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.