I'm doing a book tour of southern California in mid-February. I'll be joined by Todd Taylor (Razorcake), the Studds Terkel of punk rock and Matt Hart, the Sideshow Bob of punk rock. I've been labeled the Bob Newhart of punk rock. Good stories told well. Even if the Misfits reference doesn't work for you.
- Mike Faloon
Monday, February 14 Calimucho HQ 384 W. 15th St.(Go around the back of the big blue house) San Pedro, 90731
Tuesday, February 15 8:00 p.m. 12th & G Warehouse 13390 12th St. Chino, 91710 with Matt Hart
Wednesday, February16 8:00 p.m. Public Address (Highland Park) 1268 N. Ave 50 Los Angeles, CA with Matt Hart
Thursday, February 17 7:30 p.m. CSU Channel Islands Aliso Hall, Room 150 with Johnny Tsaur
Friday, February 18 8:00 p.m. Stories Books 1716 West Sunset Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90026 (Echo Park)
Saturday, February 19 1:00 - 4:00 p.m. San Diego Zine Workshop The Ink Spot Art Center Lofts 710 13th Street, Studio 210 San Diego, CA 92101
There’s a line in Edward Abbey’s 1988 novel, The Fool’s Progress, when Henry Lightcap, the novel’s cranky protagonist attempts to sum up the confusing condition of the modern American male in one succinct, if harsh, sentence: “They’re the new breed…Not exactly men, not exactly women, but something in between they call guys.” Twenty years later, Benjamin Percy plays with this question is his novel The Wilding, by placing a suburban, professional dad back in the wilderness he explored as a kid, just before it’s logged for development. The novel centers around a weekend camping trip Justin Caves takes with his father and young son, Graham, to a place called Echo Canyon. “Guy time,” Justin calls it when talking about the trip to his son, many pages before the trip goes horribly wrong. When Graham asks Justin to define the term he says, “You know what I mean. Hunting. Fishing. Camping. Hanging…Stepping outside your comfort zone and challenging yourself. Becoming a man.”
Justin is a 42 year-old high school English teacher living in Bend, Oregon—a place caught up in the wave of “progress” that reveals itself through new retail and housing developments at the expense of the wilderness just outside of town. His marriage is floundering. His wife refers to him as an idiot; his father calls him a “puss”. His only hope at finding any respect when we meet him is in his bookish, slight, twelve year-old son, Graham, whose allegiances start to turn the minute his grandfather hands him his first hunting rifle.
The trip is a last chance to visit their favorite camping grounds before the place is cleared for a new housing development. The heart-breaking irony is that Justin’s father’s has agreed to serve as the builder of the log homes that will go up in this new development, if only to hold on to the business he will surely lose if the contract goes to someone else. This is the new wilderness, too, Percy seems to be saying, that frightening place where you abandon your most cherished principles for financial security.
Percy scatters his story with markers that remind us of this shifting landscape of American manhood: Bonanza’s on the TV at a gas station; Justin whistles that banjo line from Deliverance. Justin is the kind of guy — and he is in some ways one of Lightcap’s “guys” — who grew up feeling ambivalent about the stereotypical expectations of men. He longs for the comforts of home while also reveling in the harsh beauty of the canyon and the river. He marvels at how comfortable his son is with a rifle while remembering how awkward he was with it at his age. When he and his father find a corpse at their old camping ground Justin literally runs while his father shrugs it off.
There are a couple of subplots that didn’t quite hit their marks: Justin’s disillusioned wife never quite acts out the way she seems to want to. There’s a side story about a man named Brian, a wounded Iraq vet who dresses up in a homemade bear suit constructed form the skins of animals he trapped himself runs the risk of being so odd it overshadows the very real panic and alienation he feels.
Where Percy’s most successful is in describing the landscape right down to the berry skins in the scat. It’s all beautiful and frightening and humbling. We’re on those trails, too, sharing that sense of awe as three generations of Caves stand at the bank of a river, or the uneasiness they feel as they take notice of the vicious claw marks on a tree left by the grizzly bear that’s lurking in the woods. When Justin and his father return to the place years later, at the development’s opening, he remembers a tree that used to stand in the place that is now a golf course. The wilderness has been tamed and reappointed for posterity and optimum financial return. It’s a tragedy and yet, after the picturesque terror Percy’s delivered to us prior to that moment, it’s also a relief.
5. Zolar X Before punk and metal were popular, long before elaborate stage shows were the norm on the sunset strip, Zolar X were performing their own version of proto-punk/glam/art rock to increasingly bewildered audiences. It wasn’t just that they dressed as aliens and spoke their own invented language onstage, but they did it offstage as well! Lead singer Zory Zenith is in jail for a particularly ugly domestic dispute, but the band still tours with original guitarist Ygar Yggrist. Alternative Tentacles put out a well thought out collection of their early work a few years ago, proving even Jello Biafra appreciated their outer-space vibe.
4. Judge Dread Not to be confused with the comic book character, Judge Dread, a portly ex-bar bouncer form England was the number two selling reggae singer in England during the seventies (a close second to Bob Marley). While Dread was actually more ska/mixed with English dance hall bawdy humor (guess what the song “Big Nine” was about?), Dread was actually an accomplished toaster back when that counted in reggae. While some of his stuff comes off silly now, most of it wouldn’t be out of place on British TV to this day. Think “Benny Hill” meets Peter Tosh. Sadly, the heavyset Dread died of a heart attack on stage (a story goes that his ambulance broke down, and when his skinheads fans tried to push it, they wee dispersed by police who thought they were rioting) but his collected Trojan singles are still essential for any reggae fan.
3. Klaus Nomi Klaus was either from Germany, or possibly Mars, no one really knew for sure. He is best known as a stylistically fascinating example of early new wave, but in reality this opera trained singer, (bad haircut aside) had one of he most fascinating vocal ranges in modern rock putting even Freddie Mercury to shame. He was an early aids causality, and considered too strange during his time to make an impact but had he lived he might be as fondly regarded by nostalgia buffs as Queen is today.
2. Be-Bop Deluxe And speaking of early glam, Be-Bop Deluxe was the brainchild of guitar hero Bill Nelson. Although the band never had a stable line-up an were often taken as some kind of glam parody (they did have a song called “Jet Silver and the Dolls from Venus”) they were actually an insanely amazing mixture of early Crimson style prog rock mixed with early Bowie. Nelson eventually turned to ambient music, but on early records like Axe Victim demonstrates that he was the lost guitar hero of the seventies.
1. Jobriath Jobriath was essentially an over-hyped and notorious failure. He was designed to be a record company version of Bowie and as a bonus; he was openly gay in the early seventies when that was essentially career suicide. (Even Sir Elton said he was “bi” back then.) But Jobriath was actually far more than the American Bowie; he wrote insanely catchy blends of early glam and cabaret songs that highlighted his amazing rage. After two records flopped he was dropped by the record company and faded into obscurity, dying of aids at the Chelsea hotel in 1983. For anyone that loves early Bowie, Be-Bop Deluxe glam or Magnetic Fields, Jobriath is a must have. Pick up the compilation Lonely Planet Boy, or his recently re-issued two records.
OK, in honor of the New Year I thought instead of listing my top ten shows this year (I may break down and do it later though) I’d list some bands that (to me) are criminally underrated. So here are my top ten bands/artists that you should support now (even though most are either dead or inactive, but hey, their grandkids need to eat, right?)
Bands you should be listening to, right now!!!!
10. The Six and Violence One of the great joys of the NYC hardcore scene in the late eighties/early nineties was this six man punk band that played songs about golf (pro) and guidos (con). They had two lead singers and two drummers, one of who only played cymbals and the other who played with only drums, including a mounted bass drum. The Six and Violence sadly predated much worse bands like 311 who seem to lack a sense of humor. Plus, would 311 get Jethro Tull front man Ian Anderson to play flute on two tracks? I think not.
9. Serge Gainsbourg OK, every hipster in Williamsburg worth his skinny jeans knows the bard of sixties Franco-pop, but were they paying attention to his REALLY bizarre later years when he went reggae? Long before a lot of “crossover” records, Serge knew he would need some help, enlisting the killer rhythm section of Sly and Robbie to work with him, and infuriating the French public with a reggae version of the Marseille. Serge proved that toward the end of his life, a third, or fourth act was still possible.
8. Thor John Mikl Thor, a former “Mr. Canada” was a muscle bound comic book type hero (he did produce his own comic books) who was also a great late period glam and later metal performer. OK, his songs sound ridiculous, and they often were, (“When Gods Collide,” “Anger (is my middle name)”) but they were also catchy as well and goofy fun. Thor also used his muscular body as part of the stage show, bending a steel beam in his teeth and blowing up a hot water bottle on stage! He was relegated to c-level horror films for years, until coming back with a killer record (reminiscent of early Sweet) Thor Against the World in 2006. To best experience Thor, pick up the video collection, An-thor-ology.
7. Bruce Haack Almost forgotten, even amongst electronic music aficionados, Haack was a more dance-oriented version of Terry Riley’s or Lamonte Young’s trance work mixed with some Krautrock. He was also one of the early users of the vocoder (he built his own which he called “Farad” before Wendy Carlos) as well, but we’ll forgive him for anticipating autotune. A marginal fixture even in electronic music circles, he ended up his unlikely career with a minor disco hit, with “Party Machine” on Def Jam!
6. The Monks What would be more natural for a bunch of US soldiers stationed in Germany during he early sixties then to dress as monks (complete with tonsures) and play dramatically raw garage rock protesting the war in Vietnam before it had really even started? Well, the Monks, who billed themselves as the “anti-Beatles”, were a perplexing mixture. Their work was largely forgotten until a recent re-release and book on them. One of the unsung heroes of proto-punk and as raw as the Stooges, albeit with less finesse.
In a few days, Go Metric correspondent Joe Evans III will embark on a two part, nearly month long tour. Part One: Playing music as part of The Chris Gethard Show Cross Country Adventure, as a bunch of comedians travel the country from New York to Los Angeles in an RV that’s not big enough to hold all of them. Part Two: Attempting to make punk rockers laugh with his weird yet true stories from his own life.
We’ll have updates from Joe as often as he can send them in, but it’s still not the same thing as seeing it live in person.
It’s a weird coincidence that I finished reading Gary Shtyengart’s Super Sad True Love Story on the same day that six people were killed and 13 others were wounded in Tucson, Arizona. It’s also a weird coincidence that I found out about the shooting through Twitter. It’s not such a weird coincidence that I’ve been scanning tweets and clicking links for three days. I jump from one post to the next, experiencing little flickers of emotion in the course of my reading — horror, outrage, despair, confusion — and have this vague sense of a shared experience while still sitting alone, in silence, in my house.
Strange too, that I’m writing so seriously about a novel that made me laugh out loud for the first 280 pages, but comedy is serious business. In Shtyengart’s novel, Lenny Abramov and his girlfriend, Eunice Park, navigate a world reduced to random statistics and a tidal wave of data. Try not to see yourself in his descriptions of High or Low Net Worth Individuals, credit scores flashing on screens as characters walk down the street. Try to forget how much you may be like these people who are obsessed with their various rankings that change from minute to minute, depending on where they are and who they’re with. How many people follow you on Twitter?
No, skip that; don’t try to forget anything. Just laugh at it while it’s still funny, because this is Shtyengart’s point: gently implicating us in the confusion. After all, in his essay “Only Disconnect,” published last summer in the New York Times Book Review, he places himself squarely in the data stream as he tells the story of how he lost himself in his iPhone and his attempts to live beyond that tiny screen again. That same struggle made me wonder if I should write this this week; I wondered if I wanted to contribute to the stream of ideas — at this point a raging river — many half-formed. Certainly mine are. Then I thought it over and decided I should just go with it, accept my place in history. I’m just as much a character in this as anyone else.
What the novel becomes is a sort of blueprint for what’s been happening these last few days in response to the unfathomable events of last Saturday, this creation of a massive collection of information and opinion that must be sorted through, but ultimately never can be. Behind all the writing and tweeting and posting and talking are people, some of them gone, some of them wounded in ways most of us will never comprehend. All the writing in the world will never quite pin it down. By the way, what were we laughing about on Friday — can anyone remember?
In the novel, when New York is invaded by Venezuela, there’s a transition where the humor and the horror overlap and awkwardly coexist until life settles down, harder than it was before. Lenny and Eunice try to find their way back to each other, but they have other priorities now, more serious responsibilities than shopping for see-through jeans. Last Saturday afternoon I watched the postings and the retweets, the 140-character commentary, the misinformation about whether Gabrielle Giffords had survived. I also still caught the sex jokes, the recipe links, and the happy birthday wishes that also occur both on my computer and in real life as tragedies unfold. There were those few hours where it felt wrong to find anything funny.
Then on Sunday Facebook told me one of my friends had become a fan of the Clarence Dupnik Is My Hero group. Yes, I thought. Of course. Click here and something has been done. Press this and show that you felt something, or just to show that you exist. Those Twitter stars, Tumblr hearts and Facebook Fonzie thumbs provide us an electronic version of a reassuring nod, a comforting hand on a shoulder. A faint but hopeful sign of life.
April 9, 1969: King Crimson makes its live debut in London's Hyde Park, supporting the Rolling Stones in front of 650,000 people.
December 4, 2010: Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp performs Soundscapes in an upscale Manhattan mall atrium. The guy sitting next to me reads Keith Richards' autobiography Life.
Amidst Christmas decorations, bedazzled palm trees, and a bevy of high-end shops, Fripp played Soundscapes, alone with a Les Paul and six-foot high sampling rig, in four free performances at the World Financial Center's Winter Garden in lower Manhattan. The improvised piece, which sponsor station WNYC's John Schaefer called a “response to a place and time and audience,” is a digital age extension of Frippertronics, Fripp's groundbreaking ambient experiments with interconnected tape machines.
Ambient music is defined not by gurgling synths, but by the location in which it is performed, something Brian Eno (a frequent Fripp collaborator, most notably on No Pussyfooting, the 1973 album that introduced Frippertonics) suggested in his groundbreaking ambient works like Music for Airports. Having recently been blown away by a gorgeous Daniel Lanois (another Eno collaborator) pedal steel solo in a fully-lit Barnes and Noble, I'm probably the last one who should question venue integrity. Whether Fripp's decision to perform in this setting was subversive or financial is unclear, though I suspect it's likely a bit of both.
At a Saturday lunch-hour performance, the diminutive British guitarist entered to rapturous applause from a seated crowd of a few hundred fans, as more than a few bewildered shoppers and tourists looked on. Fripp bowed formally at center, stage left, and stage right before taking a seat and triggering 45+ minutes of vaguely sacred sounding, reverb-laden ambient music, peppered with bursts of more traditional soloing. The sonic backdrop is the din of the atrium: crying babies, humming escalators, the low-grade throb that pervades all modern commercial spaces. A single strum triggered a wash of stringy synths and a piano-eque arpeggios, both evidence of Fripp's recent interest in church music. After ten minutes, Fripp dug into a traditional “rock guitar solo,” though this one is less “20th Century Schizoid Man,” more soundtrack to a Michael Mann movie you've been meaning to rent. You know, the one about drug dealers.
After ten minutes of near silence with only the barest of looped noodles, Fripp re-investigated the single-note synth swells and with that a new set of layered sounds emerged. Flicking the controls of his of samplers and pivoting occasionally to tap foot pedals, Fripp didn't so much react to the sound of the space as dictate the audience's reaction to it: for some it was rapt attention, for others a mildly annoying drone interrupting their phone conversation en route to Banana Republic. Some, like a stiff-brimmed Yankees hat wearing teen riding down one of the two escalators that buffeted the stage, were oblivious to any music, demonstrating the modern ability to tune out and multi-task.
To anyone who has followed Fripp's career such juxtapositions are nothing new. Take, for instance, his foray in 80's hair metal, Fripp Winger; or his venture with Starbucks, the Frippuccino. (Seriously, the Daryl Hall solo album Sacred Songs which Fripp produced is a classic; or check out the bowling alley scene in Vincent Gallo's Buffalo ‘66, which is set King Crimson's beautiful “Moonchild.”)
As Soundscapes slowly trickled to its conclusion, Fripp once again bowed with formality. I couldn't help but wonder if he heard Kanye West's new track “Power,” which samples “Schizoid Man,” leaking from one of the nearby store's sound systems. Now, that would be ambient music.
1. Veteran SoCal socio-musical historian Domenic Priore, sitting alongside a tiki totem beneath a strategically placed orange branch, more than ably launches our story over a wealth of Eastmancolor'd freeway and beach footage, drawing, as only he can, that all-important connection from Gidget to Dick Dale all the way to teenage Brian's Hawthorne, California music room.
2. We see some very cool vintage Four Freshmen footage, and the undeniable influence that quartet's equally cool jazz vocal stylings had on Brian and his Boys, explained to us by none other than First Lady of the Wilsonian Bass Guitar, Carol Kaye.
3. Next, back-to-back clips of Chuck Berry serenading “Sweet Little Sixteen” at The TAMI Show and the young B. Boys themselves belting out their just-released “Surfin' USA” in full deck-swabbing gear illustrate, as thousands of words over the years have til now failed to, why CHUCK'S name is the one listed as composer of the latter hit.
4. Similarly, Inside The Music of Brian Wilson author Prof. Philip Lambert takes to the piano to juxtapose Phil Spector's “Be My Baby” with Brian's equally ingenious “answer” song “Don't Worry, Baby” …as Phil's former Wrecking Crewman (and Brian's drummer of choice) Hal Blaine gets a little Prison Wall of Sound joke in at his ol' boss' everlasting expense.
5. We get to hear lots of fly-on-the-acoustic-tile recording studio chatter, stretching all the way back to the making of that very first Beach Boy record “Surfin'” itself. Not to mention, I'm afraid, a terrifying example of father / manager / producer [sic!] Murry “I'm a Genius Too” Wilson putting the psychological screws into Brian's brain at the infamous “Help Me, Rhonda” vocal session (which ended at least one person's career).
6. Why, we even get to hear Winterreise by Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe used in the very same sentence as Pet Sounds !
7. Three Dog Night tripper Danny Hutton, however, has an even better word for this all: “Marijuana!!”
8. Original Beach Boy David Marks talks about all the treble Capitol Records liked to put on the band's Fender guitars, while current Beach Boy Bruce Johnston talks about all the trouble Capitol Records liked to put Brian Wilson through whenever he dared stray from his original musical sun-n-fun formula.
9. Which reminds me: Brian's most note-worthy by far collaborator Van Dyke Parks is shown in the old Tower Records parking lot off Sunset Strip circa 1976 in an attempt to explain why Mike Love never could get a lyric such as “Over and over the crow flies uncover the cornfield” in to his head, let alone out of his mouth.
10. And, as if the Seventies weren't cruel enough already to all concerned, we end with lifelong Beach Boy friend, confidante, and concert promoter Fred Vail still, forty years later, shedding a righteous tear recalling how he failed to get the band's “Add Some Music To Your Day” single added to a powerful East Coast radio station playlist back in the daze because, he was told, “The Beach Boys aren't hip anymore.”
Needless to say said program director – not to mention his station (and Top 40 radio in general) – is long long gone, Fred for one survives to tell this and many other poignant Beach Boy tales and, of this there can be NO doubt, Brian Wilson's magical melodies are poised to enter their second half-century of faithful, never disappointing service to one and all.
This magnificent 190-minute, two-DVD package, and the fine cast of musicians, historians, and Wilson pals and players therein, do a most remarkable job in explaining to us exactly why. It should indeed be considered Required Viewing by all who still love to add good vibes to their days.
