Sha La La – Musings About Music: Volume 7

We’re back in business at the brain factory where we earn our nickels when we’re not writing about music, so this column is overdue and too long for short attention spans. We’re sorry that we haven’t been there to guide you away from crappy tunes. Follow @JFloyd_Popwell on Twitter so that you don’t accidentally listen to something that could do permanent damage.

Music we’re looking forward to:

J Mascis – Elastic Days November 9. Dig the first single, “See You At The Movies”

Daughters – You Won’t Get What You Want – October 26. Here’s “The Reason They Hate Me”

High on Fire – Electric Messiah  – October 5

Cloud Nothings – Last Building Burning – October 19

Seen and Heard:

Saw New Order and Santigold the other night at the Music Tastes Good festival at a waterfront park in Long Beach (we only had the time to go for half a day of the fun-arty-foodie two-day fest). Santigold is one of those great festival performers who makes her shows a helluva party, especially when she invited a hundred or so people on stage to dance with her. Big bass and happy melodies work well in that kind of setting. On the other hand, Bernard Sumner and the rest of the Peter Hook-less New Order really phoned it in. Great songs delivered with all the passion of beige paint. The crowd still danced, but they had to make their own vibe, because what was coming from the stage emphasized only the robotic coldness of the classic songs.

Mudhoney is back with a new record called Digital Garbage, and after just a quick listen, we judge it to be a righteous and rockin’ spit-in-the-eye spoof of much of the befuddling bullshit of our times (Christians for Trump, Trump’s demagoguery, Christian ammosexuals, and the like). We want a heftier, darker production to go with these screeds, because the overall sound is more fun than furious. Style- and sound-wise, this reminds us of their Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge record from 1991, complete with standout keyboards on the first single “Kill Yourself Live”  Though we want it harder, this is still a properly rocking mockery of a time (now) that needs to mocked mercilessly at every opportunity, lest history think good people enjoyed this shitshow. This record is going to be on repeat for a while.

Pixies have a new compilation to celebrate the 30th anniversaries of their first two records (Come On Pilgrim, and Surfer Rosa), and it’s got the genius title, Come On Pilgrim, It’s Surfer Rosa. Besides the two albums, it’s got a radio show performance from 1986, before Black Francis became the best screamer in rock (for real, we saw them on tour with Weezer this summer, and nobody brings it like Frank! He could scrape beige paint off the walls). It’s strange to hear his voice so thin, barking like a small dog, and the mix is screwy, so when Kim Deal chimes in with her breathy beautiful accents, they’re almost jarring. It’s a cool capsule of a band before they nailed their sound, still weird and energetic, but it’ll only be appreciated by the diehards.

Groove metalers Clutch have a new record called Book of Bad Decisions. There’s is part tongue-in-cheek, part middle-finger rock and roll. Clutch busts bro-friendly, big southern flavored metal riffs, but they’re surprisingly not stupid (well, OK, sometimes).  In fact, Clutch often cover their burly grooving riffs with clever lyrics. There’s a whole school day’s worth of material on Book: history with “Spirit of ‘76,” literature with “Emily Dickinson,” art with “H.B. in Control” (H.B. standing for Hieronymus Bosch), and home-ec with “Hot Bottom Feeder” (which gives a recipe for cooking ancient catfish).  It’s about as deep as a bad teacher, but it’s often fun, smokin’-in-the-boys room rawk.

They dodge direct political discourse in favor of storytelling, or just goofy Alice Cooper-style parody. “How to Shake Hands” is the best rocker-turned-populist-politician jam since Cooper’s “Elected.”

As one of the only metalheads we know of to hold a master’s degree in English, we’re particularly fond of that song “Emily Dickinson,” which asks the reclusive poet to “Trade your lily for a rose” and screams out her name with a fury that would have made her run back into her room and lock the door for good (even faster than she really did). It’s a weird song, but strangely fun and definitely rocking. So it goes for the whole record.

More metal bands should embrace female poetry. Perhaps a nice Behemoth piece about Edna St. Vincent Millay, or Pig Destroyer waxing about Anne Bradstreet.

The Morlocks hail from San Diego and started all the way back in the ‘80s. They were certainly heard by some of the better underground bands – from The Dragons to all of John Reis’s projects, an echo is present. The group now lives in Germany with more shady shit in their past than a Trump appointee. Bring on the Mesmeric Condition is their first album in ten years. If you believe Wikipedia, then singer Leighton Koizumi has done some almost unforgivable shit that may explain why the band is working out of Germany.

Anyway, they’re still making garage rocknroll that nods along to the Dolls, but trades the glam for a thin film of ashy haze. Gritty good-time jams with creep lyrics.

The Us Festival 1982: The Us Generation Documentary

Bill Wozniak, one of the founders of Apple computers put together the Us Festival in 1982 with his own money. He mentions a few times throughout the documentary, out now via MVD Entertainment, that he had more money than he would ever need, so he spent somewhere between 10 and 13 million (figures mentioned in the documentary) to create a giant amphitheater in the Southern California desert, pay bands more money than they’d ever been paid at the time, and kick in for some creature comforts for the 140.000 people who came to each of the three days.

By all accounts in this laudatory look back, it was a success except as a money maker. About half way through this doc full of performances and the fond memories of members of The B-52s, The Police, Ramones, Oingo Boingo, The Cars, Fleetwood Mac, and The Grateful Dead, we asked ourselves, “Well, what about the fans?” We have a noted dislike of most large festivals now that we’re well into our fourth decade and we’re no longer cool enough for press passes, so we wondered about amenities, traffic, beer lines, visibility, water, and such. Alas, just as we jotted those words in our notebook, cut to a montage of early 80s dudes and chicks talking about this being the anti-Woodstock, and wonderful, and comfortable. Cherry picked for sure, given that it was a buck fifteen in the San Berdoo sunshine those afternoons, but this was the first festival to have misting areas, and organizer/promoter Bill Graham got the idea to spray the crowd with hoses (which must have been great for the first 50 of 1000 rows). It does seem like they legitimately went out of their way to plan the event for the maximum amount of comfort possible for humans standing in the desert for hours at a time.

The Us Festival was also the first festival to have a Diamond Vision jumbo television, so those unhosed people in the back could see televised images of Fred Schneider’s sweet-geek dance moves, and Sting’s alluring glances, and the sheer joy of Santana’s rhythm section grooving. The novelty of seeing the performance from far away from the stage must have felt like a great leap forward into the future.

The technology exhibitions and the attempted satellite link with another concert in Moscow are glossed over (although Bill Graham says he thinks the Moscow feed is really from a studio in L.A.), as are quite a few of the bands who played. The bigger acts get the most performance time, with full (or very nearly full) songs by The B-52s, Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, The Police, The Cars, and Santana, and quick snippets of Ramones, The Grateful Dead, Jimmy Buffett, and others. The sound is superb – from the bone-deep rippling vibrations of Andy Summers echoing notes to the squealing, tweeting, techno cascades of The Cars keyboardist Greg Hawkes, it’s all clear and well mixed.

Drama ensues as we learn that Woz (using his magical 1982-level technology) created backstage passes for his computer buds, to the disgust of Bill Graham, who’s seen walking around in cutoff jean shorts looking like he’s going to sock everyone. He gets the most begrudging admiration from the artists. Each one who mentions him openly insinuates that Graham was a dick (“He was a great guy, buuut…”)

From going to a town hall meeting to try and secure a location, to bulldozers clearing land, to a new freeway off-ramp being built, to porta-potties being trucked in, you see the lengths to which the organizers – armed with Woz’s cash – were able to go to as they put together a festival as properly as anyone knew how in 1981. And they did it for $35 per ticket for the weekend, and we’re guessing maybe five bucks in “convenience charges.”

It lost a lot of money, but Woz says “count the success by the number of smiles,” and that’s your warm fuzzy to forget income inequality for the day. Now go pay off that credit card bill you racked up going to Coachella last year.

Turn It Around – The Story of East Bay Punk

Before watching this exhaustive documentary, we could, off the top of our cannabinoided head, name maybe six or seven bands we considered East Bay punk (and that’s not including Dead Kennedys, who are from San Francisco but whose guitar player is named East Bay Ray, which always for some reason makes us think they’re from Berkeley). Now we know of all of them. Seriously. If your old band didn’t make the cut in getting mentioned here, you must have royally pissed off someone, because this sucker takes nearly three hours to tell of the truly DIY scene that spawned the likes of Neurosis, Operation Ivy, Primus, Rancid, and Green Day.

Featuring interviews with everyone from Kirk Hammett of Metallica to Larry LaLonde of Primus to the Yeasty Girls to the singer of English punk band Subhumans, the doc goes even deeper than just the celebs by giving proper time to the club promoters, tape makers, and zine creators that helped showcase and develop the scene. Maximumrocknroll – the UC Berkeley-based radio show turned super zine (still printing)  – plays a big part in all of this, as it was responsible for getting the word out about many bands, and its founder Tim Yohannan helped establish the famed club at 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley, where kids could agree to clean up after the show in order to get in when they had no money.

There’s some great examples of a collective of people working together to nurture a scene, most notably when a bunch of scraggly kids fought off a clan of racist skinheads who started ruining their good times. One of the members of MDC remarked that it was the moment people realized that “the boogeyman is human too.” (If you learn nothing else from this doc, or this review, it’s that it’s OK to punch nazis).

Funded by Green Day, the doc spends its last twenty minutes having people explain how Green Day is not a sellout, or that selling out isn’t all that bad.

It’s narrated by Iggy Pop, who has absolutely nothing to do with East Bay punk, but who has a nice deep voice. And just like in the US Festival doc, everyone in Turn It Around agrees that Bill Graham was a dick.

If you’ve made it this far you deserve something special, so here’s a new video by the Ramones put out in honor of remastered 40th anniversary of Road to Ruin.