosmo Angeleno, and understand that it might be me who looks a little silly.
Corollary 1 to Myth 3: There's no downtown.
What's this?
And there's more where that came from, buddy.
Corollary 2 to Myth 3: It's all sprawl.
I went looking for the sprawl. I'm well-acquainted with sprawl, see, I'm a New Jersey loyalist. That said, I did not see much sprawl of the time-honored Bedmister variety. Within Los Angeles, neigborhoods are too close together to produce that sense of "Mondo Condo" alienation and edge-city dislocation. The Inland Empire consists of small, fragmentary towns that are structured around a strip highway within walking distance of a walkable city center, and is much more akin to Bergen County than Basking Ridge. Honestly, there's more legitimate sprawl in Westchester than in Southern California.
Myth 4: Angelenos only think they've won the battle with nature; soon the earthquake will come and knock them all into the Pacific Ocean.
Yesterday I wrote all about how I see Los Angeles as the triumph of human ingenuity and construction technology over untamed physical landscape. You can't expect naturalists to be comfortable with that. Over the years, they've repeated dire warnings about the incipient earthquake that is supposed to punish Southern California for its geological hubris. After visiting Los Angeles, I now see earthquake-mongering for what it is: an expression of the same kind of resentment that gives us the sky-is-falling ecological disaster narratives I've been hearing all my life. Remember, acid rain was supposed to wipe out life as we know it. The depletion of the Amazon rain forest was supposed to have suffocated us all by now. The hole in the ozone was to have melted the polar ice caps, and 42nd Street was going to become a canal. And so on. Maybe there will be a big California earthquake, maybe there won't. After seeing L.A., there's one thing I'm certain of -- the same initiative and inspiration that turned a strip of semi-arid Pacific coast into the second biggest metro area in the country isn't going to evaporate in the wake of a natural disaster. I believe Southern California can handle anything you want to throw at it. I had a geology professor in college who refused to travel to California; he felt the entire state was structurally unstable. That was many years ago. California is still there. If you're pulling for an earthquake, you might win the bet in letter, but I doubt you'll be spiritually satisfied. Those of us who root for cities instead should see the relentless earthquake warnings for what they are: wishcasting.
Myth 5: Because it has no natural resources, L.A. produces nothing but ass Hollywood movies and other figments.
I wanted to leave Hollywood (the motion picture industry, not the neighborhood) out of this discussion altogether, but you can't discuss Southern California without bringing up the entertainment business. Still, while the culture industry might drive much of the economy here, it's only one of several engines. The Los Angeles river is, in most places, about the width, depth and color of the kiddie pool. Yet if you follow the waterway to the source, you find the biggest container port in the continental United States. The harbor isn't there because of any natural advantage, it's there because Angelenos willed it there. Meanwhile, we've got the greatest natural saltwater harbor in the universe here in NYC, and when was the last time you saw a container ship on the Hudson? No, wiseguy, the QE2 doesn't count.
Myth 6: It's not the heat, it's the humidity.
It's the heat. The ancient Hebrews saw the desert as a site of imaginative exertion, and perhaps they were right. Upper Claremont -- where the temperatures approached 95 degrees before 9 AM this week -- is the closest place to the Dead Sea that I, personally, ever want to get. Leonard Jeffreys is right about me, I'm an ice person. I'm also a New Jerseyan, and an indoor mouse. If you, like me, believe that the white lights at the Mercury Lounge are the closest thing to full daylight that you ever want to see, be advised that Southern California is scorching. All the arid climate really means is that there are never any clouds to take the edge off the glare. If you're used to hiding in shadows, Pasadena might prove a tough adaptation for you.
But hey, if I can do it, anybody can.
So we're driving north on Interstate 15, straight outta Claremont, through the Cajon Canyon and toward the Mojave. We've got Volunteers by the Blood Group on the rental car's crappy CD player to set the desolate mood. I'm anticipating wide-open California highway. Instead, for the first time in our trip, we hit bumper-to-bumper traffic. Where the hell are all these people going? Into the desert?
Yes, as a matter of fact, they are. Clear the San Gabriel Mountains -- the mammoth dividing line between the Inland Empire from the High Desert -- and you find Hesperia, Victorville, Apple Valley. These aren't small towns squatting on desert plots, they're growing mixed-income communities built by top-dollar residential developers like the notorious K. Hovnanian. The scrub brush and cacti will, for a block or two, be replaced by utterly incongruous verdant squares. It is as if a mad artist has decided the desert is an empty canvas, and he's taken a pointillist's brush to the arid landscape, dotting it here and there with lurid green geometric shapes and equally garish new homes.
On the more familiar side of the San Gabriel divide, the landscape isn't much more arboreal. Everywhere you go in Southern California, you are confronted by a frightening scarcity of water. Different towns cope differently. Claremont, our base, is a testament to forced greenery -- topiaries, ivy covered walls, trees of different species planted in a postmodern hodgepodge, hidden sprinkler systems pumping through the night. Nearby Azusa and Rancho Cucamonga don't bother with the pretense or cost -- their aesthetic is semi-arid, and they work with it, importing tropes from Mexico and the Old West. Conspicuous consumption of water is a rampant indulgence. Many restaurants shoot a steady steam of mist out towards their sidewalks from jet systems atop their outdoor seating sections. As in Philip Dick's Martian Time-Slip (and I now understand that novel as an allegory of Southern California), willingness to waste water in a parched environment becomes the ultimate class marker.
This land is inhospitable. Los Angeles is strung out like a set of rickety backyard lanterns on sharp hills; the entire town is terraced, chaotic. It's fascinating, but difficult to navigate. If you were playing Sim City, and you drew this piece of land from a random generator, you'd reboot the computer. There are no natural resources here, no minerals to mine, no natural harbor, no rivers, nothing but an unfriendly ocean and a punishing sun. Even the hills aren't really suitable for construction, since they're made of loose rock and sand, and seem perpetually on the verge of crumbling, held together by a collective act of will. So the question isn't how Los Angeles grew to become a dominant cultural force and America's second city; that's almost beside the point. The question, rather, is: why is there a city here at all?
There shouldn't be, but there sure is. This is a metro area of staggering size and scope, worthy of comparison to our own. And it's here not because there's a fantastic harbor, or because it's an obvious trade route, or because of minerals or soil. No, L.A. exists because it does, it's there because it is. More specifically, the Los Angeles metropolis exists because Angelenos decided it would; they built this monument to human ingenuity out of sand, light waves, and their own sun-addled, fevered imaginations. Unlike the Bay Area, which hides the mechanics of its constant reformulation behind a veneer of putative unity and internal coherence, Los Angeles refuses to disguise its artifice. Nothing about Southern California is organic. This place is proud to be a fabrication.
Naturalists decry Los Angeles for this very reason -- it feels, superficially, like fantasyland, a town without plan or design, disconnected to anything but dreams. But to Tris McCall, anti-naturalist and friend to the machine, Southern California represents the triumph of the creative impulse over the harsh conditions of the material world. Angelenos have inscribed onto this unfriendly landscape not just a functional urban plan, but the second largest metro area in the country. A formidable one, a respectable one; a model totally unlike ours.
You might better understand, then, why Southern Californians are so obsessed with physical fitness and body-perfectability. Walking on the Santa Monica Pier, we were surrounded by hundreds of mesomorphic gym-coach types, running, playing volleyball, showing off their physiques. I must have cut a ridiculous figure in my black Baseball Prospectus t-shirt, black jeans, and the usual geeky specs; I was bummed because nobody was wearing cute little wire-rimmed glasses (or glasses at all). Bedford Avenue this is not. Southern Californians are encouraged by their own landscape to radically retrofit their bodies, and to imagine their physicality as a blank surface upon which they can project their ideal images. No wonder Arnold Schwartzenneger is being seriously discussed as a gubernatorial candidate.
We don't have anything like that here in neurotic, pathological New York, and I think we resent Southern Californians their health and cheer. And we'd be well within our rights, too, if there was anything natural about it. But if we see Angelenos as the wannabe-cyborgs they are, they become much more sympathetic. They're manic self-fashioners, just like us; they've just taken a different path to an analogous goal. We have plenty in common: we're coastal sophisticates, tradesmen, wholly reliant on the artificial and built environment, facing a modern American state apparatus in the hands of cowpokes, naturalists, and Texans and Nebraskans of all varieties. We face the same enemies; we mustn't be taking swipes at each other.
Tomorrow, I'm going to look at some of the hoary old City Of Quartz-type myths about Southern California, and give you my spin on them after having actually encountered the city firsthand. I know I have been guilty of propagating some of those myths, and tonight, back home in Union City, I regret it. If you've ever heard me say anything crappy or unfair about Los Angeles, I want you to know I take it back. From now on in, I'm all about fostering bi-coastal understanding and solidarity.
Proof we are not vampires:
Three quick notes from (unpleasantly) sunny California:
#1. Why are record release events so mandatory? Because they sit at the confluence of two crucial subcultural elements: indie releases and rock performance. In my opinion, the tail (recordings) has been wagging the dog (live shows) for years now -- but that's a natural consequence of a culture-industry structured around product. Now, Black Cat Revolver has never been about product; they're about bashing you over the head with vicious, harrowing blues-rock. They want to make their contribution to the permanent record of the Brooklyn underground, so they've captured their sound on disc for you and yours. But they're naturalists in the best sense, so everything keys off of what happens during those magic forty minutes between the first riff and the final encore. In case you missed the point, they're having their record release party with The Giraffes, outstanding recording artists who also draw their inspiration from the bludgeoning source of caught-live dementia. I wish I could be there. I won't be back home yet, though, so I'm urging you to go to the Metropolitan House at 389 Metropolitan Street on Saturday in my stead.
#2. Speaking of recordings, despite what you've heard, Liz Phair is a really good album, and it doesn't deserve the kind of dumbass playground bullying it's been getting by rock critics. If you've got any taste whatsoever for hit radio music, there's no way to deny the quality of the writing, production, or execution. All Avril Lavigne jokes aside, it's much closer to Guyville than the last album was. Ten years ago I suspected people were bandwagon-jumping and praising Phair without paying much legit attention to what she was trying to say. Now I know I was right. Rock writers: before you pen that scathing review, try listening carefully, then listening carefully again. You might learn something.
#3. Weasley Is Our King.
I'm out: I'll be home soon. See you in New Jersey....
An open letter to NYC club owners and promoters:
When I first started doing shows in New York -- back in the Stone Age of grunge rock and bands with the word "Groove" in their names -- if a group was listed in the Village Voice for ten PM, you could be sure they wouldn't see the stage until eleven at the earliest. It was an unspoken agreement between the house and the band. The crowd would show up early, wait around aimlessly and buy more and more drinks, and the group would get to stall for time while the club filled up for the headliner. So everybody was happy except the audience members, who would have to stand there holding their asses. Usually all was forgiven by the time the show was over (especially if the delay insured that everybody would be wasted and silly by the time the music started), but the slipperiness and disingenuousness of the arrangement left a bad aftertaste. People felt used, shuffled around.
Then, around 1998 or '99, something happened. Shows began to run on time. I have my theories why this shift occurred, but I'm not going to get into it here; suffice to say that if you lived through both periods of NYC club rock, you noticed a change. Sure, there was often still a lag between the reported show time and the actual beginnings of sets, but it was more like fifteen minutes to a half hour, rather than an hour or several hours. The expectation that a night out at a rock club meant standing around and waiting for the action to begin -- that started to dissipate. Listings began to feel honest and straightforward, not like a bizarre branch of contemporary fiction.
What happened? Did groups start playing to empty halls? Did the house start to get killed on drink money? Well, I can't really speak to the latter, but considering the well-chronicled spike in show attendance, I can't imagine too many clubs were complaining. The move toward prompt performances coincided with a creative and commercial explosion in New York City and Brooklyn rock music.
It is an error to assume that coinciding phenomena are causally linked; that is why the word "coincidence" has a negative charge. If things are coincident, we expect they occurred together by accident. The NYC garage and indie rock renaissance and the widespread practice of faithfulness to listings were coincident, and it's tempting to deem them unrelated. But when you think about it, wouldn't it figure that audience members would be more likely to return to a rock club if the general atmosphere of being dicked around by the house (and the group they were ostensibly there to support) was removed? Before you were a promoter and performer, you were an audience member; you probably stood there at the old Ritz, waiting for the damn video screen to rise, hooting and clapping, all in vain. You're no stranger to that frustration.
I believe we radically underestimate how very much we annoy audience members by starting shows late. We view our slippage as an innocuous open secret beneficial to the participating members of the subculture and as a balm for our pre-show nervousness, and casually forget that we're treating the crowd like shit. It's not O.K. It makes us look like a bunch of hucksters rather than legitimate showmen.
Since a high-water mark in 2000, we have given back most of the ground we gained. NYC shows now often begin an hour, an hour and a half, sometimes two hours after they are listed. A later show means a more inebriated band and audience; that might generate some superficial "fun", but isn't an atmosphere conducive to a meaningful experience. We aren't merely competing for the imaginary "entertainment dollar", we're also up against the human need to sleep and eat. Screw with people's basic drives enough, and they will stop coming, they'll plan their night around The Matrix rather than rock music. New Jersey clubs never learned the lesson NYC did, and as a consequence, our rock events here feel unfocused and ad hoc even when they are well-orchestrated. Look over the Hudson; you don't want that.
Start your shows on time. It may cause you some short-term discomfort, but in the long run, it helps everybody.
June 30, 2003
Why doesn't Club Rare have a website? Come to think of it, why doesn't Club Rare list anywhere? Hilary and I must have spent a solid hour on Saturday afternoon trying to figure out when the Possibilities show started. Turns out we shouldn't have bothered, since the answer was "after we've made you sit around for hours watching the disco ball and 2001:A Space Odyssey projected on a video screen." I don't think either of us would have liked that answer.
Focus on the positive, focus on the positive. San Serac was a solo synth performer who could really play; the guy had a great chord vocabulary and a terrific sense of where he'd put the backbeat. Plenty of the music was discharged via that old reliable band member the CD player, but his performance elements had none of the stale flavor of electroclash. I found Serac personally engaging; a skinny feller with a moustache, an expressive face, and the sort of literate yet conversational lyrics that were once a New York staple. His set featured jazz-pop songs that conjured memories of the Ambitious Lovers and the No Wave reinterpretations of Talking Heads' early direction. The crowd didn't exactly grok, but I hung on every word; I kept expecting him to break into "Locus Coreleus". In any case I felt intelligently addressed. Sometimes that's all I ask for (especially after the aforementioned and interminable Space Odyssey.)
The Somnambulants took the stage after we did. They're a super-cute boy/girl synthpop duo; less hipsterish than Mommy & Daddy but operating on a similar logic. Their robotic dance moves were reminiscent of those of Emily Haines of Metric -- even if theirs weren't quite so disturbingly automated. There was something indisputably human about the Somnambulants' machine-driven performance, frayed around the edges and warm even as they presented cool, striking synthetic textures. Songwriters first and electronic pioneers second -- that'd be my guess. Not that they really needed them, but the pair won extra points for sporting a Hooverphonic sticker on their main axe.
June 18, 2003
I first heard Matt Houser play at the Luna Lounge in the winter of 2000. I went to hear "Angel", the only Rachel Warren song I knew; I heard it off of a CD I pinched from Melody Lanes. Back then, Palomar was a pop-punk group with an emphasis on the punk -- the rowdy crowd wanted "Washington" and "Slingshot" and the fifty second shouter that was another highlight of the first album. Matt powered those through with flair and a spastic energy (because Matt does everything with flair and spastic energy; that's his signature), but he also lent a graceful outline to "British Spelling" and "Try", prettier songs with aching melodies that demand a kind of delicacy. Two months later, I would watch the three-piece levitate the Mercury Lounge with those same songs, leaving a packed house breathless, and establishing the group -- at least for me -- as the most luminous star in the firmament of NYC indie rock.
They did it the same way the Police did. Great, insanely catchy songs played by three wholly characteristic musicians with unique and complementary styles. Rachel Warren's thin Rickenbacker squall and exacto-knife of a singing voice interlocked perfectly with Sasha Alcott's intensely musical and powerful bass parts. Behind it, Matt staggered and rolled, commented, bristled, started, halted, knocked crossrhythms into the corners of the songs like a pool shark, put pedal to the metal and drove the songs with the manic energy of a cartoon rodent. Houser brought swing, artful swagger, and a doo-wop feel to these pop-punk songs, and helped ease Palomar's transition from an edgy gang of inspired maniacs to a ridiculously talented and accomplished indiepop group. Nobody who has ever heard Matt Houser play ever walked away without comment.
I had the immense pleasure of playing with Matt on a few occasions. He sat in with the Zest twice, and I've gotten to practice and perform with Palomar. Sometimes, hypercreative spazmos who are wonderful to appreciate from the audience are absolute murder to try to make music with. But playing with Matt only increased my esteem for him. Phil Rizzuto used to go off on tangents, riff, and be silly and spectacularly entertaining, but he never forgot to give the ball-strike count. Being in a practice situation with Matt made me recognize that as scattershot and sugar-fixed as his departures from musical expectation could be, he always kept the backbeat rolling.
After tonight, two-thirds of that Palomar lineup that electrified the Mercury Lounge in the spring of 2000 will have dissolved into the rock and roll ether; that same thin mist that'll someday claim us all. Palomar withstood the departure of Sasha Alcott, and it'll weather Matt's decision, too. Rachel Warren will no doubt bring in a new drummer with a completely different style, one who will move the band in a new direction. Matt will be around, too; I can't imagine he'll hang up the sticks. He's got too much nervous energy, and can you imagine him spending his time building model airplanes? Into a town of a thousand drummers who get by on nothing more than slamming their snares as hard as they can, Matt injected humor, subtlety, geek chic, a singular sense of rhythm and style. He had a good run with Palomar. For a few years, he made this city a brighter, smarter place.
Hats off to Matt Houser.
June 17, 2003
Yesterday I wrote a bit about the Barbes show, but I also want to mention our excursion to the Somerset Inn in Somerset, New Jersey on Friday. It was precisely the horrific Central Jersey sports bar I though it would be -- about eight television sets, all broadcasting the Nets getting systematically dismantled by Tim Duncan -- but the clientele was fairly young 'n' with it. Artsy Rutgers students and recent grads, I'd wager. Moreover, as Peter Horvath pointed out to me, the sound in the live room is surprisingly good. Like Moving Insects isn't an easy group to mix properly, but they sounded just as achingly beautiful in this sports boy/pizza place as they did at the Williamsburg Publik House. Somebody's got to get these guys on the main stage at the Knitting Factory; if there's room for Battlestar America, there's got to be a place for LMI. Perhaps the Knit is worried that it would be so gorgeous that people would actually drop dead from astonishment.
I dug The Ankles, Jersey City's answer to the Jesus and Mary Chain. Several of their psychocandy pieces were built around guitar-effect phenomena, like one tremolo-driven number that exploded into a fiery chorus. Unrepentant shoegazer Shaun Towey doesn't bring any stage kinetics, instead opting for an introspective (but never maudlin or overtly emotional) stance that fits his effortless vocal delivery. This is a promising act, for sure.
The Roadside Graves turned out to be a fireballing and largely acoustic six-piece fronted by a small ball of country-punk energy. I'm not exactly sure why they needed three acoustic guitars plus a piano for their straightforward songs, but each Grave proved to be a talented instrumentalist, and they (mostly) stayed out of each others' way. Let's just say the treble range was well covered. Most of the crowd was there to see the Hub City sextet -- mainly guys with their Jersey-side girlfriends in tow, and wondering what the hell was going on. The room was saturated with male energy; guys egging on the Graves' articulate tales of women who've done them wrong, and cheering when the frontman lit his chest hair on fire (only in New Jersey). He even did a song about how he no longer has to put up with white chicks now that he's figured out that black girls dig him. A thin line between enlightenment and offensiveness, these guys are happy to walk. I'm giving you the wrong impression now. The Roadside Graves are actually a subtle group, frequently exciting, articulate when not willfully facile, a pack of pornographic playing cards missing a queen, a blind ride down a prairie road with a brilliant but dangerous cowboy.
Once again we're growing an interesting crop of indie rock groups in North Jersey. While Maxwell's seems content to waste time with Skanatra, makeshift venues like Uncle Joes and the Somerset Inn have become incubators for a new generation of Jersey voices. They're not the hippest spots in the galaxy, but they'll do, for now. All we need over here are a few clubs, and a booking agent or two with some stones. Our demented imaginations will do the rest.
June 16, 2003
The revelation of the night at Barbes was David Wechsler, who sings and plays in a group called Pinataland. Wechsler sounds a lot like John Linnell when he sings -- which certainly isn't a bad thing -- and like Linnell, he's interested in musical historiography. So we got a song sung from the perspective of a heartsick astronaut in the capsule (a much more human reinterpretation of Peter Schilling's "Major Tom" scenario), a song sung from the perspective of a flyer distributor dressed up like a taco, a song sung from the perspective of an enemy of P.T. Barnum, and a few of what Wechsler called "xenophobic love/travel narratives". His understated performances were tremendously communicative, and he handled complex and nuanced subject material with unerring clarity. For an uncomfortably long portion of his set, he performed with his back to the audience -- not his fault, the Barbes house piano is just set up that way. It hardly mattered, since the stories he told were so engrossing in their bizarre detail. I can't even imagine what Wechsler would sound like with a full group, but I'm looking forward to the Pinataland set at Fez on June 27.
Essentially, David Wechsler gave me exactly what I'm always asking of performing musicians -- a very communicative "storyteller"-type set replete with intelligent engagement and cultural specificity. In Wechsler's case, his commitment to historicity didn't render any of his material dry -- instead, it was hallucinatory and prismatic, and it's kept me thinking. I'm sure I'll have much more to say about Wechsler once I've listened to Pinataland's Songs for the Forgotten Future, Vol. 1.
June 9, 2003
We've reached the brutal final stages. J is in the process of remixing the ten tracks of the Shootout At The Sugar Factory for finished polish. I've selected a cover image and written the liner notes. We're both strung out on sound and ready to turn this motha out, to quote MC Hammer by way of James Brown. Art rock takes time, though, and while I hope to wrap for good by the end of this week, we've still got the mastering and layout to do. For once in my recording trajectory, I've taken the time to sweat the sonics, and if you're going to get started on that kind of thing, you may as well see it through. Everything on this record has been processed to hell and back. This is not an album for naturalists or luddites. It's a trip. Let's get this done, I'm ready to go.
May 28, 2003
Revivalism takes many forms. Some dudes are in love with the ambience and crunch of the guitar on mass-produced seventies rock albums, and go out of their way to replicate that sound. They're sonic classicists, and their music foregrounds its sonic features. Others believe that the classic rock era -- particularly Beatles-inspired groups -- paid an attention to songcraft and composition strategies that since been lost. They pore through books of Big Star sheet music looking for interesting chord shapes and progressions to borrow, and write clinically-perfect hooks into their songs. They're formal classicists, and their music foregrounds its formal features.
Jesse Blockton doesn't have time for any of that. He writes songs that cut straight to the spirit of the classic era. That's not to say the Vitamen ignore sonic and formal features -- particularly not on their somewhat polished new EP Mujer. But Blockton doesn't ever worry about sonic fidelity or the tyranny of the hook; he just presents his stories, figuring that if he can approximate the feel and narrative impact of the Lennon, Fagen and Grateful Dead albums he clearly loves, cultural memory will do the rest of the work for him. It's a great strategy, and not merely because it succeeds. It also has theoretical implications for the function of memory, the purpose of nostalgia, and the value of classicism itself.
On Fun, the jaw-dropping Vitamen debut, Blockton and essential second contributor Matt Hyams established themselves as penetrating and brutally honest chroniclers of urban male neuroses. Writing viciously humorous songs about bad sex, onanism, takeout Chinese, and pretty little secrets, the Vitamen mapped a constellation of embarrasing associations, petty failures and interrelated yearnings common enough to postgraduate ectomorphs. If this had been hardcore, or even rap music, the NC-17 subject matter wouldn't have been a cause for commentary. But by telling their outrageous stories over music most reminiscent of American Beauty or All Things Must Pass, the Vitamen confounded expectations and cut to the heart of the classic rock conundrum: people for whom this movement mattered did not grow up to become truckers, or motorcycle gang leaders, or kick-out-the-jams revolutionaries. They moved to the city and took Stupid Fucking Jobs, and while they still cherish their copies of The Dark Side Of The Moon as a point of reference, they no longer imagine themselves as heroic contenders against time, money, and brain damage. By casting the new concerns over the old signifiers The Vitamen squeezed out a record that was received as simultaneously poignant and hilarious. If Fun had been as hi-fi as its sources, it wouldn't have made the emotional resonance it did. It needed to sound like the sketchy memory of scrapped plans for glory, and it needed to salvage humor, self-awareness, and a kind of geeky defiance from that after-the-fact downscaling of expectations.
Mujer is not Fun revisited. For one thing, The Vitamen have cashiered most of their four-letter words (and cheekily responded to critics like me who called them potty-mouthed by including a "clean" version of "Stupid Fucking Job" as a bonus track). The maturing subject matter parallels an accompanying leap in formal songwriting quality and sonic fidelity. This is the best-sounding Vitamen recording I've heard yet, and while I never begrudged them their lo-fi approach, I am glad that the latest material has been handled with a certain amount of care. Because while we weren't looking (or maybe while we were), Blockton has metamorphosed into a superior writer, one who has developed compositional skills worthy of his sources.
"Stupid Fucking Job" and "You May Not Know" sound like Zappa Freak Out reinterpretations of Jerry Garcia and John Lennon, respectively, and while that ought to get your attention right there, they are also such well-built songs that you might not even bother to trace them back to their sources. The former boasts those characteristically off-kilter but welcoming Vitamen harmonies -- many courtesy of drummer Dave Rozner -- that have always served as the group's calling card, while the latter reiterates Fun's willingness to chase big arrangements into tight corners. But Blockton has acquired a new knack for tight song construction, and he now baits melodic hooks as sharp and penetrating as his lyrical ones. Part of Blockton's newly developed skill is his ability to blur the usually stark dividing line (at least among egghead rockers) between text and recorded performance. The first two tracks on Mujer fuse lyrical parallelisms with commensurate musical parallelisms until you feel like you're listening not to a marriage of words and tones, but a total music that flows directly from the rhythm and meaning of the phrases. Lennon used to do that, too.
The masterpiece here, though -- the song that really ought to get Blockton compared to his heroes -- is "Don't Cry", which shares some gravity with the Asia song of the same name, and some immediate vocal I.D. with the better-remembered G'n'R song. Blockton certainly doesn't have the pipes that Axl Rose does, but he compensates with a cracked, Fagenesque delivery that communicates great emotion, wry humour, and tremendous character. For Rose and John Wetton, "don't cry" was something to say to a girl, a command meant to stave off guilt feelings, a kind of preemptive exorcism of unwanted emotion. Blockton feints down that well-travelled road, but then takes the listener on a sharp and moving detour. In the hands of this writer, "Don't Cry" turns out to be a heartbreaking open letter to the narrator's mother. "You've got to find something you like/to start the next part of your life", the son sings tenderly, but with apparent knowledge of the perils of misdirection. The music builds from a catchy riff that's pure Vitamen through a glorious chorus to a barbed and earnest dedication on the outro that has to be heard to be believed. By applying the same brutal honesty to difficult relationships that he did to his examinations of his own behavior, Blockton has taken a step outside postgraduate solipsism, and toward rapproachment with his own surroundings.
It's fitting that for the sophisticated second record, The Vitamen attempt to reclaim some of the grandeur of classic rock, and make it their own. They're still not kidding themselves -- nobody in this milieu is born to be wild, and dreams of the open highway are still fettered by day-to-day difficulties that they're far too honest to sugarcoat. But while so much of Fun attempted to find causes for rueful celebration (or at least commiseration) within the dusty heart of resignation, Mujer is the sound of soulful wiseguys getting the balls to fight back. They've been through the disillusionment, they've learned that the rock and roll fantasies peddled during the classic era don't have much of a correlative in modern Manhattan, and they took us on that ride last time out. This time, they're surveying the world that's left to them, and devising strategies for moving through it; through the stupid jobs, broken promises, and dashed expectations. On Fun, they earned their self-absorption with their wit, and for Mujer, they earn their release from it with their skill. Sometimes the long and winding road is the trip from thinking about yourself to thinkking about others. One day you merge with that road without even knowing you did.
May 26, 2003
I tire of the rock thing. I'm not sure whether it's just me, but big guitar -- never a favorite of mine anyway -- is absolutely leaving me cold this season. Don't get me wrong; I've seen a bunch of good rock shows lately (yours included), but during this postwar malaise, I'm wondering what all the bombast is for.
In a sense, it's perfectly understandable. Performers follow applause, and applause follows the cultural mood. We're living through a particularly aggressive period, one where we're all inclined to cheer for wattage and muscle (backing the strong horse, as Osama Bin Laden succinctly put it), so a guy onstage with a Marshall and a bad attitude is going to get approbation. It's a tidal pull, and one we all feel. Even the members of the Beeps must sense it, and you've got to sympathize with their situation -- a fey bunch of Europeans and/or Europhiles playing distinctly European music at the most Europhobic moment any of us have ever lived through.
The Knitting Factory is the closest thing New York rockers have to The Hague, a little outpost of cool transatlantic chic in the un-rock neighborhood of Tribeca, and the Beeps looked relatively natural there. Maybe not 100% comfortable, sure -- but how could a group that sounds so much like Blue Wonder Power Milk-era Hooverphonic fit comfortably into a NYC indie rock scene dominated by big American guitars and even bigger American affrontery? The Beeps sport seven pieces: a conga player, a trombonist, a talented gremlin on the organ, bass and scratchy guitar, a jazzbo drummer, and a frontwoman/flutist who likes to run her vocals through spacy effects. If I couldn't make out the words in many of the songs, the cocktail lounge/spy movie collection of tropes was familiar enough to ground me. This is jetset (if not Jetset) music: James Bond and Swinging London, Geike Arnaert's brandy-stained Club Montepulciano, roulette wheels at Monaco, Europhilic sophistication, martini glasses, the whole brie-eating shebang.
They sold it. It would be inaccurate to say the crowd went wild, but a mook-like enthusiastic response isn't what The Beeps are after. They got an intellectual, appreciative reception, the kind that suggested attentive listening. It helped that the instrumentalists were all pretty ace. The frontwoman didn't articulate clearly enough for me, and I couldn't follow her narratives, but at least one song was about Paterson (a few of the Beeps are Europeans by way of Hudson County, I am told), so they win points there. I'm looking forward to my next opportunity to engage with their champagne-sipping, artful, shadow-of-the-Louvre project.
It's a huge mischaracterization to say that New York used to be crowded with bands like this -- for one thing, the musicianship in The Beeps is a good deal better than the crapola you used to get during the dreaded lounge revival -- but it is fair to say that during the Clinton years a nice percentage of city artists shared their multicultural aspirations. All the faux-globetrotting and NYLONosity was annoying for sure, but it wasn't anywhere near as destructive as the current fiction that NYC is Detroit. It isn't. We're supposed to be the nation's first line of defense against xenophobia, and it's about time our local cultural production regained some of its cosmopolitan sophistication.
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Here's an archive of old news posts, for those of you who like old news (I know I do).
You have this strange effect on me, and I like it.
