3/18/12, 7pm

Death is in all faces; shape in one history
Rung bone and blade (the ventricles of Adam)
And manned by Midnight, my friend to the stars.
To the night, look up:
A new one shines there.

                        -Leonard Graves Phillips

From the Vaults (2007)


I had five beers tonight and listened to The Damned. What a glorious, glorious thing. How sublime life can be at times.

 I wish there was some way I could repay the service these men have done for me. I wish there was anything I could say to impress upon them how their music changed me, turned my brain around, made me think differently about music, then art, and then, logically, life itself. I wish I could tell each one of them, without sounding like some goddamned lunatic, how they helped saved me as a young man.

 I reckon it would sound really, really bad. Psychotic, probably.

There’s no way you can explain to people how the most profound art stirs your soul and acts, as Bukowski once said, like a vast bridge across the things that claw and tear. But The Damned have been that bridge for me, and they’ve stirred the deepest depths of my soul for over 23 years now. It was a revelation for me in the summer of ’84, innocently discovering punk rock with my friends, grabbing Burning Ambitions: A History of Punk on vinyl at a record store in Coronado Mall in Albuquerque that no longer exists. Amongst the abundance of gems on that double-LP (The Buzzcocks’ Boredom, The Stranglers’ [Get a] Grip On [Yourself], The Heartbreakers’ Chinese Rocks) was a song by The Damned called Love Song. I’d seen pictures of these guys – the singer who looked like Dracula, the guitarist who dressed in furry Okapi outfits, women's dresses, or nothing at all, and their red-headed drummer, eyes bugged out, looking like he was coked up.

 It sounded pretty damn good. 

Before having my jaw operated on, resulting in my jaw being wired shut for six weeks, my father caved in to my shameless begging and bought me The Best of The Damned. Shit friends, there’s no way to describe how sublime it was, hearing New Rose, Smash it Up, Wait for the Blackout, and Rabid for the first time. Explosive bar chords, absolutely soaring melodies and harmonies. Proof positive that you could be a drunken, insane punk band and still be bona fide musicians – these guys could PLAY. They were fucking GOOD.

 On a trip to San Francisco to visit my grandparents later that year I picked up Machine Gun Etiquette and The Damned Live at Shepperton. This was as good as life got. Etiquette is one of the greatest albums of all time; that I discovered it at a time on my life when my thoughts and feelings were so out of control and needed it so badly… Sometimes you just get lucky. I Just Can’t Be Happy Today, Liar, Anti-Pope, Melody Lee – holy shit. Dave Vanian's voice was like a balm for my psyche. Just hearing him improved life's odds. You could be down five runs in the bottom of the ninth with two outs and an 0-2 count. Then you put Smash it Up on the turntable, crank up the volume, and suddenly the bases were juiced and your clean-up hitter was digging in at the plate. What was boring was suddenly exciting. Where there was abyss there was suddenly gamble. The Damned became my soundtrack while learning about girls, getting through high school, dealing with the shit that we all deal with trying to escape that volatile time in our lives.

 

I remember once sitting in Chemistry class with Mrs. Najjar, a dumbass kid who simply COULD NOT FOCUS on school work because there were girls to pursue, and records to listen to. That’s ALL I wanted to do, ALL I was interested in – girls and rock’n’roll. I wanted to be anywhere but there. I always sat in the back, doing my best to get my Ds and Fs anonymously. I had a feeling this afternoon that she was going to call on me and try to humiliate me. I could feel it. She knew I was a loser and enjoyed calling me out in front of the GOOD students. She worked a problem on the board, and I knew it was coming. “Russell, can you walk us through this…?” I didn’t care. I was ready for anything. I had bought The Damned Live at Newcastle at Merlin’s Records in Albuquerque the weekend before, which contained an incendiary version of Ignite from The Damned’s Strawberries LP. It was this particular version of Ignite that blared through all the corridors of my brain at this moment, ricocheting hither and thither through my neurons and conciousness, electrifying me as I sat there. Captain Sensible's guitar solo was like a power cable charging me with a million watts of energy. I was 100 feet tall, I was a fuckin’ monster ready to tear the roof off the chemistry building. I was a one-man army with state-of-the-art incendiary devices, hell bent on obliterating anything stupid enough to get in my path. I had The Damned kicking almighty ass in my head, and I wasn't taking shit from anyone. Life couldn’t have been better. Nothing scared me right then, nothing mattered; bring it on, world. Give me your best. Sure enough, Najjar called on me 30 seconds later.



Damned Damned Damned, Machine Gun Etiquette, The Black Album, Friday the 13th EP, Strawberries, Live at Newcastle… Thank you, boys. God bless you. You’re the very best the species has to offer.

MAILBAG

                                                      Dear John from Conway, AR:

Thank you for your email of 2/29. Yes, we have read Dave Marsh’s Louie Louie book, and are also amazed that someone who gets paid to write about music can be so bottomlessly clueless, and not even employ a fact checker. In addition to writing, as you point out, that “the extremely rowdy and obnoxious” Henry Rollins sings Black Flag’s version of Louie Louie – despite the fact that singer Dez Cadena is on the cover of the single, and is credited on the inner label (one senses that Marsh isn’t even aware of the three Flag vocalists who preceded Rollins) – Marsh also writes that “Black Flag are the first and only band ever to scare the producers of ‘Saturday Night Live’ into using censorious tape delay, to preserve NBC’s federal license.” Although Black Flag was at one point booked to play on SNL, Marsh was undoubtedly referring to Fear’s infamous appearance on SNL, since Black Flag never appeared on the show. Which just goes to prove that even arrogant, pedantic blowhards like Dave Marsh are wrong sometimes.

Thank you for your query! We hope to hear from you again soon.

Book Of Lists I

The 10 Greatest TV Movies of All Time

1) Don’t be Afraid of the Dark

2) Disaster on the Coastliner

3) Trilogy of Terror

4) Pray for the Wildcats

5) Ants

6) Dark Night of the Scarecrow

7) The Last Dinosaur

8) Wine, Women and War

9) The Dreamer of Oz

10) Titanic

A Career in Any League

“Nostalgia is a sadness without an object, a sadness which creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience. Rather, it remains behind and before that experience… the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative.”

-Susan Stewart

“There was a time. That time is gone.”

-Jay Farrar

Naïve as I was back in 2006, I found myself hoping Alex Rodriguez would stay healthy the rest of his career and break the all-time home run record. I was not an A-Rod fan. His stint in Arlington only confirmed what I already suspected, that this was a young man with enormous talent, and a mind utterly devoid of any interesting or challenging thought to go along with it. Bill Lee A-Rod definitely ain’t. Like so many people thrust into the limelight who aren’t terribly bright, Rodriguez quickly became all about Rodriguez, a boring, annoying amalgamation of ego and image that, as such, was tailor-made for the New York Yankees. Rodriguez’ trade to the Yankees in February 2004 quickly seemed almost inevitable: one of the league’s most unlikable players now starting for the league’s most unlikable team.

Still, there I was in 2006, calling my best friend, naïvely telling him I hoped A-Rod would stay healthy the rest of his career and break the all-time home run record. Standing front and center in this incongruous change in attitude stood the 6’1” lefty from Riverside, CA: Barry Bonds. The fatigue from what we now call the Steroid Era, from watching men like Bonds, McGuire and Sosa, who came up as skinny kids and then retired as bloated, alien-looking hulks, demolishing all the mythical baseball numbers in the span of nine years, had finally broken me. Bonds disposed of McGuire’s single-season home run record in 2001 with 73, and by 2006 was well on his way to breaking Aaron’s career record. Both Bonds and McGuire used steroids to accomplish these feats. It was too much to take: the humble, intelligent Aaron endures death threats on his way to well-deserved immortality, and the ignorant, exceedingly unpleasant Bonds uses performance-enhancing drugs to break that mythical record. Aaron, the apex of strength; Bonds, the nadir or self-obsession.

So even though Rodriguez makes me want to vomit, I figured it would be a hoot for Bonds, his shriveled testicles and gruesome, oversized head to break the record, strut around for a few years thinking he was the shit, only to have it broken very quickly by this other dumbass he hadn’t seen in his rearview mirror. Then 2009 rolled around, and Selena Roberts and David Epstein broke the news of A-Rod’s steroid use.

***

Here’s what happened in 1980: I got home with a couple packages of Topps baseball cards, rifled through the cards, looked at the pictures and the stats, and went to bed that night. And the next night. And then got up on Saturday, did my chores, and had this nagging in my head, a number that kept appearing in daydreams, the feeling that I had to confirm I really saw what didn’t seem possible.

So back I went to George Foster’s card, flipped it over and for the first time seriously fixed my eyes on his 1977 stats: 52 HR, 149 RBI. Fifty-two. Deficient as I was in all things sports, I knew enough about what constituted a good hitter, and what constituted a power hitter. 52 in the HR column wasn’t the sort of thing that went on very often. Once every 10 or 15 years, in fact; no one had hit over 50 since Mays in’65, and no one would do so again until Cecil Fielder in ’90. This stat went beyond mere power. If you hit 20 homers a year, you had some power. 40+ home runs? You were truly one of the elite, one of the veritable gods that kids like me looked up to in wondrous awe. Here was something transcending a good season, something historic that happened in my own lifetime, not some ancient statistic from the fabled days of the Babe or Christy Mathewson: 52.

There’s no more awe in the post-Steroid Era when numbers like 52 HR wind up in a stats column. After living through the sham perpetrated by McGuire, Sosa and Bonds, I imagine lots of kids look at the kinds of numbers put up by someone like José Bautista in 2011 and shrug their shoulders; put him in the clean-up slot. He’ll drive in some runs.

But there was a time, kids. There was a time when Bautista’s 41 home runs would have stirred the playground chatter before school in 6^th grade, because it meant something. There was a time when I went back to school on Monday with my George Foster card in hand, excitedly talking to anyone who’d listen about this man who put up god-like numbers in 1977, who was a major BADASS even without 52 home runs, what with those chops and piercing eyes – the kind of guy who actually seemed scary to me as I looked at his card (what is Foster thinking, I thought, looking at the card? What does a guy who hits 52 fucking home runs need to think? If I were a pitcher I’d just walk him. Fuck it.) – and who looked like a NORMAL HUMAN BEING. Dig it. No freakishly-huge forehead, no un-humanly mammoth arms that at once looked muscular and flabby. Now 63, Foster let himself go and packed on some pounds recently, but as a twenty-something slugger, he was a regular, healthy looking ballplayer: lean and athletic.

George Foster never hit 50 home runs in a season again. In ’78 he crushed 40, and then averaged 21 dingers a season for the rest of his career. He was never elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. There are those who would point to the power drop-off as proof that Foster was only ever an average ballplayer with one aberrant season. These are the snobs that think you’ve failed unless you single-handedly alter the trajectory of human existence. Here, then, is the crux of the steroid era: individual players aiming not for a ring or some good numbers, but for universe-defying, mind-blowing, world-altering numbers, for the season and then their careers. It’s not enough to be the kind of power hitter kids like me used to admire 35 years ago. You have to change history itself, and command the kind of allegiance that God himself demands of his abject, groveling subjects.

Those who look at 1977 as a baseball footnote for George Foster are the kinds of pea-brained idiots who cannot even dimly comprehend the significance of that critical exchange towards the end of Bull Durham:

“Nuke, you know who this is? This is Sandy Grimes. Sandy Grimes hit .371 in Louisville in 1965.”

“.376.”

“I’m sorry. He hit .376. That’s a career, man. In any league.”

It’s a precious memory for me, talking to my brother, a Cincinnati Reds fan from birth, about the mighty George Foster and his fifty-two home runs. The kind of precious, once-in-a-lifetime memory kids growing up in the 2000s will never have, used – as they are – to numbers like 70 and 65 (McGuire), 66, 63 and 64 (Sosa), 73 and 762 (Bonds). They’ll never know what it was like growing up with the real numbers, what it was like when 52 in the HR column – not a steroids-fueled 65 – was a source of wonderment.

And precious memories, finally, are exactly what fuel the falsehoods, the empty facade of nostalgia. Yes indeedy, there’s nothing worse than some curmudgeonly geezer starting in on the clichéd “When I was your age…” spiel. I know, I know; kids nowadays shouldn't even be expected to grow up with my awe of Foster. That was 30 years ago. And of course anyone who grew up fifty years ago would feed me the same line: You think 1977 and Foster were cool? Hell, when I was your age… On and on it goes, with each new generation.

I agree: there are no Good Old Days. There are just days. And if you had a good childhood – loving family, great friends – then you reach your 40s and things from 30 years ago seem lovely indeed, better than all the bullshit you’re putting up with now. You can find men and women from every generation going back 200 years thinking this way.

Allow me to take the low road, though, and point out that I’m right on this one. There really was a time when a guy who hadn’t been shooting steroids into his veins hit 52 home runs over the course of a season. And it was amazing. It was the kind of thing that made headlines. So it’ll never really be the same, will it? As it was in 1980, I mean. Because no matter what we do with their numbers – assign asterisks to them, remove them altogether, or define them as legit – the dark shadows of Bonds, McGuire and Sosa will forever chill baseball’s history and numbers like a late blast of arctic wind on a mid-April day.

It’s fucked up. Sometimes I wonder if my memories of 1980 are all I’ve got left with this damn game.

Let's Waste Some Money

The U.S. Mails was kind enough to deliver my latest order today.  From somewhere 100s of miles away in the vast nether regions of the USA comes a flimsy cardboard envelope containing The Damned – The Chiswick Singles… And Another Thing on CD. 24 songs, all of which I already own in innumerable permutations. Vinyl, cassette, CD, what have you. Had ‘em all for years. Decades, really. Nothing new here. No rarities, no demos, no live cuts, just the same old versions of The Damned’s Chiswick catalog we’ve all had for somewhere on the order of 30 years now.

Did I hesitate two weeks ago, even momentarily, placing The Chiswick Singles in my cart, and then clicking “Proceed to Check Out?” Fuck no. $13.67 for 24 songs I own two, three, five times over? Why the fuck not? Look at this description: “The package comes with brand new high-end transfers from the original master tapes.” Gotta hear that, for damn sure. How can any good Damned fan resist? “The booklet features a lavishly illustrated package including rare photographs and tons of memorabilia.” Well shit, sign me up, Chiswick Records. It’s one thing to, once again, for about the bazillionth time, dress up The Damned catalog and release yet another goddamn compilation, but “tons of memorabilia?” Now you’re cooking with gas, my friend. Liner notes by former Damned producer Roger Armstrong? Please rush me one (1) copy. Hell, rush me two. THREE. I already own all the goddamn songs, right? Might as well have a copy for the bedroom, one for the living room, and one suitable for hanging as a fucking conversation piece.

Love Song? I own three copies of the single (all with different picture sleeves, natch’), have it on The Best of The Damned twice (Vinyl, CD), and Machine Gun Etiquette three times (vinyl, original CD release, 25^th anniversary CD release). Ditto for Smash It Up, except, additionally, I also own the 25^th anniversary CD single reissue. The Friday the 13^th EP? Got the original EP, have it on The Long Lost Weekend, and the Tales From The Damned CD. Hell yes, I’ll take it one more time. What have I got to lose? Maybe the new digital remaster will reveal some hitherto unheard single, half-second guitar note I missed the last five thousand times I listened to Disco Man. Why the fuck not?

Some years back a friend of mine explained why he downloaded all his music from illegitimate pirate sites. “They release it in a different medium every few years, and you have to re-purchase it to keep up with the technology,” he pointed out. “They trot out the ‘intellectual property’ argument, but you already paid for the intellectual property when you first bought the record back in 1978. Why do you have to keep paying for the same album over and over again? Something is fucked up here.”

And yet, all The Damned have to do with their pre-Phantasmagoria catalog is release it every few years in a new cover with new liner notes, and off I go, like some slobbering mutt sniffing a bacon treat in my master’s pocket, pulling out whatever cash is handy, or whatever credit card isn’t overdrawn, so I can buy the CD, listen to it once, read the liner notes, and place it triumphantly on the shelf with my other Damned CDs.

Such is the power of this band over me. Such is the nature of The Damned’s recorded output between 1979 and 1984: the planet’s greatest band recording their best-ever songs. Not Phantasmagoria, or Not of This Earth, or even Grave Disorder. No, the golden years, the proverbial halcyon days. The days when Dave, Rat, and the Captain were all in the band, when Algy Ward bragged about how he could play totally hammered (“without batting an eyelid”), when Paul Grey made out his will in the back of the van in Italy, certain he wouldn’t make it back to England alive after a month of relentless chaos. When they were all too young to know any better, to think about or even be aware of rules or limitations. When they calmed down every now and again from the endless barrage of drugs and drink, repaired to the studio and recorded some of the most glorious music ever visited upon human ears. There is none better in my estimation, and so The Chiswick Singles finds a permanent home within my collection.

I could get mad. I could ask why the countless number of Damned demos – Don’t Trouble Trouble, Blind Leading the Blind, Frantic, etc – have never been officially released. But what the shit; I’ve got time. Maybe it’s a test. Maybe the band is seeing how many asinine comps their fans will keep shelling out for before finally throwing in the towel and spending their money on something productive like anti-depressants. Fuck it. I’m not completely without willpower, you know. All it takes is a little discipline, a little… which reminds me, isn’t Music for Pleasure about due for some remastering? Maybe punching up those highs is all that’s needed to neutralize Nick Mason’s production. Let’s see what we can find out on the interweb...

Not So Respectable

Ah, 2011. Another year, another deluxe reissue of a vastly overrated Rolling Stones album. Remastered, two discs, outtakes, extra tracks, and a “Super Deluxe” version with three discs, a book, and postcards, all for the low low price of $200. And who would hesitate even momentarily to shell out a small fortune to line the pockets of four men who are already multi-millionaires?

After sycophantically fawning all over Exile on Main Street last year – easily one of the three most overrated rock albums of all time – western music critics turned their obsequious hyperboles to Some Girls, the Stones’ flaccid, tedious, overwrought 1978 offering. Some Girls was the band’s fifth Stones-on-autopilot album in a row, and yet Stones fans, long in denial about Mick and Keith’s full-throttle descent into decadence and self-indulgence leaving them burned out and lacking anything remotely interesting to say, constantly point to it as the Last Great Stones Album. “Some Girls,” a friend of mine who owned a record store ruminated years ago, smiling at the mention of it. “The last great Stones album.”

Each and every one of us has bands that we simply cannot be objective about. We'll defend their horrible, uninspired latter-era work because our love for these wretches is so great, we’ll allow for the toll age and drugs take on men and women who once saved us during life’s darkest moments. This is perfectly acceptable behavior provided you’re willing to swallow your pride and admit that it’s more guilty pleasure than anything rooted in reality. A friend of mine once told me about his love for the Ramones’ Mondo Bizzaro. “Really?” I said. “You like that album?” He nodded, painfully. “I’m what you would call an apologist,” he said. I appreciated his honestly. In fact, I nodded right along with him, thinking about my love for AC/DC’s For Those About to Rock, not the first, second, third, or even eighth album I’d recommend to anyone wanting to know what AC/DC is all about.

But that doesn’t mean that a crappy album isn’t a crappy album. What would you recommend for someone wanting to acquaint himself with the Stones? Beggars Banquet? Fuck yes. Sticky Fingers? Certainly. Let it Bleed? Of course. Between the Buttons? Beats Some Girls anytime of the day. Hell, I’d loan you Satanic Majesties before Some Girls (if I even owned a copy; I don’t) to give you an idea of what made these guys great.

Some Girls, though, is shit. If I made five Stones mixes, not one song from Some Girls would appear on any of them. FUCKING DICK, you’re shrieking, WHAT ABOUT KEEF’S BEFORE THEY MAKE ME RUN? FUCKIN’ ROCKS, MAN. No, it definitely don’t, man. Production’s crap, Keith’s vocals are crap, and really, what the fuck ever, folks. This is supposedly the baddest of Keith’s badass lyrics, but there’s not much badass about a burned-out junkie who’s desperately still trying to convince you of his badassedness now that his band has lost all street cred. How badass can you be when your lead singer is Mick Jagger? Don’t fucking tell me Before They Make Me Run is badass, because there ain’t nothing – NOTHING – more badass than Sympathy for the Devil, Stray Cat Blues and Midnight Rambler, all of which were nine years in an increasingly distant past by the time of Some Girls.

Here’s what Joe Posnanski recently wrote about this year’s decidedly lackluster batch of Baseball Hall of Fame nominees:

“There’s something worth remembering: In baseball, in sports, in life, there is always downward pressure. Once you make some money, there’s the temptation to feel comfortable. Once you’ve proven yourself, you can lose your hunger. Once you’ve run into a wall, you don’t want to do that again. Once your arm starts hurting, you might throw with a little less enthusiasm. On and on and on, we all see it in our lives — downward pressure, the force to relax, back off, take the foot off the gas, and whatever other cliché you want. There are some people who never stop raging — and that has its own pitfalls. But by and large, those people, the ones who never stopped raging, are the ones in the baseball Hall of Fame.”

He could have been writing about the Stones, post Sticky Fingers. Finally becoming multi-millionaires in the early 70s brought that downward pressure upon Mick and Keith, and there was nothing interesting forthcoming in their songs beyond that. That they backed off and lost their hunger was evident on Black and Blue, an undistinguished album largely remembered today for its idiotically misogynistic advertising campaign. Interestingly, the departure of Mick Taylor and subsequent arrival of Ron Wood was the true onset of the Boring Stones, the beginning of what is in retrospect a parade of countless forgettable albums and tours from the once dangerous five-some turned harmless middle-aged stadium juggernaut.

I wish I could report that those musicians who took their foot off the gas are the ones we don’t celebrate, but strangely, it’s the creeps who play nice for the big labels and stop raging who are celebrated by wealthy industry parasites at the annual back-slapping fest known as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Shifting millions of units also helps, and Some Girls is still the Stones' best selling album. Jagger & co., naturally, showed up and accepted their statue when their turn came around, thanking an auditorium full of unimaginably rich, black-tie wearing industry drones for the dubious honor. How, exactly, does an event where only the rich and connected have access have anything to do with rock and roll?

It doesn’t. And neither do the Stones. That’s what no one gets anymore. I wrote last year that a palpable ennui courses through Exile on Main Street’s grooves. Beyond Exile – and especially on Some Girls – the Stones’ ennui is replaced by a bored contempt for innovation and exaltation, an indifferent capitulation to the most clichéd excesses and banalities of Rock and Roll’s mainstream artery. After Before They Make Me Run, Stones fanboys always point to Shattered as proof somehow that the Stones still had It. I direct you to the crucial missed opportunity at 1.50, where Ron Wood’s already dull lead, instead of exploding back into the verses, limps along unimpressively with help from a fucking synthesizer. Boring, boring stuff, and nowhere near the craziness of pre-’71 Stones. Hearing a poofter like Jagger warn that you have to be “tough tough tough” to live in Manhattan is embarrassing - for him - considering the real deal, in the form of the Ramones and The Dictators, had already been singing about life on mean streets of New York for years.

"We had this idea that we'd reinvigorate certain albums by finding other songs recorded in that time that would hold up," Jagger says, with respect to reissuing more old albums with extra tracks. "That sounded like a better idea than doing mindless compilations."

How much more mindless does it get than everything the Stones have recorded since Sticky Fingers?