1979: Various Artists: Posh Boy - Beach Blvd.
Because of the folks working tirelessly from the inside -- the promoters, DIY venue owners, and others who spent every waking moment spreading the gospel of this loud, bizarre, shitstained music -- early American punk reached the unlikeliest of ears. Orange County's Robbie Fields, known in certain circles as the Posh Boy, was one such chronicler, and it's in no small part because of him that the world came to know the darker, dirtier side of sunny southern California.
Beach Blvd., a stellar compilation first released on the Posh Boy label in 1979, features the music of three disparate groups: the sunny, melodic, totally SoCal swagger of The Simpletones; the laborious, spooky ghost-fuzz of Rik L Rik; and the ADD-riddled pop-punk of The Crowd, an outfit equal parts Dead Kennedys and The Cramps. None sounded quite like the other, yet all three groups now seem insistently entrenched in a particular milieu. This is, of course, because they were. In the late 1970s and early 80s, the southern California punk scene was among the richest and most vibrant the world over, and it shows on Beach Blvd.
The major-key harmonies of The Simpletones embody the West Coast's split from the New York and UK scenes. Surf-influenced, lyrically upbeat (if quite sardonic), and often humorous, their brand of snotty garage rock, with titles like "I Have a Date" and "Tiger Beat Twist," is the perfect soundtrack for the skeevy beach bum who peers at girls over rainbow-tinted shades, knocking over sandcastles and swigging schnapps. The Simpletones most melodious tune (and perhaps the album's default theme song), the doo-woppy "California," delivers as concise a mission statement as any: "They say the chicks are really nice/ And the cars, they go so fast/ And the beach is just the most/ And the surf is really wild/ I wish that I could stay here all my life." On the surface, it reads like a schlocky, gee-golly, Mike Love sort of deal, but the song's apparent buoyancy is belied by its eerie, ironic undertone. Besides, the next track is "I Like Drugs," with the chorus "I like drugs/ They get me high." One guesses the sentiment is somewhat less satirical.
Next up is Rik L Rik, a pioneering L.A. scuzz-rocker whose work here falls somewhere between The Misfits and T.S.O.L. His is a wonderfully hazy, slurred brand of rock 'n' roll -- the flippantly dismal soundtrack to smoking dope in some unkempt necropolis. Born Richard Elerick, he spent time in various Huntington Beach bands including F-Word and Negative Trend, but is credited here under his own assumed name. The handful of his songs included on Beach Blvd., though less approachable, are damn good jams nonetheless; sloppy, fuzzed-out, and maybe a little angry, they contrast with the sunny beach punk of The Simpletones but are no less gratifying. "Atomic Lawn," in particular, is a gem, the lyrics apocalyptic and the chorus melody among the best of its type.
Finally, with full force and guitars wailing comes The Crowd. The most musically intricate of the bunch, they are also the most enjoyable, at least superficially: their tunes are filled with the manic, flailing intensity displayed by all the best early punk bands. I've always harbored a strange sort of ambivalence toward The Dead Kennedys; their impeccable panache notwithstanding, Jello's maniacal squeal paired with his annoyingly self-righteous lyrical tendencies often registered on the cornier end of the affected-vocals spectrum. The Crowd's Jim Decker does the whole shaky voice thing too, but never sounds like he's auditioning for the stage production of The Wizard of Oz; his is a far more palatable, believable timbre.
Beach Blvd. is a first-rate relic of a certain time and place, and, above all, an attitude which has all but disappeared since; music labeled "punk" today bears little resemblance to the tetchy, firebrand sort of tuneage chronicled here. How peculiar it must feel to those who helped usher in this exciting new era to hear it discussed in 2009 as old times and artifacts -- back-in-the-days and remember-whens. Such a young-folk thing, y'see, isn't supposed to get old. Perhaps music like this wasn't meant to last after all -- it is ephemeral by nature, more concerned with punch than posterity. At the very least, Beach Blvd. can help those of us who weren't there begin to appreciate what once was.
1. The Simpletones - Kirsty Q
2. The Simpletones - I Have A Date
3. The Simpletones - Tiger Beat Twist
4. The Simpletones - Don't Bother Me
5. The Simpletones - California
6. The Simpletones - I Like Drugs
7. The Simpletones - Dead Meat (Killer Smog)
8. The Simpletones - TV Love
9. The Simpletones - Rock 'n' Roll Star
10. The Simpletones - Disco Ape
11. The Simpletones - Nasty Nazi
12. Rik L Rik - Black And Red
13. Rik L Rik - Meat House
14. Rik L Rik - I Got Power
15. Rik L Rik - Mercenaries
16. Rik L Rik - Atomic Lawn
17. The Crowd - Modern Machine
18. The Crowd - New Crew
19. The Crowd - Suzy Is A Surf Rocker
20. The Crowd - Living In Madrid
1996: Avail - 4AM Friday
When you’re a teenager with even the slightest bit of differentness about you, surviving adolescence is no simple feat. Try doing it in a town like Richmond, Virginia, a.k.a. the former capital of the Confederacy. Let’s just say it’s easy to resent the obvious ass-backwardness of a city that, not too long ago, celebrated Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee’s birthdays on the same day as Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s. You need a thick skin, a well-developed sense of irony, and a community of similarly-minded weirdos for protection. And you need a band like Avail to write loud-as-fuck, catchy-as-hell anthems to serve as the rallying cry for your misspent youth.
I was a teenage weirdo, and believe me when I say that I wore out my cassette of 4AM Friday before I even reached college. Sure, the songs found on the album don’t stray too far from standard (albeit not textbook by any means) melodic hardcore that was so popular at the time. But 4AM Friday is so much fun, so perfect an encapsulation of what it meant to grow up strange in a small Southern city in the 90s that it’s hard to deny.
In case you weren’t there or need a refresher course: you got caught up in the circle pit while the band sang the anti-fight song, "Nameless." You belted along with your friends on the anti-conformity track, "Order." When Tim Barry sang about never compromising or changing to fit in on "Simple Song," you got it, you felt it, and connected to it in the way only teenage weirdos can connect to songs. But when they threw in that jarringly traditional cover of "Swing Low"? Well, in a weird way, you kind of connected to that, too. Sure, it all sounds a little contradictory and confusing. But that’s puberty, in any city.
And that’s the thing about Avail. As much as they wrote songs that pointed out the flaws in the world around them, they also had a strange way of making you proud to be a part of it. And the best part? In spite of the fact that 4AM Friday is littered with inside-baseball-style references to Monroe Park and three-strike laws, it actually struck a chord with a few people outside of Dixie, too. Because North or South, teenage or ten years removed and steeped in nostalgia, the fact remains -- everyone needs something to sing along to once in a while.
1. Simple Song
2. Order
3. Tuesday
4. 92
5. McCarthy
6. (Ben)
7. Monroe Park
8. Armchair
9. Fix
10. Blue Ridge
11. Swing Low
12. F.C.A
13. Hang
14. Governor
15. Nameless
1998: Emmylou Harris - Spyboy
Emmylou Harris has lived many musical lives: muse, country superstar, professional singing partner, rock star. Spyboy, an out-of-print live record, exposes a cross-section of Harris’ career. For this reason, it is jarring and uneven, and despite highlighting many professional peaks for the singer, you have to wonder: why the hell was Spyboy -- essentially a live greatest hits album -- released?
Spyboy came out in the wake of Wrecking Ball, which was something of a creative resurgence for Harris; it revealed that, while primarily known as a country singer, she simply likes a good song. So it is on Spyboy, which begins with the lovely Jesse Winchester ballad “My Songbird.” The band then launches into “Where Will I Be,” a dark but hopeful rock song from Wrecking Ball, and it’s to Harris’ great credit that she sounds equally at home in both styles. The audience doesn’t seem to mind, either.
Put simply, the best songs on Spyboy are the ones with the sweetest melodies: the intimate “Prayer In Open D,” the flat-out gorgeous “Green Pastures,” “Calling My Children Home” (sung a cappella by Harris and her band), and “Love Hurts,” that old chestnut Harris once sang with frequent partner Gram Parsons. With fellow Byrd and Flying Burrito Brother Chris Hillman, Parsons also wrote “Wheels,” a song Harris performs here as if it’s always been hers.
Although Spyboy is a live album, it would still be a fine introduction for Emmylou Harris beginners. It’s a sonic résumé -- a “look-what Emmylou-Harris-can-do” record that shows off the singer’s many talents. Though she tends to get attention for That Voice, it could be argued that Harris’ greatest strength is arranging and picking songs (she’s not a bad songwriter, either).
However, this is still very much a live album, the type of record that, unless containing versions that differ from their studio brethren, nobody likes. So it's easy to imagine why Spyboy, despite some moments of greatness, went out of print. Harris fans likely bought it out of curiosity, then sold it or lost it, and went on their merry way.
At least the album ends on a high note with “The Maker.” Though it lasts eight minutes, the song is fleeting, doubtlessly swept along by That Voice, but mostly by those years of experience. It caps off a record that no one needs, but it still feels perfect.
1. My Songbird
2. Where Will I Be
3. I Ain’t Living Long Like This
4. Love Hurts
5. Green Pastures
6. Deeper Well
7. Prayer In Open D
8. Calling My Children Home
9. Tulsa Queen
10. Wheels
11. Born To Run
12. Boulder To Birmingham
13. All My Tears (Be Washed Away)
14. The Maker
1969: Dick Hyman - Moog: The Electric Eclectics of Dick Hyman
When you picture the future, what does it look like? If you take your cues from pop culture, the view’s a little bleak -- a landscape of distant, desolate planets and bright white spaces inhabited by cyborgs and machines, all marching to the vocoder-powered voice of Kanye West. Come to think of it, it’s a lot scarier typed-out than it is through the gloss of a music video.
The funny thing is, since the dawn of the space age, our vision of the future hasn’t changed that drastically. For evidence, one needs only look at the cover of Dick Hyman’s 1969 album, Moog: The Electric Eclectics of Dick Hyman. Reverse carbon copies of Hyman himself emerge from an early model spacecraft; they stand stiffly, sometimes floating above a sparse, crater-filled terrain. The emptiness of space looms in the background.
And then there’s the music contained within -- jazz and pop spun through the modular waves of the then-emerging Moog synthesizer. Hyman, a classically-trained jazz pianist and composer, was, along with his contemporary Wendy Carlos, one of the pioneers of the machine. Electric Eclectics was his first foray into composing for the Moog (he’d previously pioneered similar use of the Lowrey organ), and the resulting album is one of the most successful of its kind. "The Minotaur," a classic proggy jam, was the first Top 40 hit composed entirely on the Moog and would subsequently provide a bit of shameless “inspiration” for Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s "Lucky Man." The rest of the tracks (including a transcendent yet still danceable take on James Brown's "Turn It Up or Turn It Loose") range from pure kitsch to loungey pop to hazy improvisational jazz. It all comes together to form the "sound of the future": pulsating blips, jaunty bloops, and funky bleeps; undulating sine waves and modulating grooves; melody and human emotion, processed through the heart of a machine. The result, however, is surprisingly warm and undeniably entertaining.
So how does the sound of the future hold up today? Well, sort of dated, actually -- a bit like a space age bachelor pad relic. This is hardly a criticism, though. Hyman was doing something new, testing the boundaries of an instrument that had rarely been used to its full potential before. And the result, while occasionally veering into questionably cheesy territory, is for the most part a set of virtuosic instrumental pop tunes iconically indicative of the era. To say they’re dated? Well, do you imagine Daft Punk won’t sound a little kitschy after 40 years? How about Kanye’s aforementioned robot vocals? It’s not a knock to anyone’s creative integrity, just a note that artistic merit shouldn’t always be judged based on the technology available at the time.
So maybe the future doesn’t sound exactly like Moog predicted it would. That doesn’t diminish the contributions of Hyman and his contemporaries to the modern musical sphere. Beyond all of the analog noodling, all of the killer sampling fodder, and all of the influence the guy’s clearly had on everyone from Beck to Stereolab to Momus, Hyman’s most important contribution is the enlightened realization that electronic music doesn’t have to be cold and distant, so long as the person playing it’s got a little soul.
1. Topless Dancers of Corfu
2. Legend of Johnny Pot
3. Moog and Me
4. Tap Dance in the Memory Banks
5. Four Duets in Odd Meter
6. The Minotaur
7. Total Bells and Tony
8. Improvisation in Fourths
9. Evening Thoughts
10. Give It Up or Turn It Loose
11. Kolumbo
12. Time is Tight
1997: Hellbender - Con Limón
Hellbender as a whole made three albums, but if we’re going to talk about the band from a “retrospective” point of view, it's important to mention a legacy that encompasses far more than just catchy, anthemic punk rock songs, like those found on 1997's Con Limón, Hellbender’s final album record. There are also New York Times Book Review ravings, gallery listings, and a namesake cocktail.
In 2009, two of them write, one makes art. Guitarist Wells Tower is author of the recent acclaimed short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, and bassist Al Burian is the man behind the long-running Burn Collector zine. Harrison Haynes, meanwhile, splits his time between making visual art and playing drums in Les Savy Fav.
That there were writers in the band isn’t much of a shock, even to someone who first encountered the work of Tower and Burian in a musical context. The lyrics on Con Limón read like aphorisms, bleakly funny from the titles on down: “You Gutted Me With a Switchblade Shaped Like a Telephone” is the best example, and it’s in a tradition that also includes Footprint of the American Chicken’s “Unsolicited Anthem for the Portland Hipsters.” As a band, Hellbender had the ability to capture the posturing of a scene while still tapping into the angst behind the clichés. Take the lyrics “Long distance is just a tool to keep us down,” or “Do you recognize this song/ This is our song/ My favorite slow jam/ My favorite quiet storm.” It’s hard to imagine any other punk-rooted bands playing the late-90s VFW circuit and referencing quiet storm in their lyrics.
As the earlier reference to Portland suggests, Hellbender were also a geographically-minded band, based at various points in the aforementioned Oregonian city as well as North Carolina. Con Limón’s travelogue also includes stops in South Dakota and New England, as well as the memorably titled “I-95 Is Tattooed On My Brain.” And while the trio could shift into slow-burn mode throughout the album, those distances don’t necessarily sound metaphorical: Haynes drums with a momentum that sounds essential, as though his kit was responsible for powering the band’s traversals of interstate highways.
A strong vein of knowing misanthropy runs through Con Limón: “Untrusting You,” in which the line “Aren’t you lonely yet?” is repeated again and again before giving way to a pair of rueful “God damn it”s, might be its apex. As much as accusations of romantic instability fly through the lyrics of these 10 songs, there’s an equal amount of guilt -- confessions made in the presences of judges and other authorities.
It’s a bitterness balanced by wry humor, however, exemplified by the album’s penultimate number, “A Song About Some Girls.” “This is a song that I wrote about some girls,” it begins, segueing into references to Jeeps, Coppertone, and Bob Seger. It’s also a scary prediction of what would become mall emo: anonymous female figures in the background and monstrously-sized “whoa-whoa” choruses that one can’t help but sing along to. Yet in this case, it’s the lack of depth that’s the joke: the song's protagonist has apparently wandered into the kind of track designed for stadium sing-alongs and quickly finds himself wholly unsuited for the role. It is, I suspect, no coincidence that the song is without accompanying lyrics in the liner notes.
The album comes to its bitter end with “Graveyarded.” Lyrically desperate, it inverts or makes explicit all that had been previously hidden: the distances described without romanticism; the literacy couched in paranoia and desperation; a landscape of dead-end jobs and dying momentum; and a narrator who’s “[a] million miles from home/ a blank slate/ a throw-away.” And while the jokey, funk-influenced hidden song that properly ends the album isn’t the band’s high point, its presence is an indicator of a greater truth about Hellbender: even when they reached their lowest emotional depth, they never lost their sense of humor.
1 Fake I.D.
2 You Gutted Me With a Switchblade Shaped Like a Telephone
3 Long Distance Phone Bill Runner
4 Untrusting You
5 I-95 is Tattooed on My Brain
6 Call Me When You're Dead
7 Make Up an Excuse
8 The Inevitable Social Awkwardness of the Junior High School Prom
9 Song About Some Girls
10 Graveyarded
1971: John Prine - John Prine
In the nearly four decades since John Prine’s self-titled debut came out, a lot’s been said. This was the album that had people flying the “next Bob Dylan” flag, that spawned some of country and folk’s most lasting standards. The album that the man himself never could quite top, even though he came damn close on Burnt Orange. But no one has written about John Prine as what it is to me: perfect music for a funeral.
Now, don’t get me wrong. John Prine is anything but macabre, morose, or maudlin. He simply tackles all the things we think about at funerals -- life, death, love, and loss -- with the poignancy, wit, and empathy that earned him all those Dylan comparisons in the first place. Lives well-lived, lives less-than-well-lived, loss, redemption -- it’s all in here, presented earnestly and without a hint of cloying sentimentality.
The reflective nature of John Prine doesn't merely result from the range of themes explored, however. Ultimately, it's Prine’s strength as a songwriter, the earnest lens through which he filters his subject matter and the unadorned delivery of his warbling voice that give the album its poignancy.
The humor of "Illegal Smile" is foiled by the stinging tragedy of one of the Vietnam era’s greatest songs, "Sam Stone." The sad pastoral beauty of "Paradise" eulogizes simpler times lost to progress, while "Angel From Montgomery" finds hope in death. These songs are as much the sound of a thousand American flags being folded as they are the soundtrack to the most revelatory wake, and they are just as good, just as relevant, and just as timely today as they were in 1971.
Maybe I’m biased. In fact, scratch that, I absolutely am biased. For the sake of full-disclosure, this is the album my father wanted played at his own funeral, and when the day came, we cut off the organist prematurely and hit “play” on "Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore." Through all the somber moments of that day, these songs made me feel human, a reminder that death’s just one part of life. And in the end, that might be the highest praise I can give to any album -- that even in the face of death, it can make you feel positively alive.
1. Illegal Smile
2. Spanish Pipedream
3. Hello In There
4. Sam Stone
5. Paradise
6. Pretty Good
7. Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore
8. Far From Me
9. Angel From Montgomery
10. Quiet Man
11. Donald And Lydia
12. Six O’Clock News
13. Flashback Blues
