First off, apologies on having left you dear readers hanging for the duration, behind such a depressing bit of news. Since that last missive, though, it was brought to my ever anxious interest that when one is beset with the Blues, a thorough house cleaning does more than a bit of good.
Factoring in one of the many tools for virtue or vice at the artist’s disposal, namely Procrastination, there’s this teetering pile of books, CD’s and vids that has taken to skyscraping up the far wall of my Geek Lair. One that has been well overdue for what my mom used to call ‘retting out.’ So with pen and pad in one hand, broom and dustpan in the other, it is now that we dutifully wade in with a gratuitous yell of “CHAAARGE!”
So how’s about a few books for starters? British writer Mark Hodkinson’s debut novel The Last Mad Surge Of Youth (Pomona Books), for instance, manages to finesse a difficult deed. Its focus is the career of Killing Stars, a British post-Punk group of the early 80’s, from DIY, John Peel-fixated, cassette-and-Xerox-fanzine origins to a meager blip of commercial success mid-decade.
Flash forward to The Oughts: Killing Stars front man John Barrett is coping poorly with a rapidly crumbling solo career, alienated from family and dulled by drink. Eventually, Barrett manages to earn an extra 15 of media attention, with his booze-fueled truth attack on a daytime TV talk show. His teenage friend and band-mate Carey, now a reporter for a local daily, reconnects to help his old pal write a cash-in memoir. Most of the book ping-pongs from the unfortunate reality of Carey and Barrett’s present state, in which reopened wounds to their friendship figure highly, to the musical aspirations and social activism of their earlier lives.
It’s never easy, when it comes to novels about Rock, to vividly convey the enthusiasm, hope and intent being young and anywhere near a mike or guitar can generate. Many such books by those who’ve tried end up reading like the product of a slumming, or worse, uninformed author. This book clearly comes from a place of memory still fresh in Hodkinson’s mind (and his potential reading public, with luck), and is all the better for that knowledge. A sharp read.
One of my favorite groups around during the early 80’s was Liverpool’s Teardrop Explodes. It was as much for their music as for their front man Julian Cope, particularly his evident enthusiasm for the music that inspired him, and the generosity with which he shared those insights. The way he would rave at anyone who’d listen (and if lucky, report about it in the UK music press) about music quite out of favor then: 60’s dirtbag garage and unhinged psych, 70’s German progressive primitives and, above all, Scott Walker.
My admiration for the awesome vocal talent and willful, maverick career trajectory of Scott Walker knows few bounds; it’s certainly gratifying that the increased attention paid him over the years has resulted in the great 30 Century Man documentary, and more recently, a new book by Anthony Reynolds, The Impossible Dream: The Story of Scott Walker and The Walker Brothers (Jawbone Press).
There’s been a number of books on Mr. Engel written, some more concerned with his artistic temperament, perceived reclusive nature, and the romanticizing of those elements of Scott than about the music itself. Happily, Reynolds devotes as much time to cut-by-cut breakdowns of those amazing records, on his own and with the Walker Brothers, as he does the career high and lowlights.
And there’s much of both to behold in these pages: tracing as it does these three journeyman L.A. musicians’ path to London, to achieve mega-success there with abiding 60’s popstar looks and the moody bombast of smash hits like “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore.” This unexpectedly coinciding with Scott Walker’s increasing reluctance to play the fame game, and a budding imperative to expand his creative horizons. Reynolds plainly lays it out that this was manifest even before his astonishing quartet of solo albums, on certain Walker Brothers album tracks and B-sides like “Mrs. Murphy” and the proto-Goth, church organ-dominated “Archangel” (the CD anthol After The Lights Go Out: ‘65-’67 provides a near-perfect overview).
All leading to the Walkers’ brief and reluctant reconvening in the 70’s, getting them back in the charts but also requiring the indignity of playing to the nostalgia circuit (the book’s opening chapter depicts a Walkers gig from this time in disheartening detail). Which makes their parting shot all the more remarkable: the Bowie/Eno-inspired Nite Flights LP from 1978.
Its songs portioned out among the three with varying results, Scott’s contribs at least still sound fantastic in their sense of sonic risk, evident in songs like “The Electrician.” Nite Flights enabled Scott to continue pursuing his muse, as he has done to this day with unusual, almost modern classical albums like The Drift.
Reynolds ably covers the Walkers waterfront within these pages, and it makes for a definitive account of the trek of a unique, elevating Pop artist.
Speaking of Elevation, two excellent recent DVD’s also came through. Both are about the history of somewhat influential creative communities, and while separated by two decades, both are examined in a surprisingly similar, homegrown cinematic fashion.
Scott Conn’s Dirt Road To Psychedelia documents the music and arts scene in Austin, Texas during the Sixties. From its seeds in landlocked Beatnik festivities around the city’s collegiate ‘ghetto’ (attended by a young Janis Joplin and future underground comic artists Gilbert Shelton and Jack Jackson), Austin managed to resist the Draconian attentions of the local police to conceive a species of psychedelic art as uniquely Texan as the cactus and mushrooms that assuredly fueled many of its prime movers.
As one might suspect, Roky Erickson and cohorts figure highly (sorry) in the recollections of the musicians, artists and local fans interviewed. Equal attention is accorded, however, to groups that also soundtracked the Texas psych experience, like the Conqueroo and Shiva’s Headband (led by classical violinist Spencer Peskin). Just as enlightening are the memories of Austin’s original hippie dancehall, the Vulcan Gas Company, including those of its resident light show wiz, David Martinez (who gleefully demonstrates his various techniques for the filmmakers). Altogether, much like the Technicolor Dream docupic written about previously, an overdue examination of a 60’s milieu all too often overlooked.
Similarly overlooked, perhaps, was the scene that gravitated in the late 80’s around a bar in San Francisco, the Chatterbox on Valencia Street. Back in those days, I recall a particular term starting to gain some popularity in my East Coast circles of townie acquaintance, known by the initials FSU, which for the sake of G-rated parlance translates here as ‘foul stuff up.’ Well, even though separated by three thousand miles, watching Alfie Kulzick’s funky, lively doc., Chatterbox: Biography Of A Bar, I clearly suss many Mission denizens were intimately familiar with that concept as well.
No getting around it: in its brief existence, the Chatterbox – named in salute to, and literally blessed in paint by, Mr. Johnny Thunders – was a classic rock and roll dive bar. What’s more, its patrons and the groups that played there had no problem diving into and swallowing more than a few mouthfuls of its vibe: cheap drinks, cheaper drugs, and nasty, trashy hard rock: live, loud and insolent. The Groups That Would Not Be Guns’n’Roses (not that some couldn’t have been, and more’s the pity given what transpired).
Miraculously, someone had the foresight to videotape many sets at the Chatterbox, and the documentary is peppered and energized by footage of a boatload of Punk and Glam mutations prowling the Mission in those days: Jackson Saints, the Dwarves, the SF Dogs, White Trash Debutantes, Short Dogs Grow, Touch Me Hooker and Osgood Slaughter to name a few, along with frequent outta-towners like L.A.’s horror-panto mob Haunted Garage.
More recent interview footage with those bands, and fans that lived to tell, are informal, colorful and at times gleefully explicit (take a bow, Blag Dahlia). It really gives even those not around then (guilty!) a feel for a time in City subculture before, as local poet/performer Bucky Sinister observes in his book Get Up, “graphic designers and dot-commers flooded in, rents rose, and the price of burritos went up two dollars.” Social history with a backbeat: always a welcome thing.
Meantime, while there’s no time like the present, we regrets to say we’ve no time in the present for wading thru the heap of music discs hovering overhead. Second time around, then, as Blue Cheer would say.
MLH
10-10-09
