Weak Records Get Off to a Strong Start

New Swiss-based label Weak Records don’t use their name sarcastically: from an astrophysical point of view, it is actually the “weak forces” in the universe that hold it together. Their brand is defiantly DIY, angry and completely unwilling to give up on having fun. In other words, late 70s/early 80s punk rock style. Their initial release, the Weak Records Sampler #1 has been assembled to coincide with current Weak artists’ tours, live shows and writing and it makes a great introduction to some people who deserve to be better-known than they are. Weak Records was conceived as a platform for poetry as well as music, and there are a couple of spoken-word tracks here as well. Brett Davidson’s To Do List cynically litanizes a series of mundane and no-so-mundane projects that might be possible with a little respite. Bobby Vacant’s Cancerland savages endless bleak cloned suburban rot over a contrastingly pretty acoustic guitar background.

The music here is upbeat and funny. Mixin’ Bowl, by Riders of the Worm blends echoey, off-center riff-oriented Chrome Cranks garage punk with a late period Man or Astroman feel. I´m Not Your Dog, by Police Bulimia matches snapping bass to trebly percussive punk guitar with an early 80s vibe: “If you try to subjugate I’ll kick you in the head.” All of these are streaming at the links above. Weak Records’ latest live show features Bobby Vacant & the Worn with Brigitte Meier on bass on September 3 at 9 PM at Werkschau Nr. 6, Bahnstrasse 22 in Bern, Switzerland, where Weak Records’ newly launched, cynically amusing oldschool punk rock style fanzine Savage Laundry will also be available.

Robin Hoffman’s Timeless Images Capture New York’s Oldtime Music Scene

It’s funny how even though millions of bloggers and youtubers have documented live music over the past several years, there hasn’t been one particular photographer with a signature vision to emerge like Henry Diltz in the late 60s/early 70s, or Bob Gruen during the punk era. However, this era is fortunate to have Robin Hoffman, whose new coffee table book Live From the Audience: A Year of Drawing at the Jalopy Theatre vividly captures much of the magical demimonde of New York’s oldtimey and Americana music scenes. Interestingly, Hoffman is not a photographer but a painter, with a singular and instantly identifiable vision. She has an amazing eye for expressions: in a few deft strokes, she portrays banjo player Eli Smith in a characteristically sardonic moment, with a sly jack o’lantern off to the side of the stage. Her perfectly rendered portrait of Mamie Minch brings out every inch of the oldtimey siren’s torchy bluesiness, leaning back with her resonator guitar as she belts out a classic (or one of her originals that sounds like one).

Hoffman is a former ballet dancer and maybe for that reason she also has a finely honed sense of movement. A lot of these performers play sitting down and consequently don’t move around much. One particularly poignant painting shows the late Brooklyn bluesman Bob Guida jovial and comfortably nestled yet full of energy, seated with his hollow-body electric. The single most striking image here marvelously depicts the Jalopy’s Geoff and Lynette Wiley, Lynette behind the bar, warm and beaming triumphantly from the rush of a good crowd and a good show, bushy-bearded Geoff to the side up front, attentive as always, the audience ecstatically lit up in silhouette in the front of the house. Other artists vividly captured in the Jalopy’s magically wood-toned ambience include Ernie Vega, Feral Foster (being particularly Feral), the Maybelles, the Ukuladies and les Chauds Lapins.

These paintings induce synesthesia – you can literally hear the ring and the twang of the voices and the music. Hoffman has also included several equally captivating sketches and sketch collages, in the same vein as the ones she periodically posts on her excellent blog. It’s a wonderful portrayal of one of New York’s most vital music scenes, one frequently overlooked by the corporate media and the blogosphere. It’s also a valuable piece of history – although few of the artists here will ever be famous, the music they make deserves to be. The book is available online, but as Hoffman says, “It’s a lot more fun and a little bit cheaper to get one at Jalopy.”

Irish-American Songwriting Legend Larry Kirwan Talks About His New Novel, Rockin’ the Bronx

For over 20 years Larry Kirwan has led ever-popular, literate, socially aware, soaringly anthemic Irish-American rock band Black 47, whose 2008 cd Iraq was ranked best album of the year right here at Lucid Culture. They tour America and Ireland regularly, including a special Ireland trip where fans of the band come along with the band and hang out during the whole tour, or at least part of it. Meanwhile, Kirwan has also managed to write a column for the Irish Echo, along with many plays, a memoir and two novels. His most recent novel Rockin’ the Bronx, just published this year, takes the reader on a wild, vivid ride through the world of hard-working, hard-drinking, hard-playing Irish immigrants and musicians in New York around 1980. As he did in the book, in this interview Kirwan took us back to a vastly more lively era in New York history:

Lucid Culture’s Correspondent: It’s not just a question of verisimilitude -  the book has more than just a ring of truth, in fact it feels suspiciously like nonfiction. I know this is the obvious question, the one that everybody wants to know, so I’ll get it out of the way. How much of it is true? The scary scene in the drug den on Avenue C? The perfect description of the scrungy North Bronx apartment where the protagonist lives, with the drug dealer neighbors? The way the Pack of Tinkers – the fictional band who bear more than a little resemblance to Black 47 – start to build a following among the immigrants on Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx?

Larry Kirwan: Well, let’s say that the situations were all “true” but the story is pretty original. I lived on Ave. B and 3rd Street at the height of the heroin scene in NYC (in fact, I deal with it in a more literal way in Green Suede Shoes, a memoir). So, the scene in Rockin’ the Bronx is small potatoes to what I saw and experienced back in those days on B, C & D. I played in the North Bronx back in the late 70′s and early 80′s so I can smell the actual apartments that I describe in RTB, even as I’m answering this. Black 47′s experiences up there are very different to the scene described for the Tinkers. Perhaps, that’s because even though I was accepted in the Irish areas, I was still a bit of an outsider. However, even back then I knew that I could see Bainbridge/Kingsbridge in a clearer way than those who were actually living there at the time, because I had many other views of NYC to compare it with. So, let’s say I knew the scene, but the characters – for the most part – were not derived from anyone living there at the time.

LCC: Is it an accurate statement to say that this story could only have taken place when it did, since the Bush regime made it vastly more difficult for Irish immigrants to get on the plane?

LK: In a certain way, but it was more the times than the effect that any politician had on them. 9/11 changed that. Up until then, a blind eye was turned towards a lot of immigration. Irish were white, cops were white and often of Irish descent too, so there was little hunting down of Irish immigrants. I was here for 3 years myself illegally. Many Irish, however, left during the Bush era. They didn’t like the direction that the country was going in – on top of that, the Irish economy went into a boom mode so there was much well paid work “back home.” Many also disliked the American school system and felt their children would get a better education back in Ireland. There’s a real lack of the humanities in the basic American educational system and many Irish felt that keenly. The lack of value placed on World Geography was always particularly noted. Every Irish kid can identify most countries in the atlas. Although this does not take brain surgery, the lack of emphasis on it has always disturbed Irish people. Many Americans could make excuses for Bush, but to the Irish he seemed to be a dope – and a dangerous one at that.

LCC: You have a great ear for dialogue, in the black humor of the shellshocked soldiers on the Iraq album and also with the characters in this book, a lot of them real weirdos. Where do you get that dialogue? I know you always have your songbook with you: do you take notes when you hear something that might work in a novelistic context?

LK: I never take notes – a failing, no doubt. James Joyce would notate whole conversations. I have a good memory and sense of rhythm. I exult in the odd meters, rhymes and sayings of people of all races. So, I don’t need to remember conversations verbatim. Neither did Joyce, of course. He had a stunningly real “ear.” It’s just a matter of listening, though, and delighting in conversation. Delighting in characters too. Most people don’t really listen. You can tell by their body language – they’re already thinking of their response the moment they get the gist of what the other person is talking about. It’s such a turn-off. But I’ve also worked hard at playwrighting. To write a play you have to know how to cut the bejaysus out of every line you write. So, you’re constantly editing and by doing so, you’re forever making sure that the new line you come up with is “true.” In essence, you’re auditioning speech for many months or years while you’re polishing a play to the perfection it will never achieve.

LCC: One of the lead characters, the charismatic lead guitarist in the Pack of Tinkers is gay, and by the end of the book, he’s out of the closet for all intents and purposes. Yet the people around him, who are increasingly aware of it, don’t disown him – in fact it doesn’t seem to make any difference, they still love the guy. Remember, this is 1980 – we’re dealing with a Catholic culture here, not exactly the most hospitable place for a gay guy at that time. Or was the immigrant population here a lot cooler and more tolerant than the mainstream?

LK: As the saying would have gone back then, “He may be an asshole, but he’s our asshole.” These were very tightly knit communities. I was always amazed that the Puero Rican community down on the Lower East Side always accepted their transvestites. When drunk, they might have occasionally called them “maricón.” But, in general, they were considered part of the community and often hung with the women and talked fashion, and women talk. Gays were not accepted in the Irish community but within a group of friends, as in RTB, Danny, though not understood, would have been accepted. What else could they do – throw him out? Alcoholics, junkies, drunks, thieves were also accepted. They were blood. But no one outside the “fag’s” circle would have had any time for him. And that comes out in the violent scene at the Olympia Ballroom between Danny and the owner. The Irish scene in the Bronx was, and is, a very narrowly defined culture. When founded, ILGO (Irish Gay and Lesbian Organization) was a wonderful outfit – because for the first time, many Irish gays in the mid to late 80′s found community. My own feeling, and I was a friend and most definitely a supporter, was that ILGO more than likely saved a number of people heading for suicide. Such were the times.

LCC: How about the hottie roommate who works as a nanny until she meets the rich Jewish lawyer? Looking back, is that combination less unlikely than it seems?

LK: There was always a good connection between the Irish and the Jewish – it’s fallen apart in recent years because of some of the political and military choices of the Israeli state. But basically, many undocumented Irish married Americans – for love, money, or legal status. Many Americans also helped out by marrying an illegal so that legal status might be gained. That was common enough. So, marrying a lawyer rather than a plumber would have been a choice a more ambitious woman might have made. Which reminds me, one of Black 47′s first big problems in the Irish community was over a song called Green Card. It was a reggae song (and not a particularly brilliant one) that dealt with a a number of situations between Irish and prospective marriage partners. The verse that set nerves on end was an Irish girl marrying a Jamaican-American for legal status. I couldn’t believe the hostility this pairing invoked, particularly since the song was tongue-in-cheek and set to a reggae beat. There was very little sense of humor when it came to miscegenation in the Bronx.

LCC: As someone who remembers what New York was like in 1980, I can vouch for the fact that this book captures it exactly as it was – although I can’t vouch for Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx. Much of the book takes place during a hellishly ominous early- global-warming-era summer, surrounded by garbage and decay. Yet the characters in the book take it in stride, just as all New Yorkers did. Inasmuch as gentrification has had some horrible repercussions, are you really nostalgic for all that grit and grime?

LK: Not really. I couldn’t have cared less at the time, though. I had other things on my mind. NYC was just a very unlawful place back then – but that suited me, I was illegal myself and “living the life,” as it were. There was a saying then – “When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws can be free.” Seems a bit trite now but it had currency at the time. Cops didn’t bother you unless you were out to kill someone. Certain parts of the city were more than slightly out of control. I loved it at the time, and was involved in various escapades that make my hair stand on end now, but I wouldn’t want to go back. It’s a more boring city now, but I still keep my eyes open. You’d be crazy not to – the city will always bite when you take your eyes off of it. I can’t believe all the idiots walking around in a daze listening to their iPods. Apart from missing the distinctive, adrenalized pulse of NYC, they’re risking their lives – and for what, some dumb song that they can listen to at home.

LCC: Rockin’ the Bronx is a quintessentially New York book, even though it deals mostly with one particular neighborhood and immigrant population. Yet these people witnessed the same decay, and more importantly, the same opportunities that existed for all New Yorkers before the developers started to turn every neighborhood into a cheap copy of a New Jersey suburb. Is there a single characteristic, or set of characteristics, that defined the Irish-American experience at that time – or is it an experience shared with every other immigrant group?

LK: Booze, I suppose. We drank more than most. But really, all the cultures had their own central focus – themselves. No one cared about the others, except to make fun of them. Much is made of the melting pot, but that happened only in certain types of work; mostly people hung out and exulted in their own and the culture back at home. That’s why there was a marked response to Black 47 when we first formed, for we were in essence saying, “Don’t look back. We don’t need The Pogues or the Waterboys. We’re here in the greatest music city in the world. We’re mixing Irish music through that prism. Looking back is nowhere. We’ve got Miles, Bobby, KRS, Chuck D, Avenue B, Salsa, whatever you want.”

LCC: Despite his punk image, Sean, the book’s somewhat wet-around-the-ears protagonist is apolitical – until the real life IRA member Bobby Sands goes on hunger strike and eventually dies in prison. To what extent was that event a galvanizing moment, politically speaking, in the Irish community? Was it in your own life, or were you writing songs like “James Connolly” already by that time?

LK: Bobby Sands changed Irish-America and continues to change it. Many of the young people who marched outside the British Consulate back in 1980-81 are now in leadership positions in Irish-America. That’s why the AOH (Ancient Order of Hibernians) is more centrist and even a little Left now, as compared with 30 years ago. Same with the Irish-American media. Sands changed me, because he pointed me back to my roots – growing up with a Republican Irish grandfather. I had forsaken much of that when I came over and became part of the CBGB’s/Bells of Hell Village scene. Sands made me come face-to-face with a certain part of my heritage. I didn’t want to bomb the British or be part of any violence – but I wanted the return of Habeas Corpus, and proper representation for the Catholic Nationalist people. He influenced me in a very personal way by his saying, “No one can do everything but everyone has their part to play.” That changed my life and I still adhere by it – it gave a meaning to my life that I’ve never let go of since.

LCC: The Puerto Rican hoodlum who runs off with Sean’s girlfriend actually turns out to be a nice guy – at least in the beginning – who constantly tries to extend an olive branch to Sean, although he’ll have none of it. Was this a deliberate attempt on your part to illustrate the kind of cross-cultural, neighborly interaction between the Irish and the other minorities in the Bronx during that time?

LK: Not at all. But it was something that I personally came in contact with on Avenue B. I was friendly with many people like Jesus. It was just part of life and existence on the LES. I was always surprised at how polarized the Irish and Puerto Rican communities of the Bronx were. Both, to my mind, were similar shared very common bonds such as Catholicism, love of family and a deep loyalty to their own people. I was very aware of that on Avenue B. But in the Bronx, these cultures didn’t even look at each other except in disgust. And yet, there was the occasional Irish girl who “was turned” as the PR people called it by one of their own. Often, though, that had to do with drugs, and hence Mary/Jesus.

LCC: What’s the likelihood of the Pack of Tinkers – or Black 47 – getting an audition today with a big record label like they did in this book?

LK: Well, the character of Steve, the RCA guy who comes to the Bronx is based on Stephen Holden, now a music critic for the NY Times. Back then he came to the Bronx as an A&R man for RCA to see Turner & Kirwan of Wexford [that's Pierce Turner, the extraordinary Irish singer and songwriter, who goes back years with Kirwan] – to a place with the nickname The Bucket of Blood, just off Fordham Road. So, it did happen back then. And, of course, Black 47 has been signed to two major record deals with EMI and Mercury. I don’t even know if there are major labels any more – and if there are, who would be interested in signing with them anyway?

LCC: I can’t think of anyone who would. Is there a sequel? To the book, I mean?

LK: I doubt it.

LCC: Is there any factual basis for the incident where the old, drunken fiddle player suddenly plays the gig of his life after one of the band feeds him a huge line of cocaine?

LK: I’m sure there is but it’s not based on any particular event. Remember, the amount of drinking back then in today’s terms was staggering. People would often go out on a Friday night and come home on Sunday evening. We drank and smoked for days on end and usually passed out someplace for sleep. If a player – no matter how old – has been doing that and someone placed a line of white powder in front of him, what do you think he did? Most Irish people back then didn’t have much connection with drugs of any sort. But when they eventually came in contact with it, the Irish loved blow, mostly because they could drink even more. But it wasn’t just coke – one summer while I was doing a residency at the Boardy Barn in Hampton Bays, liquid speed was introduced. All it took was one drop in your beer and you were invincible. We used to play on it and wouldn’t be able to sleep for 24-36 hours at a time. Amazingly hundreds in the bar were speeding their butts off, without even knowing it – as friends would slip a drop in their beer when they weren’t looking. Nothing quite like a couple of hundred cops and firemen tossing back booze while the white lightning was ricocheting around their brains.

Everything seems a lot more sensible and conservative now – and maybe that’s a good thing – but oh what times we had. We’ve been trapped in an age of irony for some time now. Back then, no one cared that much about anything – especially the future. The bosses and the establishment won the war, but it’s good to remember a time when it was still all to play for.

Rockin’ the Bronx is out now from Dufour Editions, at bookstores and online vendors.

DVD Review: Trio Joubran – A L’ombre des mots

[Editor's note: to be consistent with the DVD and its booklet, we use the French "Darwich" here rather than the English "Darwish" as a transliteration of Mahmoud Darwich's Arabic name. Any errors in translation here are ours.]

Poets are the rock stars of the Middle East – the day the Bush regime invaded Iraq, the number one bestseller there was a book of poetry. Which is often the case. Iconic Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich could read to a sold-out stadium crowd of 150,000. He died unexpectedly in August of 2008; forty days later, extraordinary Palestinian oudist brothers the Trio Joubran - who often served as Darwich’s backing band, touring the world with him – gave a memorial concert at the Cultural Palace in Ramallah, playing along to a recording of his words. The footage on their latest DVD A L’ombre des mots (“In the Shadow of Words,” accompanied by a cd of just the audio track) was filmed at that concert. It is extraordinarily moving: dark, pensive, terse yet often lushly arranged instrumentals that sometimes accompany Darwich’s recorded voice, other times providing an overture – or, more frequently, a requiem. Darwich’s powerful, insistent baritone keeps perfect time, allowing the musicians to do what they always did: if it’s possible to have onstage chemistry with a ghost, they achieve that. Shots of the band stark against a candlelit black background heighten the profound sadness that permeates this, yet the indomitability of Darwich’s metaphorically-charged words and his voice linger resonantly. Darwich speaks in Arabic with French subtitles on the DVD.

Darwich was first and foremost an artist, fiercely proud of his Palestinian identity and therefore seen as a voice of the Palestinians. But he bore that cross uneasily: once a member of the PLO’s inner circle, he quit the job. Although politically charged, Darwich’s work always sought to raise the bar, to take the state of his art to the next level and through that his writing achieved a universality. The poems here will strike a chord with anyone who’s ever cheated death, missed their home, been outraged by an atrocity or numbed by a series of them. Darwich was both a poet of his time and one for the ages. This DVD contains four works, notably the long suite The Dice Player, his last. On the surface, it’s a question of identity and ends with a taunt in the face of death. Fearlessly metaphorical, it contemplates the cruelty of fate yet celebrates good fortune, by implication the fate of being Palestinian.

The concert opens with the trio onstage, closeups alternated with shots taken at a distance from crowd, a characteristically understated requiem beginning stately, a portentous drumbeat and then a cymbal crash signaling the beginning the theme, a forest of ouds from the three brothers, Samir, Wissam and Adnan. Darwich’s images are rich with irony and unease: “I had the good fortune to be cousin to divinity and the bad fortune that the cross would be our eternal ladder to tomorrow,” he states emphatically early on in the piece. He addresses the issue of love under an occupation: “Wait for it,” he cautions, again and again, “As if you were two witnesses to what you’re saving for tomorrow, take it toward the death you desire, and wait for it.”

“I didn’t play any role in what I was or will be, such is luck and luck doesn’t have a name…Narcissus would have freed himself if he’d broken the mirror…then again he would never have become a legend,” Darwich muses (intense as this all is, it’s not without a sense of humor). “A mirage is a guidebook in the desert – without it, without the mirage, there’s no more searching for water.” As the poem winds up, through an ominous, swaying anthem, several subsequent themes and pregnant pauses, the bitterness is overwhelming: “I would have become an amnesiac if I’d remembered my dreams.” But in the end he’s relishing his ability to survive, even if it’s simply the survival skill of an old man who knows to call the doctor before it’s too late.

There’s also the defiant On This Land, a offhandedly searing, imagistic tribute to Palestine and the Palestinians, the somber Rhyme for the Mu-allaqat (a series of seven canonical medieval Arabic poems) and finally The Mural, its narrator bitterly cataloging things which are his, ostensibly to be grateful for. “Like Christ on the water, I’ve walked in my vision, but I came down off the cross because I’m afraid of heights,” Darwich announces early on. And as much as he has, there’s more that he doesn’t. “History laughs at its victims, she throws them a look as she passes by.” And the one thing he doesn’t have that he wants above anything else? “I don’t belong to myself,” the exile repeats again and again as the restrained anguish of the ouds rises behind him. The DVD ends with the group playing over a shot of the mourners at the vigil outside. It’s hard to imagine a more potently effective introduction to Darwich’s work than this – longtime fans, Arabic and French speakers alike will want this in their collections. For anyone who doesn’t speak either language, it’s a somberly majestic, haunting, lushly arranged masterpiece – the three ouds and the drummer together sound like an oud orchestra. It’s out on World Village Music.

Much of the text here is available on the web, including an English translation of The Dice Player and the original Arabic text.

Song of the Day 2/5/10

The best 666 songs of alltime countdown continues every day, all the way to #1. Friday’s song is #174:

Gil Scott-Heron – We Almost Lost Detroit

Based on the John G. Fuller expose, this is an understated, haunting look at a narrowly averted nuclear disaster that almost took out a major American city. Now there are actually global warming activists who support the use of nuclear power. How quickly we forget – can anybody say “Chernobyl?” From the South Africa to South Carolina album, 1975; there’s also an even tastier live version on the No Nukes concert anthology.

Song of the Day 1/23/10

Til the next post, as we do every day the best 666 songs of alltime countdown continues all the way to #1. Tuesday’s song was #191:

The Electric Light Orchestra – Whisper in the Night

Roy Wood’s greatest moment in the band is this towering, haunting anthem, a rustic mix of plaintive acoustic guitar and a million cello and other string overdubs. Also from No Answer, 1972.

Wednesday’s was #190

Elvis Costello – Red Shoes

Trivia question – in 1977, on My Aim Is True, Costello was backed by what future million-selling, cringeworthy 80s hitmakers? Answer: Huey Lewis & the News! To the King’s infinite credit, he gets them to do a credible Byrds imitation here.

Thursday’s was #189:

Erica Smith – Jesus’ Clown

Sean Dolan’s lyric is a clever fly-on-the-wall take on the Stations of the Cross from a nonbeliever’s perspective. Behind Smith’s understatedly haunting vocals, Love Camp 7 guitarist Dann Baker adds a forest of searing overdubs that do Neil Young one better. Unreleased but ostensibly due to see the light of day sometime early in this decade.

Friday’s was #188:

The Sex Pistols – Did You No Wrong

Musically, with all those searing layers of Steve Jones guitar, it’s arguably the Pistols’ most interesting song, an outtake from Never Mind the Bollocks first issued on Flogging a Dead Horse in 1978. Which begs the question, why was it left off Never Mind the Bollocks? Maybe because it’s a Glenn Matlock tune?

And today’s is:

187. Angelo Badalamenti – Moving Through Time

The haunting centerpiece of the 1992 Twin Peaks Fire Walk with Me film soundtrack, Bill Mays’ macabre piano cascading around an eerie two-chord chromatic vamp.

Song of the Day 6/27/09

Every day, our top 666 songs of alltime countdown gets one step closer to #1. Saturday’s song is #396:

The Vapors – Letter from Hiro

Best known for the inscrutable new wave hit Turning Japanese (a song you won’t find on this list), the British band actually put out two brilliant albums of fiery, artsy, Clash-style punk rock. This majestic, epic antiwar anthem from 1979′s New Clear Days is told from the point of view of a WWII-era Japanese kid saved from kamikaze duty by freak chance.

Best Congressional Speech of the Year – Maybe the Decade

Here’s legendary prosecutor and Helter Skelter author Vincent Bugliosi testifying before Congress, urging the prosecution of George W. Bush for murder (the title of Bugliosi’s impassioned new book). Bugliosi- one of the most fair-minded people you will find anywhere, a maverick who supported John McCain in 2000, and a man who wouldn’t bring anything to trial unless it was ironclad – provides a passionate but irrefutable case against Bush and his cronies. This ranks with the US Army’s Joseph Welch’s “have you no decency” rejoinder to Joe McCarthy as one of the great Congressional moments.

 

Note the Bush operatives trying to shush Bugliosi before he drives his point home.

Book Review: Sweat – The Story of the Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band

Sweat – The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, by Joe Bonomo

 

Continuum, 2007, ISBN-13 978-0-8264-2856-2, trade paper, $17.95

 

After all these years, the Fleshtones still need a Hexbreaker. Contemporaries of the Ramones and Sex Pistols, the legendary, Queens-born band still plays to a cult audience in small-to-midsize clubs across the country, having brushed tantalizingly with fame on innumerable occasions without really ever having achieved it. That the Fleshtones managed to survive thirty-two years is in itself a miracle, considering how badly they’ve been sabotaged, by record labels, management and most of all, themselves. If this book is to be believed, even the Stones at their most debauched are lightweights, compared with the literally lethal quantities of drugs and alcohol that were part and parcel of the Fleshtones’ existence for the better part of two decades. This is not a fawning, fanclub-style tribute: Northern Illinois University professor Bonomo’s fascinatingly detailed chronology is unsparing in its treatment of the band. All the drinking and drugging notwithstanding, the book concerns itself mostly with the music, which is a very good thing: America’s greatest garage band deserves no less.

 

At the height of their mid-80s popularity, the Fleshtones – singer Peter Zaremba, guitarist Keith Streng, bassist Marek Pakulski and drummer Bill Milhizer – played off a well-earned reputation as one of the world’s best live bands. Despite having come up in an era that saw garage music as retro and derivative, they left audiences dumbstruck, playing with a passion and intensity seldom matched by any band from any era. But at every turn, the band found themselve sabotaged: by thieving CBGB soundmen, who took a cut of the band’s door proceeds; inept booking agents; producers who didn’t really understand garage rock; label executives who for all their bluster always put the band on the back burner, and, most notably, by themselves, whether due to substance abuse or stubbornness. Ironically, the band’s first album, issued around the world on several labels, has never seen an official US release.

 

Signed to IRS just at the time the fledgling label broke through with the Go-Go’s, they became a staple of college radio and soon afterward a sensation in France, where an “instant” live album was released during an ecstatic residency at one of Paris’ premier rock clubs.  A couple of years later, Zaremba would eventually score a regular weekly gig as a host on MTV. Yet the Fleshtones never broke through to anything approaching a mass audience, perceived as either derivative or simply a party band whose audience was primarily in the clubs. Bonomo sharply deflates these myths, demonstrating how the Fleshtones (and their original bassist, Pakulski, in particular) broke new ground by bringing elements of funk, soul and other black music into garage rock. Through three decades of escapades, Zaremba comes off as a funny, cerebral, hyperkinetic polymath who’s also utterly impossible to work with; their current bassist Ken Fox presents himself as a serious, dedicated pro who also has no objection to having a good time. We don’t learn much, musically or otherwise, about the other band members, other than Streng’s impressively singlehanded victory over a nasty alcohol problem.

 

The detail in this book is exceptional. Bonomo carefully places each stage of the Fleshtones’ career in the context of how far afield they always were from the most popular songs of that particular era, and how their defiant un-trendiness always reinforced the view that they were a niche act rather than something that could be marketed to the mainstream. New Yorkers in particular will find innumerable little jewels in the margins here. Did you ever realize that Cosmo’s Diner up on 23rd and Second Avenue was a popular meetup place for rockers back in the 70s? Or that Fox once played as a hired gun in one of the worst New York bands of alltime, Smashed Gladys? Or that Streng was the original guitarist in the legendary Bill Popp’s shortlived punk-pop band the Popsicles? Bonomo’s casual yet vivid description of each milieu in which the band found themselves, whether the world of horrid Queens cover bands in the 70s, the early 80s new wave scene, or LA in the mid-80s before hair metal took over, is indelibly rendered and dead-on accurate.

 

Like its subject, this book is far from perfect. The most recent twenty years of the band’s career gets only a fraction of the space allotted to their first five, and the book starts out like the Deer Hunter: it takes a long time to get going (do we really need to be told that as teenagers, the individual members of the band preferred three-minute singles to extended art-rock suites?). For all the band’s marathon drinking, their party stories are surprisingly dull: with one exception (a delightfully successful drunken race with a police car), nothing more exciting than what you’d find on the average college freshman’s myspace page.

 

The book could have used a proofreader, and it reads in places as if it was edited in dribs and drabs, the later chapters being given a look-see without reference to any preceding text. As can be expected, there are plenty of errors, some of them glaring: for example, the assertion that the band didn’t know how to play In the Midnight Hour at a gig with Johnny Thunders is simply absurd. Tom Scholz didn’t record the first Boston album in a LA studio: he did it in his basement on a little homemade gadget whose patent he sold to Sony, who marketed it with great success as the Rockman. And Tainted Love isn’t a Standells song: it was originally recorded by the soul singer Gloria Jones. General readers won’t pick up on most of these glitches. This is why second editions are worth seeking out.

 

With the exception of two bass players, the thoughtful, articulate Robert Burke Warren, and Fox – whose reputation as a genuinely nice guy reaffirms itself here – the rest of the band remain a cipher. When Zaremba speaks, the quote is virtually always thirdhand, and sometimes decades-old. It would have been nice to hear more from Streng, one of the alltime great rock guitarists and a fine songwriter as well. And when, quite shockingly, more than one band member is cited for being against the Martin Luther King holiday (this from a group who are all passionate fans of black music!), the cognitive dissonance is casually brushed off.

 

Quibbles aside, this is an excellent book, essential reading for anyone interested in the history of American music. While fans of the Fleshtones and garage rock in general will find plenty to feast on here, to Bonomo’s infinite credit, he makes you want to go back and listen to all those great Fleshtones albums with fresh ears, or discover them for the first time. If this book is anything like its subject, it’ll be around for decades. 

Bad News for Books

In a move straight out of 1984 (the book), Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels has just signed into law a bill requiring any bookstore selling “sexually explicit materials” to register with the state. According to Publishers Weekly, stores will have to pay a $250 registration fee. Failure to register is against the law.

According to the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), the law is so broad that it could be applied to a mainstream novel, for example, the latest Danielle Steele.

Just in case you were wondering, Tipper Gore had nothing to do with this.

And in what looks like a blatant antitrust violation, amazon.com now requires that all print-on-demand books sold on their website be manufactured through their proprietary on-demand printer, whom they recently purchased to compete with Ingram Book Distributors’ popular Lightning Source supply system. This is especially disconcerting since amazon is a major source of sales for small or independent publishers whose books are kept on disc and printed as orders come in, rather than being manufactured and stored in a warehouse.

[postscript - good news on both fronts - the Indiana law was overturned and amazon backed down, allowing freedom of choice for small publishers