Albums That Meant Something - Part 5 - Dreams of Last Year's Heroes

This poster, hung over the foot of my bed, is what I woke up to every morning for the better part of a decade. It's the backside of the poster-sized cover to The Feeding of the 5000, Crass's 1978 debut.

As I've mentioned in previous installments of this series, I came into punk rock at a time when the scene was at a low ebb, reduced to isolated individuals and small knots of like-minded enthusiasts. Historical documentation and available material was thin on the ground.

Occasionally one might come across some second-hand books or music mags or a rare affordable treasure in the used vinyl bins, but for the most part it was a trial-and-error journey through uncharted territory when it came to discovering stuff outside the Clash/Pistols/Ramones/Dead Kennedys back-catalogues...or the hardcore scene, which had had taken a bad turn towards the metallic. Hard-won and incomplete information about bands or styles or whatnot was passed by word of mouth or the occasional expensive leap of import-record buying faith.

In the spring of 1992, I was a twenty year old enthusiast of 80's Britpunk and Oi with a studded leather jacket and a crest of purple hair done up Misfits style. It was stock template punrockerdom -- aggro posturing, meticulous accessorizing, and provocative (if a tad tired) fashionizing -- and I say that without making excuses for or condemning my younger self. It's all part of being young, but even then I was feeling a bit long in the tooth for the game and with little idea where it was all going to lead.

Then I discovered Crass.

I'm not certain what it was that convinced me to give the seminal anarchopunks a listen. Patches, badges and jacket paintings featuring the band's distinctive symbols and slogans were commonly enough spotted around the scene, though the same applied to Discharge, and I never warmed to their stuff. It was more likely my insatiable hunger for material to listen to, combined with my reading some reviews for Crass gigs (written in painfully earnest anarcho-communist jargon) in some old fanzines I found. In any case, I ended up picking up a copy of Best Before 1984, a 1986 retrospective of the band's career, at In Your Ear on Commonwealth Avenue sometime in the late spring of 1992.

It was the most terrifying thing I had ever listened to.

It was twenty tracks -- taken from the band's singles and topped off with a live cut from their final performance -- of hardcore anarchist politics delivered over crude tribal punk riffs and occasionally garnished with experimental sonic effects. Protest music (or political music in general) is an iffy proposition, as the proper mix of art and ideology is difficult to achieve.

Crass never aimed for a proper balance, and let the musical aesthetics take a back seat to the message. Yet on the best of their efforts, the sheer force of their convictions elevates the material past the level of noisy agitprop. Whether on "Reality Asylum," a scathing spoken word attack on religion, or the more traditionally punky "Big A Little A," about non-violent resistance, the sense of outrage is visceral, palpable, and chilling in a way no cartoony shock value nonsense could ever hope to match.

More so than the music, it was the concepts behind the Crass collective that struck a chord with me during that transitional period. The theories, manifestos and explanations -- packed in as booklets with Best Before and Christ: The Album -- concerning the punk movement, anarchism, pacifism, and activism influenced me greatly even if I didn't entirely agree with their views on politics and human nature. (I'd love to think a society could work on the basis of voluntary cooperation alone, but harsh experience has taught me otherwise, and no amount of utopian cheerleading is going to change that.)

It got me to thinking about what my priorities were as a self-identified punk rocker, which I realized meant more than an elaborate hairstyle and dogmatic adherence to genre orthodoxy...which was great, because I've saved a ton of cash since I've quit buying ultra-super-hold hair gel and Cockney Rejects bootleg live albums.

Here are two of my favorite selections from Best Before 1984. The first, originally from a 1980 split single with the Poison Girls, is a pointed rejection of letting the ends justify the means. The second, taken from a 1982 EP, is a sandblast of vituperative anti-militarism which brought down the impotent wrath of Parliament. (An edited news clip about the controversy precedes the track.)

Crass - Bloody Revolutions

Crass - Sheep Farming in the Falklands

children of the counter-revolution

Buried somewhere in my attic archives is a copy of the January (February?) 1978 issue of Creem, which features a cover story on the Sex Pistols' disastrous American tour and subsequent break-up (wedged in at the end of the piece as a "breaking news item"). The issue also features a list of recommended punk records, with a mention of The Clash's debut LP being considered "too rough-sounding" for an American release by CBS and a review for The Jam's The Modern World.

The punky buzz was in the air at the time, with nuggets of punk news and rumors liberally sprinkled amidst the premature optimism for the Frampton/Bee Gees Sgt. Pepper movie's prospects and record labels playing both sides of the street with full page ads for The Vibrators' Pure Mania ("You've been conned! This is real rock and roll!") run back-to-back with ones for the various corporate rock gods punk was supposed to displace.

All in all, it offers an amazing glimpse at the rock'n'roll zeitgeist at a watershed time, the crossroads of millennarian rhetoric and sobering realizations. Which is why it pains me that I can't locate the damn thing after four years of searching through my boxes from the move to our house on the hillside. I suspect that I packed it, along with my Psychotronic film and video guides (which doubled as scrapbooks for the better part of a decade), into a "special" box for easy retrieval, providing yet another example of my being tripped up by my own clever thinking.

Oh, well, I guess we'll just have to settle for this unexpected find from the August 1978 issue of Pizzazz:

That's right, Mighty Marvel's mag for swingin' teens paid a visit to a Bowery dive bar in order to rake the cooling embers of the New York punk scene.

It starts off with some speculative junk food for thought...

...or will the "punk" tag be so freely and nonsensically applied that it becomes reduced to meaningless marketing jargon?

The writer then spends a while discussing club's overall ambience (i.e. dive bar chic) while unsurprisingly omitting any and all references to dirty needles and hepatitis infections. (Remember, kids: A 2% bleach solution is your friend.) As for CBGB's clientele...

Oh, so it's a downmarket version of Studio 54, then? Anyone care to wager if the dog collar and leather jacket kids mentioned in the article ever attended the venue before the media buzz began? Here's the accompanying photo of the tragically hip crowd...

One of these people is not a music critic for the Village Voice! Can you tell which one?
Tell me, Mr. Pizzazz Staff writer, how loud was it?

Loud enough to evoke a baffling Peanuts reference, apparently. Here's something I never understood about outsiders' descriptions of punk music -- music played in club venues is always too goddamn loud, unless the artist is playing an acoustic set. That's not something limited to just punk acts. If the music requires any sort of amplification, it's a given that the person in charge of the PA system will crank the volume up to "head inside a jet turbine" levels.

No vintage mass media depiction of punk rock would be complete without a taste of some representatively "punky" lyrics, and the article does not disappoint:

The members of Flip City were apparently alumni of the University of New Hampshire.
There is no entry for either Flip City in the International Discography of American New Wave. (Shrapnel, the other band cited in the article, has an entry in the listing of New Jersey acts.) By the time the article was written, most of the founding members of the Bowery scene had moved onto bigger venues, broken up, or slid into the "no wave" or "mutant disco" scenes, leaving an assortment of wannabes and bandwagon jumpers to occupy the field.

I'm kind of curious about Flip City, though, with its pair of female vocalists and the somewhat new wavey description of the band. Shrapnel, whose act centered around dressing up like Vietnam vets and engaging in mock firefights, sounds like yet another example of the novelty shock punk buffoonery that has glommed onto the scene since its inception and rarely lives up to its over-the-top promise. It's a lot easier to be loud and obnoxious than it is to be loud, obnoxious, and clever...

...which brings us to this mindboggling inset featuring one of the "really big American punk groups" of the era:

What the fuck, Pizzazz?
There's no Flip City, no Shrapnel, and definitely no goddamn Kiss in today's musical selections, just a swell pair of cuts from the golden era of the NYC punk -- off-kilter rock romanticism by Television and Suicide's sweetly sinister brand of synthpunk. I'm quite fond of a lot of the music that came out of the 1970's NYC punk scene, but I'm less charitable regarding the scene itself, which spent decades trying to distance itself from "punk" before rushing back to assert its primacy once the label had come back in vogue.

Television - See No Evil (from Marquee Moon, 1977)

Suicide - Cheree (from Suicide, 1977)

la-la la la-la-lah

So Elton Billy Preston-John, Freddie Mercury, Disco Cowboy, and the World's Ugliest Ace Frehley fan are all punk rockers? Huh. It must be true, because it appeared in Dazzler #3 (May 1981).

(Although I am absolutely certain there's some would-be rock critic out there wasting megabytes of hard drive space expounding how "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting," "Bohemian Rhapsody," and "Nothing from Nothing" are seminal punk classics. In the space of twenty years, we've gone from a situation where the mainstream media wouldn't touch the genre with a ten foot pole to one where folks are falling all over themselves in a rush to tag anything and everything with the punk label.)

When I first came across this panel (via Essential Dazzler Vol. 1), I had a brief moment of punk rock indignation over its absurd inaccuracy. Then I remembered this, the "punk rawk" CHiPs episode (which has been tragically yanked from YouTube), and the various American Sex Pistols fans shown in Lech Kowalski's 1980 documentary D.O.A. and realized that the fellows in the comic knew exactly what they were doing.

Television Personalities - Part Time Punks (from the Where's Bill Grundy Now? EP, 1978; collected on Yes, Darling, But Is It Art? 1995) - How did my not-quite-friend Tim once put it? "A poseur is a punk that isn't you or anyone in your circle of friends." All of us may be sinners, but some are more damned than others.

SNFU - Real Men Don't Watch Quincy (from a 1990 bootleg 7" of 1982 compilation tracks/demos) - I'm amazed at the extremely low ratio of crap to quality among late 70's/early 80's Canadian punk material, especially since our neighbors to the north seem so, well, polite (compared to their surly cousins in the States, at least).

everything we crave will be inside

First off, I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to comment on my last post. I felt a little dizzy from all the praise, but the consensus was that whatever I’m doing here is working for you folks. That’s nice to know, as I’m too complacent and old to change my ways at this point.

No real theme for today’s posts, just a collection of random thoughts with musical accompaniment.

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Concerning last night’s Grammy Awards:

I’m not a fan of The Police, as I consider them the kind of “new wave” music that my parents would listen to (also see The Eurythmics). However, for all the hullabaloo surrounding their reunion appearance, I was expecting something other than “Roxanne,” a song so overplayed and over-referenced that it has become more of a punchline (Scrantonicity! Woo!) than an actual song.

It would have been nice if, instead of pandering to public expectations, the band came out swinging with something a bit more unexpected and challenging, like this track:

The Police – Synchronicity II (from Synchronicity, 1983) – My love for this song has nothing to do with musical aesthetics, and everything to do with its ability to act as a mnemonic macro capable of calling up all the wonders and terrors of an early 80’s childhood. I don’t know why my brain chose to place a nostalgia trigger in this song, and not a better-loved track from that era, unless it’s somehow linked to the way I associate certain 70’s TV actors with the smells of various deli meats and cheeses.

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Speaking of 70’s TV, some kind soul has uploaded a condensed version of the notorious “punk rock” episode of ChiP's to YouTube. It’s a panic-mongering mainstream take on youth subculture (as pioneered by Jack Webb and countless “educational” films with titles like “Hippies: Smelly Red Dupes”) that would have had me seeing red back in my full on punk days, but now I think it’s hilarious as fuck, and as a bonus features a woman dressed like a streetwalking Raggedy Ann doll. Here’s the first part:



The rest can be found here and here. KEEP ON PUNKING!

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This might be old news to some of you, but Irdial-Discs has made The Conet Project, a four CD set of shortwave number station recordings, available for free (with a .pdf of the accompanying booklet) at their website. I first found out about these mysterious transmissions and other shortwave anomalies through William Poundstone’s Big Secrets, but lacked the means to listen to the actual thing until I stumbled across these recordings. The written descriptions don’t do the genuine articles justice. There is something fascinating and unsettling about these multilingual alphanumeric recitations and electronic blip tones, leaving one with the feeling that they are eavesdropping on the static-distorted conversations of upper band phantoms.

Here are two sample recordings from the set:

The Swedish Rhapsody

High Pitch Polytone

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While I’m digging into my bag of odds and ends, I’d like to put a plug in for The Dents, a local punk band that my wife has been raving about since she caught them during the intermission of last Saturday’s Boston/Philly roller derby bout. The Dents play tight melodic punk rock with some killer harmonies; just the sort of music my wife goes ga-ga for. You find out more about band (and score some sample mp3s) at their website.

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…and finally, because I feel like it, here’s some nifty bubblegum pop and rock courtesy of the Saturday morning cartoon universe.

The Banana Splits – I’m Gonna Find a Cave (from We’re the Banana Splits, 1968) – How is it that four guys in psychedelic animal costumes, fronting for some session musicians (including Al Kooper, Gene Pitney, and Barry White), managed to create music that exceeds the entertainment quotient of current Top 40 artists by a factor of ten?

Josie & The Pussycats – Stop Look and Listen (from Josie & The Pussycats, 1970) – The slightly scatterbrained Pussycat drummer, Melody, was my first childhood crush, along with the girl who played Becky Thatcher on The New Adventures of Huck Finn. “Blondes, always blondes,” says my very dark-haired wife. Hey, it’s not the girl you bring to the dance; it’s the girl you leave with that matters.