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.

****

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

Stewart Udall

1920 - 2010

YOU’RE GOING TO REAP JUST WHAT YOU SOW

For the first time since they re-formed in 2005, I watched 60 minutes of a “Queen + Paul Rodgers” concert last week. Half of a great band that broke up 19 years ago, joined by one member of a lame band that broke up 28 years ago, all of whom are in their 60s, attempting to belt out songs that were written 35 years ago. It inevitably dredged up the old argument, once again, that makes everyone role their eyes: should old men be allowed to play rock’n’roll?

Music nerds can debate this topic endlessly, and the rest of the population can’t believe how seriously music nerds take themselves: why are you so judgmental? What’s wrong with The Rolling Stones, or anyone else, playing the music they love into their 50s, 60s, and 70s? It’s ok for blues artists, so why not rock’n’roll musicians?

Despite the incredulous eye-rolling, it’s a valid argument, and one I’m never able to resolve. At best, I walk away from this argument feeling rotten – rotten that perhaps my heroes never took any of it seriously; rotten than I can’t accept them for what they are; rotten that it’s even an issue.

I am one of those who always felt rock’n’roll is – was – a young person’s language. It was started by young people playing for young people, and inspired horror in their parents.  Very simple and straightforward. Even the musicians who weren’t revolutionaries – who may have been, even, conservative – were leading a revolution anyway, by virtue of their playing a new kind of music that drove kids into a frenzy, convincing their hapless parents that society itself was coming apart at the seams.

It was at the heart of what dour, un-hip old losers like Spiro Agnew referred to, disingenuously, as the “generation gap.” Such was the power of this music for all of us who heard it as kids. Only we understood it; our parents could make a gracious attempt to try and understand it, but by the time you had cashed out and had kids, your brainwaves were irrevocably altered and unable to translate this stuff. Not only did parents not get it, they couldn’t get it.

Rock’n’roll was brand new in 1955, and no one had any idea what it would look like 10, 20, 50 years later. Pondering the face of rock’n’roll 50 years down the line was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. The kids were living in the now, and Townsend hit the nail square on the head with “hope I die before I get old,” which was a safe lyric to sing in 1965. Pete was only 25.

The problem is, life doesn’t exist in a vacuum. No one imagined Rock’n’roll aging, but that’s what inevitably happens to everything in this universe that doesn’t drop dead in its youth. So, here we are, 55 years after Chuck Berry and Bill Haley. And rock’n’roll looks mighty damn old. I love this stuff – it has been my lifeblood since I was five years old - but even I have to say: everything rock’n’roll was capable of was done within 15 years of its birth. As an art form, it ceased evolving around 1970. By that point we had Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, Bo Diddley, the British Invasion, The Velvet Underground, the American garage movement, Hendrix, and Iggy and the Stooges. Even though some truly great rock’n’roll was played after that, there was nothing new about it. We’re left with this conundrum after 1970-ish, where a new generation comes of age every 20 years, producing some great music here and there music, but everyone’s simply dialing in bands that played before they were even born.  (The punk bands from London in 1976/1977 had more in common with Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley than they’d ever care to admit.)

In fact, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s just wrong for bloated, geriatric Englishmen like Queen’s Roger Taylor to put on oversized shirts (in a sad attempt to hide their paunches) and exploit everyone’s sense of nostalgia to the tune of $100/ticket.

It’s unfair for me to think this way, of course. Who the hell am I to say geezers like Roger Taylor and Paul Rodgers shouldn’t be up on a ginormous football stadium stage, running around as tho they’re 35 years younger?  Why didn’t I have a problem with John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters playing into their declining years, but I find “Queen + Paul Rodgers” a depressing spectacle?

It’s somewhat of a paradox for me – I do consider it a young person’s language, but now that the decades have worn on, we’re finally seeing what Rock looks like as an old man. Jonathan Richmond always looked forward to the aging process, insisting we’d be Old and Dignified. Would I have been happier if it had died out as an art form, no longer written or played? Of course not. By the time I was in a band in 1986, there was nothing new under the sun. And yet, bands like The Damned, The Beatles, Ramones, Bo Diddley, and Black Flag guided me through life’s darkest moments. I literally wouldn’t have made it without them.

The answer is simple enough, even though it didn’t dawn on me until last week. Really, I have no problem with old men playing rock’n’roll. Link Wray and Dick Dale are two examples of old men playing rock’n’roll, kicking severe ass as hard in their 60s as in their 20s. Nay; when it becomes offensive is when bands form, record great music, break up when the marriage goes sour, go their separate ways, and then reunite 20 years later when some money (maybe not even all that much) is dangled in their faces. It’s such a cynical, shameless move. What bigger let down is there than watching a band that saved your life as a kid – that wrote a song like Bodies, or Sheer Heart Attack – reunite as fat old men and tour the world to cash in on your old feelings of I’m-not-alone-in-this-world;-someone-actually-understands-out-there? It’s like being kicked square in the stomach with a steel-tipped Doc Martin. You realize: these guys were completely full of shit. It wasn’t ever an inside language that I got; it was just more of the same bullshit that I thought these guys helped me escape, in my room in the middle of the night, headphones on to keep my parents off my back, away from school, away from my fucking job, away from, as Bukowski would say, the things that claw and tear. Back then they were saviors, Gods who refused to compromise with a status quo that was so obviously full of shit. Now they’re just average losers, willing to do whatever it takes to make a buck.

Put it this way: here’s a lyric by Bon Scott, the one true AC/DC frontman, written for the band’s second album in 1975:

You can stick your 9 to 5 living

And your collar and your tie

You can stick your moral standards

Because it’s all a dirty lie

You can stick your golden handshake

And you can stick your silly rules

And all the other SHIT

That they teach to kids in school

‘cause I ain’t no fool…

That is potent, powerful stuff. It sums up, in my humble opinion, the very essence of rock’n’roll: It’s Us against Them, and I will never be broken.

Can you imagine the man who wrote these words – literally a life preserver for me as a fourteen-year-old – happily touring the casino circuit as an old, gray man, kow-towing to the promoters and businessmen and suits, all for a paycheck?

It hurts me just thinking about that question. If Bon was like 98% of the human population, yeah, he probably would have toured the casinos. We’ll never know; Bon died in 1980 at the age of 33. Maybe that really is the only thing stopping our heroes from destroying our trust.

Where Do I Belong

Freddie Mercury died on November 24^th, 1991. He was 45 years old. At the time, I was working at the campus bookstore at California State University, Northridge.

I grew up on Queen. They were – along with King Kong, Spider Man, and The Beatles – a primary influence during my formative years in 1970s Santa Fe. His death took the wind out of me. In the administrative area of the bookstore, next to the clock and our timecards, I hung up a piece of paper upon which I scrawled, in my barely legible chickenscratch: “No beginning, there’s no ending… believe me, life goes on and on and…” It was a couple of lines from In the Lap of the Gods, a song Freddie wrote for Queen’s third album, 1974’s Sheer Heart Attack. I walked around in a funk for two or three weeks afterwards. His was one of three or four celebrity deaths that genuinely fucked with my head, that had me grieving like a good friend was lost. (John Lennon and Mel Blanc are the other two that come to mind.)

Perhaps it’s precisely because I heard Queen during my formative years that I still love them so much. I often talk to my friends about the current state of movies – namely, why do they suck so bad? It seemed like there was this special era between 1975 and 1987 when cool-ass movies were coming out every damn year: Jaws, Close Encounters, Blade Runner, Alien, Halloween, Escape From New York, Star Trek II, Return of the Living Dead, Evil Dead II, Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, Animal House, Sixteen Candles, etc… A good friend of mine tells me repeatedly: No, it wasn’t that the movies during those years were better than any other span of time, it’s just you; when you’re that young, everything is cool. You take that with you into your dotage.

Could be, I guess. I was listening to the opening 22 seconds of Bohemian Rhapsody on Queen Live at The Bowl tonight, and was struck again by Freddie’s tunefulness. Throughout Queen’s touring years, Freddie would take songs that he started on piano, and improvise – or so it seemed – a short intro. These intros were, invariably, sublimely etheriel. However, Roger Taylor’s cymbal flourish on the Bowl recording (0:09 to 0:13), coming at exactly the right time, indicates that these were bits the band probably went over during rehearsals, or evolved every night at the same point in the set. Regardless, all these years later, I still stand in awe of the man’s talent.

The amount of live Queen footage on youtube is staggering. I found a clip of the band performing In the Lap of the Gods… Revisited last week; it looks to be from about 1976 or so, and true to form, Freddie opens the song with a faux-improv (0:15 to 0:42) that is soaringly, achingly beautiful. The guy was just so tuneful, so fucking talented. He was all ego, I’ll grant you that – he was an obnoxious egomaniac who took everything to the extremist possible extreme, but as a dear friend of mine once said, “an asshole without talent is just an asshole.” Freddie may have been an egomaniacal creep, but the creeps I know and deal with every day didn’t write Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions. Indeed, they couldn’t write Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions. It takes a certain kind of genius to do so.

It’s been fashionable in the U.S. to bash Queen as a “fag band” (as a guy I know here in Santa Fe once said) ever since they committed the cardinal sin of sounding disco on 1982’s Hot Space, but that’s just sour grapes on the part of music snobs. Talent like Freddie’s comes down the pike once every 30 years or so (if we're lucky), which is to say nothing about the other members of Queen.

I don’t love the man and his music because I first heard him when I was of the age when everything sounded good. I love the man and his music because he was one of the towering talents in rock’n’roll history.