La Flor de Mal

There are differing opinions on the definition of true art (Jello Biafra once said words to the effect that anyone not using art as a weapon is not an artist), but speaking as someone who is reasonably well-rounded – I count Beethoven, Bach, Howlin’ Wolf, and Captain Sensible amongst my Gods – I can tell you that Reel Ten by The Plugz, the song played during the final moments of Alex Cox’ Repo Man, is one of the finest three minutes of music in the history of humankind.

You got that – HUMANKIND. In the history of THE WHOLE EARTH. Yup yup, all arrogant, holier-than-thou classical snobs and music nerds of the rock'n'roll variety are rolling their eyes, lamenting the day that the interweb gave everyone – even twits like I – a forum for spewing forth ignorant, clueless drivel. Good; we've had hundreds of years of only having you creeps to listen to, so dig this: it ain’t Beethoven’s 7^th, but it moves me as much as Beethoven’s 7^th, so what’s the diff? Reel Ten is a benevolent force of nature; it stops evil in its tracks, causing it to wither and die. It cuts the feet off the myriad mundane headaches of everyday life as effectively as it crushes the larger problems into fine dust. It’s a clear, achingly beautiful day with a full moon at dusk, a starlit night full of possibilities; it’s heroin without the addiction, a grand, grand buzz without the hangover or dehydration. It gives me faith in humanity, a giddy sense of I Can Do Anything, a love of men and women, not as conniving demagogues, but as creative teachers helping us understand and appreciate life for the gift it is. It makes me marvel at my good luck that I was born at all, on the one beautiful planet in a solar system otherwise devoid of life. It’s enough to bring me back. In a world where the great ignorant masses accuse the president of being a socialist, where muslim clerics find cause and effect between promiscuity and earthquakes, where wackjobs shriek hysterically for their right to carry loaded guns into restaurants, where the unspeakable horror and carnage of war are simply a means to an end, or sometimes an end themselves-

This song, every time its haunting opening notes ooze through my speakers, rescues me from the darkness, a giant hand from Los Angeles pulling me back from that dark place where the darkness gets so thick that, finally, you may not be able to find your way out.

If you aren’t hip to The Plugz, or Steve Medina Hufsteter, or The Quick, or Tito Larriva, or Tito and Tarantula, you ain’t doing yourself any favors. Tito and Steve had their fingers in multiple pies back in the halcyon days of the L.A. punk scene, and their talent was so huge they quickly grew out of that scene and fused traditional Mexican sounds with their rock’n’roll roots.  But it was their collaboration on Reel Ten for Repo Man that – for me, anyway – will forever be the most brilliant thing they ever did; a once-in-a-lifetime shot where they delivered beyond all expectations, with such conviction and grace that they’ll always have at least one chump out there who is grateful. And thankful.

All the Things I Never Asked For

Like the French, I believe that if an artist only manages to connect once in his or her life time - a painter with one good painting, a writer with one good novel - it was still worth it. It still means something. There is no shame in it, no need for excuses from the artist, or rancor from the critics. Achieving true beauty only once in your lifetime is a hell of a lot more than the vast majority of half-wits populating the planet can lay claim to.

At a dark time in life around 1990, I was walking along the boardwalk at Venice Beach, CA, wondering what the hell it was all for, anyway; the water, the birds, the people, the stars at night... It all seemed pretty cheap. The usual booths with overpriced towels, shirts, nick-nacks, etc approached and disappeared as I walked, but then something caught my ear. It came from a booth where a british woman sold overpriced jackets and pants. It was a song with only three chords, and it seemed like it was over inside of two minutes. There was a lot of feedback, a wall-of-sound production job, and a soothing female voice that made me forget what I was even brooding about. I asked the British woman who it was, and she told me it was The Primitives. "What album are you listening to...?" She didn't even know. She grabbed it from a stack of CDs near her boom box, and read straight from the cover: "The name of this album is Lovely."

I went back to the house where I lived in Northridge, scraped some cash together, and bought Lovely by The Primitives at Aaron's, then on Melrose. I remembered the song I heard on the beach: a sped-up 1-4-5 progression, sort of like Blitzkrieg Bop on speed. I listened to the first track, Crash. Cute, but not it. I listened to ten seconds of the next track, Spacehead; crappy song. Not it. Ten seconds of the third song, Carry Me Home. Nothing. The sixth song, Dreamwalk Baby, sounded somewhat similar, but still not it. Finally I got to the tenth song, starting with a four-count that sounded more like the drummer was hitting the stick on the side of a tom tom, than hitting the sticks together. It started full-throttle in G flat, jumped to C flat, and then the verse kicked in in D flat; pretty unorthodox stuff for a band that sounded, for the first nine songs, like a bubblegum outfit. Here it was - THE SONG I HEARD ON THE BEACH. It was the darkest song on an album of poppy stuff, called Stop Killing Me. It clocked in at 2.05, lived up to the band's name, and had the singer telling her unnamed antagonist to "keep away from me, cuz your KILLING me..." I listened to it over and over for weeks.

The Primitives were part of the fortunately short-lived "Blonde" movement in the late 80s/early 90s, that also gave us the forgettable Darling Buds and Transvision Vamp. It was the kind of thing that could only have come from England; a series of poppy bands fronted by cute, dyed-blonde singers who were backed by black-haired, skinny English dudes. If this kind of thing wasn't your cup of tea, I don't blame you. The Blondes didn't change or shape the face of popular music, and there wasn't much to differentiate one band from the next. It was, at its best, pretty lightweight stuff. And it all started sounding the same very, very quickly.

Lovely, however, was different. The Primitives went on to release two more studio albums, Pure and Galore, and both were boring, two-dimensional affairs. But with Lovely they connected, and for one glorious moment in their existence, left everyone else in the dust: 15 songs, seven of which are A-list, four of which are decent filler. Only four fall flat. Not a bad ratio, I reckon. You can compare such output with that of The Kinks or The Beatles and be arrogantly unimpressed, but it's an inherently unfair comparison. Maybe 2% of all the bands there ever were had runs like Face to Face through Lola vs. Powerman and the Moneygoround. Guys like Ray Davies make the rounds once every 30 years.

The truth of the matter is, most bands can't even muster an EP's worth of good music, much less an entire album or a fucking career. Stop Killing Me is one for the ages, tho; a statement of intent, a signature that will survive most of the truly drab, monotonous bullshit music that has been diminishing my soul for the last 15 years. If it had been the only cool thing The Primitives ever did, I would happily defend them. As it is, Lovely stands up all these years later, a solid batch of songs by a band that rose above their station for one year in 1988 and left their mark. Its beauty is enough. I don't need anything more from them, and they don't owe us anything else.

Some Thoughts on a Saturday with Shinerbock

The commentaries John Carpenter tapes for his DVDs are object lessons in how commentaries should always go. He always tells you where a certain scene was filmed – very cool shit for obsessives like me who live for location shots in Los Angeles – and he always talks about the actors onscreen, how they got the part, and what happened with them while filming. You know, interesting stuff. For truly appallingly awful DVD commentaries, check out Top Secret or any of the Star Trek movies. Holy FUCK. John Carpenter hasn’t made a decent film in over 20 years, but god bless ‘em for his commentaries.





Coleen Gray is one of the most beautiful actresses of all time. Like Jean Harlow, she had that innocent, girl-next-door quality, but her incandescent beauty makes any film she's in worth your time. I pride myself on my independence, but Christ, if Coleen Gray told me to jump, my only question would be, how high? Hence my regularly placing Nightmare Alley in my DVD player. The Phantom Planet should be one of those pieces of crap where you think, shit, I’ll never get those 80 minutes back, but instead, because of Coleen Gray, you wish it was 240 more minutes. And despite what judgemental, snobbish movie critics everywhere say, The Leech Woman friggin’ rules, baby. Get with the program, folks.


I was driving the 900 miles back from Los Angeles lately, having finally achieved some calm, listening to a Who mix I’d made. Despite its heavy-handedness, I had thrown Imagine a Man into the mix for shits and giggles. It's pretty far from what I consider top-notch Who, but when you’re driving through the desert on a clear day, the guitar hooks you in, and that second verse shines blindingly, poetically, and profoundly. (“Imagine events,
 that occur everyday, 
like a shooting or raping, or a simple act of deceit... 

Imagine a past 
that you wish you had lived,
 full of heroes and villains and fools”). Thanks, Pete.



Lester Bangs on the albums that turned him onto music as a boy: “All these were milestones, each one fried my brain a little further, especially the experience of the first few listenings to a record so total, so mind-twisting, that you authentically can say you’ll never be quite the same again… They’re events you remember all your life, like your first real orgasm. And the whole purpose of the absurd, mechanically persistent involvement with recorded music is the pursuit of that priceless moment. So it’s not exactly that records might unhinge the mind, but rather that if anything is going to drive you up the wall it might as well be a record. Because the best music is strong and guides and cleanses and is life itself.” The entire Bible doesn’t make as much sense to me as those 116 words.

Keeping It Interesting

A little less than seven years before he found himself standing in front of a burning barn in Virginia, fatally shooting John Wilkes Booth in the neck, Boston Corbett cut his own balls off with a pair of scissors in Boston, Massachusetts.

Corbett's real name was Thomas, and he moved from New York to Boston after his wife died in childbirth. After finding Jesus in Boston, he changed his first name in honor of his newfound fundamentalist hysteria.

On the 16th of July, 1858, in order to resist the daily temptations of Boston's ladies of the night, Corbett sliced the bottom of his scrotum open, pulled his testicles down, and snipped them off. He got this very logical idea after reading chapters 18 and 19 of Matthew ("And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life maimed or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire"). Apparently none the worse for wear, Boston Corbett then attended a prayer meeting, ate a big dinner, and went to see a doctor, in that order.

Corbett floated around after the war, living in Boston, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Striving to emulate Jesus Christ, he grew his hair long and moved to Concordia, KS In 1878. Or rather, he moved outside of Concordia; in a field near town, he dug a hole in the ground (euphemistically referred to as a "dugout" by Corbett's supporters) and lived therein, occasionally brandishing a gun when anyone got too close.

Not content to merely live off the land, Corbett secured employment as Assistant Doorkeeper in the Kansas House of Representatives. He lost the job in 1887 after threatening members of a mock-legislature at gunpoint who made fun of the chamber's opening prayer.

On May 26, 1888, Boston Corbett escaped from the Topeka Asylum for the Insane, and vanished into the mists of time and history. it's possible he died in the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894, but nothing ever surfaced to prove it; no body was never recovered, and no sign of his existence ever surfaced. Just rumors and shadows about the last years of the man who killed Lincoln's assassin.

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Boy Scout Troop 31 of Concordia erected a plaque in 1958, marking the spot where Corbett lived in a hole.