HOW GOOD SONGS GO BAD, AND VICE VERSY

I will forever be haunted by the lessons learned from The Replacements' Kiss Me on the Bus, and The Damned's History of the World Part I. They confirm a dark truth that I hid from for many years, until I simply could not pretend anymore, and that is: there probably is no such thing as a bad song.

I took a couple of creative writing classes in college, and more exhilarating and confounding than anything I tried to write was the realization that there are an infinite number of ways to write about any one event. No matter how simple or complex the plot you're trying to convey, there are an infinite number of ways to tell it; first person, third person; present tense, past tense; minimalist, flowery; etc. It simultaneously made me feel like the vastness of the cosmos truly was the limit, and that I couldn't even take the crucial first step. Because once that step was taken - once you decided upon a tense, a point of view, a style - all those other doors slammed shut behind you, and what began as infinite possibilities shrank to a mere one.

Kiss Me on the Bus and History of the World proved that the same goes for rock'n'roll. The official LP versions of both leave me cold; yet, demo, BBC, and live versions of each prove that they're two of the coolest songs each band ever wrote. The immediate question is: how does this happen? Why wasn't it obvious to each band that they wound up ruining some great music they wrote? The bigger-picture question is: could it be that there's no such thing as bad rock'n'roll? Could it be that Peaceful Easy Feeling and Uptown Girl are actually great rock'n'roll, hiding under wrongheaded production and terrible arrangements, waiting to be recorded properly and freed from their cruel purgatory?

THE 'MATS
Truly hardcore Replacements fans will tell you that Let it Be was their Sellout Moment, the album where they cashed out and chased the money all the way to Sire. But for a bunch of teenage boys in Santa Fe NM, Let it Be was a revelation, and considering what brilliance came before it – Sorry Ma, Stink, and Hootenany – our minds boggled; what was next with these fuckin’ geniuses? There was no sophmore slump with these guys, no misstep. Everything they touched was golden. When word came down that Tim was on its way in 1986, we drooled in anticipation. Tommy Erdelyi was producing, and the band absolutely slayed during their January 18, 1986 appearance on Saturday Night Live, blasting through Bastards of Young and Kiss Me on the Bus, two new songs, in typically 'Mats fasion: loud, visceral, provocative, exhilarating. An astonishing reminder of what was possible in life. There was no reason to think another Let it Be-quality album wasn’t on the way.

But, as it happened, another Let it Be-quality album definitely was not in the offing. In a move of biblical wrongheadedness, Erdelyi set the knobs as though members of The Eagles were recording a new album, and Tim arrived sounding slick and syrupy, like this month's AOR hit maker. We were all left scratching our heads: what the hell happened here? How could Bastards and Bus wind up sounding so unforgivably gawdawful? The demo of Bus eventually surfaced (now available on the reissue of Tim) which also rocks about a bazillion times more than the final version. So we’re left with a live version and a demo of Bus – both very different, but both quintessentially ‘Mats – that are infinitely better than what wound up as the final version of the tune. Maybe Tommy was simply trying too hard to make this a Hit Record? Perhaps, but didn’t it ever occur to anyone in the band to put the kibosh on what he was doing?

Regardless, Bus stands as an object lesson in overproduction. It didn't seem possible to de-claw one of the most uncompromsing bands I'd ever heard, but that's what Erdelyi did, somehow turning The Replacements into a radio-friendly band. Tim version of Kiss Me on the Bus: forgettable AOR. SNL version & demo: The ‘Mats once again taking it to a new level.

THE DAMNED
Fan boys hail The Black Album as one of The Damned’s finest moments, but it is, in fact, their most vastly overrated album. It could have been nearly as good as their masterpiece, Machine Gun Etiquette, but instead stands as a monument to what subpar production and garish arrangements do to good songs.

Case in point: History of the World Part I, the first half of a one-two punch (along with 13^th Floor Vendetta) on side two that drags that album’s momentum down to a standstill. Overwrought with synthesizers and reverb, History sounds – for The Damned anyway – like an homage to Phil Spector, which as a concept is somewhat incongruous with what that band was all about (and anyway, didn’t we already go through this wrongheaded production shit with Nick Mason and Music For Pleasure?). This was the album’s first single? For years I skipped over its boring 3.52 on my way to Therapy.

That is, until 1996, when Nighttracks released The Damned: The Radio One Sessions, a second set of BBC sessions (Sessions of The Damned being the first) spanning seven years’ worth of line-ups between 1979 and 1985. Nestled in the middle of its 17 tracks were six alternate versions of songs that wound up on The Black Album: Drinking About My Baby, Hit or Miss, Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, Wait for the Blackout, Lively Arts, and History of the World.

The BBC versions of Blackout, Lively Arts and History were a revelation. Blackout and Lively Arts were certainly already great on The Black Album, but suddenly here were these rawer, faster, louder versions that were way better than their official counterparts. History, however, defied expectations, transmogrifying in the hands of the BBC's Mike Reid from a boring four minutes on Black Album to an upper-tier, exhuberent Damned romp worthy of being any album’s first single . It’s like night and day.

Four things happened here: first, the BBC version is played a half-step higher than the Black Album version, in G-flat (on the album it’s in F), adding a lot more zip to a song desperately in need of it. Second, Dave Vanian’s vocals soar on the BBC version; he sounds way more inspired than on The Black Album, which is interesting, because he’s hitting his notes far more confidently on the version that’s in a higher key. (Vanian has enormous bags under his eyes in photos taken during the recording of Black Album, a good indication that he was not in the best place when it came time to record the record.) Third, instead of an overblown arrangement revolving around echo and Hans Zimmer’s synthesizers – as was the case on Black Album – it’s a straightforward Damned arrangement revolving around bass, guitar, and drums, with an organ and piano for depth. Finally, studio effects are kept to a minimum. Instead of trying to make History sound like an epic answer to Beethoven's 9th, Reid treats it like a basic rock'n'roll song, letting the music speak for itself. No peripherals are necessary.

The band itself acknowledged problems with the final product, writing “over-produced by Hans Zimmer” on the sleeve of the History single in 1980. In 2005, the 25^th anniversary of The Black Album, Captain Sensible admitted to MOJO writer Kieron Tyler, “It’s a little over the top in places… maybe (Hans Zimmer) did go too far layering the icing on the top.” Bloody 'ell, blokes. If you knew that, why didn't you fix it?

WHY I HATE NEW MOVIES

Every now and again I make the horrible mistake of going to my local video store and, in a morbid fit of maybe-there’s-something-NEW-here-that’s-cool, rent a new release. Such evenings always wind up a complete disaster, but like a moth to the flame, the mood seizes me a couple of times a year. And like a fool, I obey it.

Last week I went to Casablanca Video and brought home Star Trek, this year’s blockbuster starring Chris Pine as James Kirk, and Zachary Quinto as Spock. An admission -  Star Trek is a part of the basic fabric of my life. I grew up watching the original series, and it’s canonical in my love of 20^th century American art. I am, however, one of those snobs who thinks that Next Generation is pitifully awful (in seven seasons, I think there are 20 episodes worth your time), and Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise are beneath contempt. Without question: the only TRUE Trek is Shatner and Nimoy, period. The rest is crap.

But my snobbery aside, the new Star Trek is a remarkably, almost impossibly, stupid fucking movie. For those of the chosen ones who haven’t sent it: in the year 2362, a star is going supernova, threatening to destroy the planet Romulus, home of the evil Romulans. The very-old Spock is dispatched to the scene in a small ship so he can inject “red matter” into the star, creating a black hole to swallow the super nova, thus saving Romulus. However, he’s too late; the star destroys Romulus before he gets there. Spock still manages to shoot the red matter into the super nova, creating a black hole that swallows Spock’s ship AND the Romulan ship Narada, despositing them (via a time warp, natch’) in the year 2233.

The enraged captain of the Narada, Nero, seeking revenge for the death of his beloved wife on Romulus, captures Spock and his ship, takes Spock’s supply of red matter, and injects the red matter into the planet Vulcan, creating another black hole that destroys Vulcan. Take that and like it, Spock. Prior to destroying Vulcan, Nero maroons Spock on a nearby moon so Spock can watch the festivities first-hand. The rest of the movie follows the young James T. Kirk and Spock trying to stop the evil Nero, with both future and present-Spock meeting face-to-face at movie’s end.

Some questions came to mind:

1) Once it was clear the star was going supernova, why didn’t an evacuation of Romulus begin? Why is it up to a mere one man to save the entire planet?

2) Doesn’t Star Fleet have teams of scientists to work on this? Why is a single geriatric Vulcan ambassador dispatched to save an entire planet?

3) When Spock arrives at the supernova, he has to take the time to leave his ship’s cockpit to go extract some red matter, and shoot it into the super nova. Are you kidding me? They couldn’t find one more loser to go on the mission with him so that one person could pilot the ship, and the other could deal with the red matter?

4) What’s up with Spock having to take the time to leave his ship’s cockpit, walk to the rear, extract some red matter from a giant vat of the stuff, and load it into the device which he then shoots into the super nova? Wouldn’t all of that be done ahead of time, so that once he was there, it was just a matter of aiming and firing the device?

5) Why would Spock be traveling with a shitload of red matter (allowing Nero to destroy Vulcan)? Would he really take enough red matter with him to create a thousand black holes – as he does in the movie – or doesn’t logic dictate that he just take enough for the situation at hand?

6) If you create a black hole to swallow up a star, doesn’t it then swallow up everything else nearby? Would not Romulus be spared the super nova, but destroyed anyway by the black hole?

7) Even if Romulus weren’t destroyed by the black hole, wouldn’t all life on the planet die anyway, having been deprived of the light and heat of its sun?

8) Creating a black hole where one didn't exist - and creating it that close to Romulus - would completely alter that part of space, probably destroying (or at least drastically destabilizing) the entire solar system to which Romulus belongs. Doesn't that violate at least one Starfleet law? Are these guys allowed to fuck with entire solar systems whenever they please?

9) After being marooned, Spock-the-Old stands outside, looks into the sky, and sees Vulcan being reduced to dust by the black hole. How could Spock see this? If Vulcan were so close that he could see it swallowed by a black hole (in daylight!), wouldn't the moon he's standing on also be destroyed by the black hole?

10) Reeling after the death of his mother and home planet, Spock-the-Young angrily demands that security get the headstrong, argumentative Kirk "off the ship." We cut to a shot of Kirk being jettisoned from the Enterprise in a small pod; he winds up on the same moon as Spock-the-Old. 'The hell..? Yeah, I get it - Spock is losing it, but would they really take the time to put an Acting First Mate in a pod and maroon him? Wouldn't this at least raise some eyebrows on the bridge? And anyway, wouldn't they want to hang on to all escape pods, considering the danger they're in? Isn't standard procedure to throw Kirk in the brig?

Sheer fucking idiocy, friends. I’m sick of this crap. Plot holes were easy enough to overlook in the original series because it was done on a shoestring budget, and had tons of charm. (And William Shatner is God.) Nowadays, J.J. Abrams has a $140 million budget, and years to come up with a workable script. I do not understand how fuckin’ garbage like this gets made, and I sure as shit do not understand why loser-ass fanboys flock to it in droves, shelling out cash to the tune of a $385 million gross, and guarantees of three more sequels. And you wonder why I love Ed Wood movies?

Neda

I don’t mind saying in this day of shit-awful Stallone, Willis, and Schwarzenegger movies, NRA buffoons and Death Scenes videos that I am not at all desensitized to violence and horror.  Been feeling fucked up all day after watching the footage of Neda Agha-Soltan dying in Tehran.  One of the most horrible things I’ve ever seen.  The girl falls to the ground, her face still alive for just a moment, a look of numb shock, and then her eyes roll back, and blood streams out of her mouth.  Then her nose.  People start screaming and crying.  There’s blood pouring out everywhere as a guy starts CPR, and you realize, when her eyes rolled back, that was actually it - that was the moment she died.  Violence, this awful violence, and then death. Eyes back, blood all over her face, people screaming and crying. You're watching this young woman's last seconds as a living being.

I try and leave everyone alone to do their own thing, and do my own thing, but so often it seems like we’re not happy unless we’re inflicting misery and suffering upon our own.  It’s this feeding off the pain of our own that leaves me wondering why it’s worth it.  Any of it.  I don’t get any kicks from watching a lion attack, kill, and eat a zebra in a National Geographic special, but I understand it.  The lion isn’t a sadist.  He’s not out to inflict horror on zebras because he’s a heartless, cruel sociopath.  It’s what he needs to do to survive.  It’s the order of the food chain.  My fourth-grade teacher explained that one to me, and I understood it.  The lion didn’t eat another lion.  He ate a zebra.  The bald eagle didn’t attack another bald eagle; it went fishing.

Today I watched the footage of Neda, and when it was over, I sat back in my chair, and thought, Jesus, is this the best we could do today?  There have been days when the best, the very best I had to offer was drinking four beers, jacking off, and laying in bed pondering the career arc of John Agar. Days like those were certainly nothing to be proud of, but what the fuck?  They were benign enough.  Nobody got hurt.  The next morning everything reset.  You could aim a little higher at 8am the next day. 

When the best we can do is seek power, seek wealth, allow our base instincts to guide our actions, and take pleasure in fucking with people, causing them pain, anguish, misery…

It’s amazing anyone can carry on.  It’s amazing every last one of us isn’t on prozac, seeing a shrink, hanging themselves in a closet.  In fact, I start understanding those who believe that they’re being abducted by the greys; those who believe a shadow government controls and crafts everything that happens on earth, even the seemingly random events; those who believe that the world will end in 2012; those who believe an invisible man lives in the sky, keeping tabs on everything they do, casting them off into the fires of eternal damnation if they break his rules.  It’s running and hiding, no doubt, but it begins to have a certain logic to it.  How to take it head on when we we’re so cruel to each other?  There’s no real answer. This is How It Is.

 

Green trees call to me

I am free – but life is so cheap…

We Just Get By However We Can

Not sure what to think anymore. That descending arpeggio on Lily Allen’s “The Fear” sounds beautiful. "Everyone's At It" mesmerizes me. Does that mean I’m a fuck up? Have you ever had one of those nights – or weeks, or months – where it just doesn’t make sense? The whole thing? Where you realize that you didn’t seize the opportunities, didn’t throw caution to the wind, and played it safe? It’s one thing to look back at a single year of wasted time, but two decades… I find myself retreating, hiding in fucked-up fantasies. The things I am doing, that are supposedly great, things of substance, are just specious interactions with truth. I know that’s what’s happening, yet attempting to move the auto-pilot switch into the off position is… what, scary? Why all the fear? Can’t figure any of it out. Feel worthless, pathetic. 

Vaughn, NM

I've found that the smaller towns have as much to offer architecturally as the larger cities. I was in eastern/central NM this last week on business. The following three pix are from Taiban, and Vaughn. This downtown area of Vaughn isn't even visible from the street. In ten years it'll probably be a mound of rubble, and no one cares to save it. No one has the money to save it. We are a sad lot.

Rachel Dunlap

“There’ll come a time, everyone you know will say goodbye…”

-Minipop

A friend of mine once said that life is a series of paths that converge and diverge.  I was talking about people I had known that I wasn’t in contact with anymore. A few didn’t matter; a few more I missed. I didn’t even know where they were. I could track them down, but then what? It had been 15 years. You want everything to be like it was – you want to pick up where you left off. You remember them the way they were back then: young, totally crazy.  But a lot changes in 15 years.  Maybe everything.

 

Rachel, I don’t know what I would’ve said to you if I had been able to see you again.  I don’t know that we would’ve had anything to talk about.  But for what it’s worth, I found myself thinking about you every now and again these last 20 years, and every time I did, it was with much fondness, and the curiosity: I wonder what she’s doing now?  These paths of ours diverged early on – Jesus, our ages then were less than the time that’s gone by since – but the moment they crossed always meant something to me.

Los Angeles, part III

Seventeen years ago I played in a Los Angeles band called Dicktit. Thinking about it now, I don’t even remember exactly when I joined. I was either 20 or 21. Alex Konya and Peter Fullerton, Dicktit’s guitarist and drummer, had written a set’s worth of tunes in their previous band, but it fell apart. These songs became Dicktit’s early set. Alex and Peter originally invited me to sing, and I did a rehearsal with them which I thought went alright, but they didn’t seem to dig it. I was invited back for another practice, but got cold feet and stood Alex, Peter, and bassist Tracy Colby up. None of the three went to Cal State Northridge, where I was trying to get a B.A. in English, so I figured I wouldn’t be running into them again anytime soon anyway. I was young and insecure and it didn’t seem like a good fit anyway.

Carlos Nuñez, one of the first people I met at CSUN as a fresh-faced, green, small-town kid, then became the band’s vocalist. (At this point, Peter and Alex still didn’t have a name for their new band. They were literally starting from scratch: bassist first, vocalist second, then name.) “Cake,” as Carlos demanded we call him, had known Alex and Peter for some time, and was the archetypal music nerd who owned 1,000+ albums, plus dozens and dozens of singles and videos - a logical choice to front the band. A couple of months after my tryout for Alex and Peter, Cake came to me saying they wondered if I would play guitar for their band instead of sing. I was shocked they wanted to have anything to do with me after bailing out on them, but what the fuck – I was a guitarist by trade, and this was an excuse to get a real guitar and at least be playing.

I say “real” guitar, because at that point I had been playing for five years on a black Electra with fucked-up frets that weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 pounds. It was a rotten piece of junk, so I decided that now was the time, by God, to get a bona-fide guitar and play in a bona-fide band. I quickly hit up a good friend who actually worked a real job and had real money, asking him to buy me a guitar and I’d pay him back. Kindhearted, genuine soul that he is, he agreed without any complaints, and before I knew it, I was sitting in a certifiably insane man’s house in Canoga Park looking at a beautiful, woodgrain 1972 Gibson SG. I found the certifiably insane man through an ad in the classifieds that promised a near-perfect SG for $300. An old-time Angus Young fan (it helped too that Captain Sensible used an SG during The Damned’s Machine Gun Etiquette era), I was hell-bent on securing an SG to the exclusion of every other guitar on the planet. I called the number in the ad, got the address, and discovered that the seller of this incredible guitar lived with a huge tank of piranhas, spoke loudly, and loved Led Zeppelin. “DO YOU KNOW HOW TO PLAY “OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY?” he thundered. “Uh, I know some Zep, but not that one-” He turned the volume and gain on his Marshall half-stack up to way-uncool deafening levels and cranked it out. He could barely play. No wonder he was getting rid of the guitar. My ears hurt when he finally stopped. “THIS IS A BEAUTIFUL GUITAR,” he continued. “YOU DON’T SEE SGS IN THIS GOODA’ SHAPE ANYMORE THAT ARE THIS OLD.” He never explained it, but the neck on this guitar was really wide – a huge plus for me, as I originally learned to play on a classical guitar. Someone had customized this guitar at some point (although it probably wasn’t Piranha Man) and it was just what I was looking for. I paid him $300 of Chris Jung’s cash, drove back to Northridge, called Alex and told him I was in.

The memories are fading, but it seems like we practiced in Studio City, in one of those rehearsal-only studios. Alex, Peter, Tracy, Cake and I learned all of Alex and Peter’s old songs there, and added some new ones. Alex and Peter graciously made the let’s-come-up-with-a-band-name process completely democratic; each one of us came up with three band names, and everyone voted for them. The only one of mine I remember is Richard Cheese. My favorite of Alex’s was Fliegenklatsche (“Flyswatter” in German). Cake, however, overheard his Rock God Gibby Haynes discussing band names in an interview a few months earlier, one of which was “Dicktit.” He duly threw this into the mix, and even though I hated the fucking thing, Dicktit secured enough votes to become our new name. Before too long we played our first show on Friday, April 19th, 1991 at the late Jabberjaw on Pico.

Although I had been playing guitar for seven years at that point, I was a late-bloomer with respect to song writing. I helped write music for a couple of tunes in my high school band, The Floors, but in 1991 I had yet to write a song entirely on my own. Dicktit afforded me the opportunity to pen my own songs, and I responded by taking a song title my friend Dax Riner came up with years earlier – “Can You Stand the Frat” – and writing music that was unconsciously lifted directly from The Professionals’ “Join the Professionals.” No matter; I wrote the song and it was a catharsis. (In the song's defense, the parts of the song not stolen from Steve Jones weren’t bad at all.) My bandmates even allowed me to sing it myself, as I was constantly carping about Cake’s laissez faire attitude towards singing on key.

All of this is an incredibly long-winded way of saying that “Can You Stand the Frat,” the first song I ever wrote by myself, was the first song of mine ever to be properly recorded in an actual recording studio. After recording two songs (“Fixxed Bayonettes” and “Marc Stengel”) at Studio Dee on Glendale in late 1991, a dumbass classmate of mine at CSUN offered to fund our first EP, saying he was starting his own record label (“Atomic Industries”), and wanted Dicktit to launch it. Not entirely thrilled with the production at Studio Dee, we recorded our next two songs – “Frat,” and a new Alex tune, “Rocket Scientist” – in downtown L.A. at Biff Sanders’ loft-studio, Motiv Communications.

At that point, my only experiences with downtown Los Angeles were through Dicktit, and then only because we played a bunch of shows downtown, and recorded half of our EP downtown. I drove to the clubs, played, and drove home, never once stopping for a look around. Same thing when we recorded “Frat” and “Scientist.” Motiv Communications was at 1324 South Figueroa in an old, three-story brick building with the fire escape on the outside. I never saw buildings like this growing up in New Mexico, and it didn’t make much of an impression back then; my love affair with downtown Los Angeles’ historic core wouldn’t start for another six years, when I bought a copy of Kenneth Schessler’s This Is Hollywood at Larry Edmunds Bookseller on Hollywood. Back in 1991, we hauled our gear up two short stairways at 1324 South Fig, took the elevator to the third floor, and recorded our songs.

Years later, after moving back to NM in 1993, I was going through some crap in an old box and found the sheet of paper, the same sheet of scrap paper I had with me in 1991 when I called Pete on the phone and jotted down the address for Motiv Communications. There were various notes written all over the paper, but smack in the middle in huge letters it read: “1324 SOUTH FIGUEROA – BIFF SANDERS.” It had been so long I didn’t even remember where the studio had been. I took the paper with me on my next trip out to Los Angeles and found the building. It was still there, across Fig from the Convention Center. I snooped around inside and saw the hallway I dragged my amp down years before. The little convenience store was still on the first floor.


***

I don’t suppose anyone gives a shit that the three-story brick building once standing at 1324 South Fig is gone, obliterated to make way for another Convention Center parking lot. I found out it was gone back in September while visiting my friend Chris Jung. We went wandering around downtown for a couple of hours, made our way to Fig, and found nothing at 1324 South Fig but parking spaces. You never would’ve known anything else had ever been there. I guess if Angelinos are happy to see the legendary Ambassador Hotel get demolished, then probably a far less-famous building now dwarfed by the ugly Convention Center doesn’t figure on any preservation group’s top-ten list. It’s easy to argue that I’m bitter about this particular building getting torn down because a pivotal moment of my life occurred at 1324 South Fig. That’s exactly right – in fact, the couple of days I spent in Biff Sanders’ loft in May of 1992 recording and mixing “Frat” and “Scientist” were two of the coolest days of my life. The band played well, I got to record vocals for the first time, and I felt like I actually did something with my life for the first time. I even got to sing backup with Alex’s girlfriend Melanie Bruck on “Scientist.” Dicktit’s Fonzie Loves Chachie EP came out later that year, and after nearly a decade of playing guitar, I finally had something to show for it.

And it’s conceited and simplistic to say that the building meant a great deal to me and for that reason, shouldn’t have been torn down. Why should one building in a city of millions be left alone just because one person had fond memories there? Dang, I'm not sure how to respond to that; it should mean something that a life changed for the better in that building, that – for a change – something truly positive happened there, and maybe the building should be left alone. Pick any old building in downtown Los Angeles, and people worked there, ate there, fucked there. They lived entire lives there.

But more than that, people should give a shit that there's a physical, tangible link to our past in buildings like the one that once stood at 1324 South Fig. But no one really does. Bless the good folks at the L.A. Conservancy, doing the thankless work of trying to preserve historic structures instead of letting greedy developers tear them down for parking lots or strip malls or ugly-ass apartments. Even they can only do so much, tho. Where they fail, the rest of us are left with photographs and memories. And more parking, I guess.