Time Takes Three Places At Once

What I was doing

13 YEARS AGO: Freezing my ass off on a stool behind the counter at the Record Recycler (4659 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA – RIP), cleaning a stack of tepid, late-disco LPs by hand, listening to a beat up copy of MICK RONSON’s Slaughter on 10th Avenue LP over the soundsystem. Dweeb nonpersonality cum popstar BECK is also there as a customer, checking out the used rock section.

At some point, BECK tentatively approaches the counter, and asks: ”Um – do you have a bathroom here?” I say: ”yeah – in the back, through that door” and point to the back office door. BECK hesitates for a moment, frozen, zero expression, staring at the counter. “Just, back through that door there?” Me: ”Yep. Just back through that door.”

BECK stands there for what feels like an extremely long while – considering his options, I suppose. But now I’m getting uncomfortable. I don’t precisely know what he more he wants me to do – help him, maybe? So I say: ”you want me to show you where it is?” BECK, visibly relieved, says: ”Yes!” I show him the way, thankfully without further incident. He emerges intact 5 minutes later.

BECK then stares at the counter and asks if the MICK RONSON record I’m listening to is for sale. Shit. ”Well, it’s pretty beat. You could find a nicer copy pretty easily. This is just sort of an in-store play copy. You know, to listen to in the store and stuff.” Which is followed by another one of these interminably long, coldsweat silences. And I, in a vulnerable moment of either Honest Abe free market wheelin’ and dealin’, or awkward tongue-tied cowardice, end up selling him the LP for one lousy dollar. My wife STILL won’t let me live this down.

19 YEARS AGO: Getting off work at Either/Or Bookstore (124 Pier Ave., Hermosa Beach, CA – RIP), heading to my older brother’s apartment in South Torrance. Upon arrival, I find not only my brother but his galpal tripping ha-a-a-rd on some righteous LSD blotter, blasting METALLICA’s Master of Puppets cassette, watching David Lynch’s Eraserhead on mute. Niiice. As one might guess, the anxiety-provoking audiovisual input is bumming everyone out pretty majorly. This, in turn, bums me out royally – hey he’s my brother, after all.

With a bit of cheerleading, I pull pry em loose of that reality and herd everyone into my pickup. We then drive up to my pad – the smallest studio apartment in the whole of North Redondo. Somewhere en route the vibe brightens up considerably, but unfortunate things like ”dude the police are everywhere” are still voiced. Once safely inside my pad, my guests plant themselves on the shag carpet and enter into a deep state of relaxation whilst paging through ROBERT WILLIAMS’ low brow art books and listening to ENO’s Music For Airports to take the edge off. No further worries are verbalized. The next day my brother phones and says ”that art shit totally saved me from the hairy precipice of insanity.”

25 YEARS AGO: Arriving at a winter junior high school dance at the Margate Intermediate School (2161 Via Olivera, Palos Verdes Estates, CA – RIP) auditorium. I am late, the place is packed, and the cover band is crucifying something I’d identify years later as a truncated version of KID CREOLE & THE COCONUTS’ ”Stool Pigeon”. I keep my head down and tell myself I don’t really want to be there, this is stupid, all the girls at this school are fake, stuck-up preppies, just boring etc. etc. etc.

I go stand against the wall next to L., an awkward fella who always arrived extra-early to these things wearing an unfashionable satin jacket. He never seemed to dance much. After a stomach- knotting length of time, the cover band’s singer lets rip his last ”Ack! Ack! Ack! Ack!”, and the song mercifully ends. Dancers slow and begin to return to their chosen wall-space.

At this point S. slowly approaches me, smiling in her friendly though slightly conspiratorial way. Out of pure fear-of-girls (particularly preppy ones like S.) I avoid eye contact at first. But then, realizing it’s not so hard, I return her smile. The band lurches into their manic and hurried take on THE ROMANTICS ”What I Like About You” and S. pops the question: ”wanna dance?” I nod and say yes yes yes. We get out there and dance the Belinda Carlisle wildly together, I have a ball and my whole freakin’ world loosens up one incredibly important notch. After the song ends, S. confides: ”I like dancing with you – you don’t make me look like an idiot.” It makes my entire week.

*originally posted on a now defunct LiveJournal

Wolfcraft

No reason to blog about the great WITCHCRAFT, GRAVEYARD & WOLF PEOPLE gig we saw last night in London, when my wife has kindly done it for me. Only thing I’d add is WITCHCRAFT’s Magnus Pelander really is the missing link between Scott ‘Wino’ Wienrich and Nick ‘Bevis Frond’ Salomon – the highest kudos I can offer. And WOLF PEOPLE? Them unassuming guys had the jaws of every stringy longhair Swede (that be you, GRAVEYARD) on the goddamn floor, with good reason too. WP are gonna be huge, I tell ya.

Progressive Kinda Rhymes With Caribbean

Apologies for the lack of action round the Pig State lately – been on vacation the past couple weeks, adrift in warm Caribbean breezes of the US Virgin Islands. No indigenous rock and roll was heard during my travels, but at least two separate versions of Buster Poindexter’s manic “Hot, Hot, Hot” were noted – the first rendered on cheap solo gtr & rhythm track by a Hound Dog Taylor-looking gentleman outside the St. John airport, the second on steel drum in a restaurant we dined in too frequently (belch).

When not snorkeling, drinking, burning, or sleeping, I could invariably be found listening to progressive rock on my I-Pod – and, inexplicably, only that prog that grew outta the neck of the woods I happened to grow up in. Now this was a somewhat new development in my musical maturation – even as an adult, prog hasn’t been something I’m always enamored by – and it sure irked the hell outta my wife. But as I’ve blogged about the music of the South Bay many, many times here before, I suppose it was inevitable that I’d eventually write about prog sounds from my old stomping grounds too. So here goes:

1. AMBROSIA – “Time Waits For No One” (Ambrosia, 20th Century Fox Records, 1975) – There was this short lived Redondo Beach record store for a couple years in the 80’s called Round Sounds that seemingly made it their sole mission to revive classic 70’s prog rock. ELP gatefold albums were displayed with pride on the walls; GENTLE GIANT listening parties were arranged but sparsely attended; and yep the owner sported exactly the frizzy mullet and soccer jersey you might imagine he did. Here, all this amazing post punk/hardcore underground rock was unfolding all around us, and this dude’s trying to sell me my first ALAN PARSONS PROJECT record.

But I do not doubt that this shop owner held AMBROSIA dear to his heart. Hell, I’m starting to myself. All these AMBROSIA fellas grew up in the South Bay, they claimed San Pedro as their home years before that town became most-closely associated with THE MINUTEMEN, and they concocted at least one great if totally commercial LP in 1975 that you should check out before you die. Yes they sound PABLO CRUISE/DOOBIE BROTHERS slick (how could you not if you were a hotshit SoCal career musician in the mid 70’s?), but this also sounds like 4 dudes still totally excited to be allowed to leap through ambitious, progressive rock hoops for the rest of us to marvel at. The story goes these guys were diehard CROSBY, STILLS, NASH, AND YOUNG fans, until they had a spiritual moment at a KING CRIMSON gig on the Sunset Strip and went for it. In turns West Coast breezy, fusionoid complex, and dorkily escapist – at one point they’re playing beneath a hammy reading of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky – this was the result, and a thing of beauty it is. You punkers will forever deride em but that’s just cause mullets and soccer jerseys are an easy target. The harder thing to do is find the balls to give this a listen. AMBROSIA might just surprise you like they did me.

2. CHAKRA – “Keys to the Kingdom” (Chakra, 1979) – I don’t kid myself: this ain’t “somewhere in between bands like RUSH, YES, ZAZU, and GENTLE GIANT” as every other prog website says about this thing. No, this will never be anything but a muted, local prog rock relic from a smelly bedroom in Torrance, ca. ‘79. Earnest in it’s love of sprightly keyboard figures and overly-arranged song structure, these guys at least display a DIY enthusiasm missing from pros like AMBROSIA. It might’ve even accidentally got CHAKRA opening slots for THE LAST at their early, more out-of-the-way suburban gigs . . . OK I too could’ve done without the Christian lyrics, but hey if I ditched all the records in my cabinet by avowed Xian types I’d be staring at one jaundiced collection, that’s fr sure. My wife laughs at me when I play it, and I rarely play it all the way through. But dammit I’m still happy that it’s 2009 and I got a CHAKRA record to spin if I wanna get tap my foot to regular joes playing in odd time meters. Me I can follow CHAKRA’s kinda convoluted, suburban musical logic, even when I’m blushing.

3. 5UU’S – “Roan” (Hunger’s Teeth, ReR Megacorp, 1994) – This is actually well past their South Bay phase, after they’d become world explorers/ex-pats not unlike Yours Truly. 5UU drummer & leader Dave Kerman hates the prog label, but how can a band that started as a KING CRIMSON cover band ever ditch that tag completely? While these guys became known as the American wing of HENRY COW’s Rock In Opposition (RIO) movement, I prefer to remember them as The Band That Confused The Heck Outta Me The Most whenever Splat Winger would spin em on KXLU’s Brain Cookies radio show – this was frequently. Their musicality was always scary, lemme tell ya – in ambition, scope, and execution. Upon reflection stinky RIO socks are jammed in lotsa hidden corners of their sound, particularly in their ZAPPAesque integration of Schoenberg’s 12-Tone Technique in composition. But it’s the sheer intensity and determined angst of the sound/conviction they exhibit that really pins me to the wall. Why didn’t Greg and Chuck ever get these guys to record something for SST Records back when they were still trapped in the South Bay? They seemed a natural to Blast a few choice Concepts back in mid-80’s Torrance.

The 60’s Will Never Die

It isn’t often that I go out for self-consciously retro, 60’s pop revival sounds. Being born in 1970 meant that anything authentically 60’s that was still around during my childhood had to be understood through the depressively distorting, earth-toned lens that was the 70’s. And by the 80’s? Well boomer revisionist historians (author Marilyn Ferguson, director Oliver Stone, ex-DOOR Ray fucking Manzarek) made sure we made sense of the Summer of Love through their self-congratulatory, narcissistic eyes. All this conspired to get me to ignore most of what sprung from the retro Paisley Underground & Cavern Club scenes in SoCal during my younger years. Me, I needed music much louder harder faster just to keep some kinda sanity amidst the sucker punch of harsh 80’s teendoom.

That’s why I’m still surprised when some willfully throwback, Beatle-y tune strikes me as great shakes. It ain’t the norm, ya know? And it doesn’t happen too often. But when it does, I dance and sing along as loud as I can, every time. Here’s one from each of the past 4 decades that still hasn’t left me alone:

1. THE LEOPARDS – “I Wonder If I’ll Ever See You Again” (from Kansas City Slickers, Moon Records, 1977) If you are a Ray Davies fanatic, chances are this band needs no introduction. THE LEOPARDS were the best lo-fi reproduction of Pye Records-era KINKS ever committed to tape. That they waxed it on a private label outta Kansas City in the just-pre punk years was the icing on the cake, and meant they’re now remembered as part of the foundation of what eventually became known as Power Pop. As great as this is, I reckon their 80’s LA phase (typified by their cult hit, “Psychedelic Boy“) to be even better. But this kinda jaunty, Anglophile pop was nearly unprecedented back in the Midwest during PETER FRAMPTON’s heyday. Lost In The Grooves put out a needle-drop of this on CD that was available for all of 2 seconds a few years back, but otherwise this gem has languished rarely-heard for far too long, tucked away on dusty collector scum record shelves. Reissue it, and fast.

2. MAD MONSTER PARTY – “Can’t Stop Loving You” ( Pink-A-Boo Records, 1988) – When Paula Pandora went unabashedly cockrock, ex-bandmate Gwynne kept true to her 60’s dayglo roots first with her own version of THE PANDORAS (aka THE GWYNNDORAS), and then with further hot allgirl action in MAD MONSTER PARTY. They may have been a bit faltering and very much of a specific time/place, but the songs – penned by John Kling, later of Michael Quercio’s JUPITER AFFECT – were catchy, proud, and heartsleeve ernest. Plus they managed to avoid that cutesy, little-girl-lost thing that Susanna Hoffs beat to death with THE BANGLES. Shit this must’ve had Rodney B melting in his KROQ mic booth. MAD MONSTER PARTY even recorded an endearing cover of an obscure but totally brilliant LAST song, “Someday I’ll Have You“, sealing the deal for me. Everything you ever wanted to hear/see about these chicks and all their galpals is already documented over here.

3. LOVE – “Girl On Fire” (Distortions Records, 1994) If you never heard this, you missed out on the single very best 90’s recorded comeback by a bonafide 60’s acid casualty. Hell, this ain’t really retro at all; it’s the sound of someone ON FIRE again like he hadn’t been for a couple decades. Dig that “7 & 7 Is” riff quote in the bridge – Arthur’s retooled his classic sound for an entirely new generation. The BABY LEMONADE backing guys are ripping it up, and Arthur’s in total command here. Falling James called him “The Anti-Brian Wilson”; surely, the LOVE man lives up to that rep here. Would that he’d put out an entire album of new material like this before he passed; it woulda been hot I tell ya.

4. THE MAYDAYS – “You Don’t Have To Wait” (Flare Records, 2002) – Why is it that folks don’t revive mid 60’s true blue-eyed soul as often as our forefathers wallowed in it? I’m guessing that the white-guy imitates black-guy thing just doesn’t have the same potency it once did . . . or maybe it’s because most retro acts don’t have a frontman as talented as MAYDAY Pat Johnson. This band was a short lived Bay-area supergroup of sorts, featuring fellas who’d done time with everyone from THE CRAWDADDYS to Penelope Houston. This was their lone recorded moment. But the flip (“The Very Last Time”) is killer too, and can be heard on Pat’s MySpace – again, I mourn the full-length that never got recorded. Pat really knew how to write and sing a great song, and his band most definitely understood the subtler aspects of gloriously neo-Edwardian clad, rockin’ pop.