Part 8 (1/2)
I have my own view of the subject, which is si to act out dreams of desperateness in a place where those dreams aren't intrinsic, then you just have to act a little harder and a little tougher After all, it's a great kick, a great fancy of revolt, to feign hopelessness in a place just drowning with hope When the passion and the moment faded, the punks could always kick back and settle into the subli rhythm of the city-and many of them did That cadence of insensibility has been what's always kept tiave the punks their momentum, and eventually it outlasted them Undoubtedly, that made some of the scene's detractors fairly happy But for the rest of us, those few voices of outrage that startled this vast, unconcerned cityscape are so we miss terrifically
ALONG THE WAY, the LA punk scene produced a handful of bands that were seen by so X and the Go-Go's (I know it's hard to believe, but the Go-Go's really were a punk band once upon a tined theroups, clearly X was the h vastly less popular) force Indeed, X reat punk records (especially Wild Gift and Under the Big Black Sun) and also played definitional, high-reaching, great live shows In concert, guitarist Billy Zoom, drummer Don Bonebrake, bassist John Doe, and vocalist Exene Cervenka took songs like ”sex and Dying in High Society,” ”Johnny Hit and Run Pauline,” ”The Once Over Twice,” and ”Your Phone's Off the Hook, but You're Not” and pushed them to their lis in order to strengthen their roup never abandoned its sense of essential unity X was, after all, a band about community-for thatbut practical-minded alternative to personal dissolution and fashi+onable nihilism-and for all the tension and frantic propulsion in their ether like firm, interconnected patterns
But by 1985, X's sense of faan to fray John Doe and Exene Cervenka not only sang the best team vocals in punk's history, they had also been a real teae suffered a breakup, and though the pair's creative partnershi+p remained intact, the romantic disunion took its emotional toll
In most ways that count, the album that came from that rupture, Ain't Love Grand, was an albued and ee new bonds of esteem and comradeshi+p Of course, before one can arrive at any such understanding, one has to cut through the rees and admissions of infidelity (”My Goodness” and ”Little Honey”), all the ” and ”Watch the Sun Go Down”) At one point, in ”Supercharged,” Exene delivers a taunting account of the feverish and relentless sex she enjoys with a new lover, and John Doe sings along with her, like a grim witness to his own exclusion One can't help but wonder, whatat such athat this is what one et past the bad truths After all, the band survived this rupture, and soed with one of its bravest works yet It's as if, in the place of children, Doe and Cervenka spawned a certain artistry that deether not merely for the sake of their e that they couldno place else but in this band, with each other The two no longer shared the same home or same love, but they certainly shared the same harmonies-an affinity they could find only in each other-and that's worth whatever the cost of their continued alliance Of course, this tiether, and not surprisingly, they pulled off their s (”All or Nothing,” ”Watch the Sun Go Down,” and ”I'll Stand Up for You”) where they stepped away fro friendshi+p and partnershi+p ”When s to Exene in the albuenerous moment ”I'll stand up for you, and you'll stand up for me”
In their music and their forbearance, Doe and Cervenka asserted that soation that co with modern tifully than in Ain't Love Grand
As for the Go-Go's-I have to ad them The band's first albuh savvy attempt to meet commercial expectations of neave diffusion, and their second (Vacation, 1982) wasout more surface-fun fare But the third record, 1984's Talk Show, proved to be so closer to a self-directed work of vengeance, as if the group had so their for-or perhaps just the internal friction within the band during that season-occurred to ed revelation In fact, the record was so good it had the effect of splitting the group up-though not forever When the band returned in 1994 with Return to the Valley of the Go-Go's, they sounded like they were playing just for the mere fun of it Yet ”eles As Greil Marcus noted in Mystery Train, LA is a city where Nathanael West's and Raymond Chandler's dark version of urban realism are no more reflective of deep truths than Brian Wilson's fun-in-the-sun view of the city's ethical climate Pop, as a medium of fun, and fun as a purpose of pop, is still an inevitable and necessary tradition in the LA scene
LOS ANGELES in the 1980s also produced two other bands I'd like to comment on briefly One is the Minuteuitarist D Boon, bassist Mike Watt, and drummer Mike Hurley, ere part of the scene nearly since its inception In the early 1980s, they released ere two of theof all American hardcore albus since the Clash's debut LP): The Punch Line and What Makes a Man Start Fires They were politically and , and quicker, harder tees
The Minute musician's hardcore band-which is to say they wrote and perforular and committed political point-of-view, and they played fro, hard, fleet shards of bass guitar cut across the contending structure set up by the iuitar lines and eruptive dru references-everything from Chuck Berry to Sly Stone, from Miles Davis to James ”Blood” Ulmer-exposed themselves and took on new identities, and, in the process, new histories Seeing them live, they e, and had finally understood why Ahab lost Soet over or around, and too irresistible to ignore
On December 22, 1985, D Boon was killed in an automobile accident, and the Minutemen necessarily came to an end The loss was immense In his quest with the Minutemen, Boon clearly worked ure In fact, sowriting style from that of Watts and Hurley, which may be a tribute to the sense of unity and functional deroups as disparate as the Band and the Ornette Coleh, Boon often seeure in the Minutemen, and not merely because of his obvious physical bulk, nor because his vocals tended to sound a bit better humored and ironic than Watts' Actually, whatperformer was that he seemed to have some kind of imperative physical involvement with thehis guitar, pulling and twisting wondrous, co the served up by Watts and Hurley
D Boon and the Minuteth cassette, co, resourceful, and continually surprising American music of the 1980s Watt and Hurley went on to foruitarist and vocalist eD fROMOHIO, and in 1995, Mike Watt released a widely respected albu contributions by Eddie Vedder, Henry Rollins, Evan Dando, andTrees, Sonic Youth, Meat Puppets, and Soul Asyluroup was the one that, at moments, also disappointed me theevenings in an LA record store, Westwood's Rhino, alongside a young, friendly guy named Steve Wynn I learned that Wynn had formed a band, Dream Syndicate, and he invited me to catch their maiden appearance at a Valley spot, the Country Club Froe, I was in love They had that ideal round, part Neil Young, part John Fogerty-but they also had soness to take their iven moment, even if that moment resulted in chaos or decomposition They also had spirit and huathered to see some no-account neave headliner or another-hated Dream Syndicate on the spot They booed the band, pelted them with beer cups, spit on them, and deot soht,” and for the first time in Dream Syndicate's set, the audience erupted in a cheer ”The bad news,” he added, ”is that it goes on for a really long tio on for a long time-about twenty-five minutes By the time it was over, there were onlytheth album, Days of Wine and Roses, was one of the best works of 1983-boisterous and reckless, and full of a weird and stirring beauty That hen Dreaht the ear of A & M Records (you re went terribly wrong Some said it was outside pressures, some said it was internal problems, but whatever the cause, Dreaht before our eyes and ears The group's A & M debut, Medicine Show (1984)-which had taken, and was utterly without the spark of spontaneity that had roup's live shohich had once seeenerated into pat, heartless perforun as an inspired vision had turned siuileful career, and it was hardly surprising when, a few uitarist Karl Precoda, had parted ways
But the best dreams die hard, so the tale uitarist and producer, Paul Cutler Their next albu work of redemption In particular, it seemed to be a record about what it means to lose one's way and to suain In such songs as ”Dying Embers” and ”Now I Ride Alone,” Steve Wynn conjured bitter, dark remembrances of blown chances and bad choices, and while he clearly cared a great deal about the people who get sed up in such dissolution, he refused to surrender to the roet on with it,” he sang at one point, even though he was singing about soo of his own decline or his own broken past Maybe Drea time, but they still had music to make, and Wynn sounded as if he intended to make it as honestly and compassionately as he kne Drearouped more than once and Wynn went on toDisplay But Out of the Grey was the best music Dream Syndicate ever made
I wrote about Drea-bound, gray-brointer day, I was driving to work, listening to KROQ-LA's neave station that playedmusic Then the DJ said a feords that perkeda lot about this LA band the Drea by the new bands a chance at KROQ, so here goes”
With that, ”Halloween,” fro fro sound unlike anything I'd yet heard on that station It re that causes one to fall in love with rock & roll in the first place, that sense of inquiring enition There it all was: flashes of the Velvet Underground, Television, and white noise Rolling Stones, in the collision of guitars and the hard, uncoone After only thirty seconds of rapturous cacophony, it disappeared with soundless abruptness
The DJ fuer ”That's all I need to hear,” he said ”I like to give new local bands a chance, but this is ridiculous You won't be hearing more of that band on this station”
And indeed, I never did
I told this story to Wynn one day during an interviehile ere seated at a haer stand on Santa Monica Boulevard He looked wonderstruck, then just shook his head, laughing
”God, that's wonderful,” he said ”To think we could disturb somebody who's supposed to be as aware of 'new music' as these people are supposed to be” He let the thought trail off into a bemused smile
”At least on't be overexposed,” he said after a while, laughing once again
BY THE LATE 1980s, LA's punk scene no longerthat was now all over the world-in fact, maybe it had always been in the air, in the history, in one form of voice or another, from Robert Johnson and Presley, to Jerry Lee Lewis and Sinatra But without what punk accomplished in the late 1970s and in the early 1980s, American artists like REM, L7, Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, or even (God help us) Alanis Morrisette, and UK acts like ABC, Huue, Oasis, Blur, Pulp, U2, Sinead O'Connor, and the Prodigy, ht never have happened or an, the place where you could hear punk at its brightest and ton, especially in the music of a trio called Nirvana But ill come to that story later
van halen: the endless party
Our ancestry is firmly rooted in the anied Children of all animal kind, we inherited many a social nicety as well as the predator's way
ROBERT ARDREY
FROM AFRICAN GENESIS
It's like ays say: There's a little Van Halen in everybody-all we're trying to do is bring it out
ALEX VAN HALEN
David Lee Roth -roo his hips lewdly and tugging at the waistband of his ruby-red spandex tights until the elastic crotch zone bulges like a gaudy Christ craer preens and postures like a bestial champion of autoeroticisesture for the ladies ill crowd around the stage tonight-the idea being that when they look up and behold David, they also behold his Goliath
After a quick check tofroers over to where I' chair ”Hey,his woolly tresses back from his shoulders with a blase flick of the head, ”I want you to feel free to ask us anything you want, write about anything you see Van Halen's got nothin' to hide But,” he adds, leaning closer and slipping deeper into his patented street patois, ”let me forewarn you: What you've walked into here is a self-created fantasyland, where everything happens four times as much and four times as quick, like an around-the-calendar New Year's Eve
”It's like, anything you desire you can find here-whatever your vice, whatever your sexual ideals Whatever somebody else can't do in his nine-to-five job, I can do in rock & roll”
Tickled by his description of rock & roll privilege, Roth laughs lustily and bounds back to the , man, is that I'm proud of the e live, not so much because of the records we sell or theto have afterward to celebrate all that”
ALL THINGS considered, Roth and the other uitarist Eddie Van Halen, and his brother, drummer Alex Van Halen-have plenty to celebrate Their most recent album, Women and Children First, vaulted into Billboard's Top 10 only one week after its release The band's previous LPs, Van Halen and Van Halen II, have reportedly sold more than 7 million copies ide In addition, the pair of sold-out shows in Detroit-part of the 1980 Invasion tour, the group's ant headline trek to date-denotes an even more crucial triumph of the marketplace: a fervid acceptance of Van Halen by Aroup is now one of the undisputed kingpins of hard rock, ranking alongside such venerable Visigoths as Led Zeppelin, Ted Nugent, and Aerosh, differs from the current crop of metal bands (such as Rush, the Scorpions, UFO, and Triuence in popularity Their ignoble posturing is a welcome reprieve from the empty-headed pomposity of blowhards like Rush, and their
Van Halen, however, isn't an exaeny of yesteryear's e like a brazen, self-endeared crossbreed of Black Oak Arkansas' Jirum, Grand Funk Railroad's Mark Farner, and Zeppelin's Robert Plant Eddie Van Halen, the group's uitar like so of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jiether, Van Halen comes off as intuitively smart and scrupulously artless-perhaps the ent, or at least Cheap Trick
But, like many of their heavy-arians At the outset of this tour, at the University of Southern Colorado in Pueblo, group and crewroom, and restroom after the caterers refused to remove some brown M & M's from a plate of candy (Van Halen has a clause written into their perfor of brown M & M's backstage When asked why, Alex Van Halen replied, ”Why not?”) The result of that little lark, according to one report, was 10,000 to 15,000 worth of dae and a ban on rock concerts in Pueblo for the forseeable future
Instances like that one have prolorious” and ”brutish” and to view the band itself as a pack of lack-witted, carnal-h appraisal of heavy- as he pulls on a pair of scarlet-plumed boots, I ask what he thinks of the critics' aspersions
”You want to knoe're ani at his feathered footwear ”Letenerating heat in ht My basement faculties take over coht like to talk about art, but look where art is: It's in the fucking gutter, starving Van Halen likes to keep things si is giving our daily livesabout is e live”
WHEN DAVID LEE ROTH declares that the life Van Halen leads is the sa is that it's a life bri sex and unabashed affluence Like many of their comrades of the metal persuasion, Van Halen ballyhoos the time-honored ideal of ceaseless, re In fact, in their capable hands, the party ideal becomes a hard and fast cohts, a boisterous, full-blown saturnalia is bound to follow
Tonight, the appointed place is the Cobo Arena, where nearly twelve thousand heavy-metal zealots-all with athered to lend their voice to the party And lend it they do When Van Halen hits the stage, heralded by Eddie Van Halen's stor yowl of acclareets them from the floor ”Let e, ”when Detroit raises its voice, it's fucking scary”
Everything about this show-fro rainbow-spectruest such setup ever taken on the road)-is designed to search out even the most narcotized kid in the furthest reaches of Cobo's three-tiered balcony and thu thu blend of Alex' double-barreled dru, palpable bass lines, and Eddie's fleet, blazing guitar