Irwin Chusid likes to take credit for a lot of my most intriguing traits and talents. (My fear of accidentally severing my hand at the wrist with a rusty chainsaw, my ability to play a saxophone while tapdancing on a Newark-bound PATH train perhaps chief among them.)
He doesn't really have anything to do with those details, but I like to humor the guy because, well, Irwin's a friend of many years and he needs his ego greased as often as possible. That said, one thing I do give him full credit for is introducing me to Moondog, the blind composer / multi-instrumentalist who lived and performed on the streets of New York City for decades. This here's a terminal favorite from the catalog. It's short (almost all of Moondog's tunes are two minutes and change), but says plenty.
I've been waiting for this one to turn up on YouTube for a while, and it was well worth the wait. BBC4's semi-recent (2010?) documentary chronicling the rise of Britain's electronic music scene/culture. Great insights from Daniel Miller (The Normal, Mute Records), Bernard Sumner (Joy Division), and Kraftwerk's Wolfgang Flür, who brilliantly summates:
"We saw [ourselves as] engineer musicians, instead of dancing boys on stage to arouse the girls."
It's always pretty after an apocalypse So we strolled past the flowers planted by the Bloods and Crips And they chose white lilies cause they're such wacky kids It was a good day Damn right, it was a good day
Almost all the hypocrites and demagogues were gone Like the sacramental moment In a Last Poets song And Bayard Rustin came back just to bitch slap Farrakhan It was a good day Damn right, it was a good day
Burned to the ground We knew it would burst into bloom Healthy and good So we struck that match and went back to sleep
Lee Atwater was on the corner turning tricks Clutching the failed box set of his heartfelt blues licks He said "I think I liked the ghetto better when it was sick" It was a good a day Damn right, I gotta say it was a good day
Razed to the ground We knew it would burst into bloom Healthy and good Bayard Rustin smiled and went back to sleep
I would strongly urge you to watch this ASAP, before it gets yanked from YouTube. It's busting at the seams with excellent archival footage, as well as great interviews with scene kingpins and converts like Don Letts, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jerry Dammers, Viv Albertine, Dennis Bovell, and Stewart Copeland.
And can I just quickly add how jarring it is for me to imagine life in a place where quality art and culture are routinely celebrated the way they are in Britain? Can you imagine American network television producing a documentary of this caliber on any similar subject matter? The British youth culture fixations of my teens and twenties clearly paved the way for my more recent considerations of media, economics, and the complex paradigms that shape them. Considering the way we live, vote, and spend, is it any wonder that we so rarely feel any kind of kinship with the stories told on television?
In further deference to my new life of being woefully behind the cultural curve, I finally watched "Persepolis", the uber-acclaimed animated French film from 2007, based on the graphic novel of the same name. The story considers the 1979 Iranian Revolution, as seen through the troubled gaze of a young innocent named Marjane. Like many other middle class Iranians of the era, Marjane's parents rally against the US-backed Shah, but end up remorseful over the rise of the Khomeini-led fundamentalist government that eventually assumes control.
The perhaps questionable role of graphic novels and political animation serving as historical documents notwithstanding, Persepolis recounts an exceptionally complicated series of events with admirable skill. The characters, especially Marjane and her grandmother (voiced by legendary French actress Dannielle Darrieux), are profoundly engaging and often wickedly funny in spite of the film's grave subtext. To the top of your Netflix cue, stat!
WPRB lost a programming giant this weekend. George Mahlberg, more commonly known as "Doctor Cosmo" to listeners of his excellent and long-running Nocturnal Transmissions program, passed away after a long illness. As an old acquaintance and former WPRB programmer, I extend my sincerest condolences to those who were close to him.
Cosmo came on board at WPRB sometime in 1991—about a year prior to me, but his experience and radio wizardry far surpassed anything in my stable. He was older than most of PRB's other non-student DJs, and had a long résumé of radio credentials, reaching all the way back to the 70s when he'd been a programmer at L.A.'s then-adventurous K-Rock. He was also a brilliant storyteller, had a voracious appetite for unusual sounds, and most of all, he really enjoyed the company of young people who were passionate about radio. To call him an inspiration and a hero may sound trite, but after spending the last 18 hours reckoning with the cruel news of his sudden departure, I'm having trouble denying how appropriate those terms are. Recollections on his Facebook page, as well as the phone calls and emails I've fielded from former WPRB colleagues seem to validate the sentiment. There are probably dozens of mic break techniques I've nicked from him over the years, and I feel no shame in admitting it. WPRB was beyond fortunate to have a shepherd like him, even if only a small minority of the staff were aware of how incredible his talents were.
Though I didn't realize it at the time, Nocturnal Transmissions was freeform radio at its finest. When Cosmo joined the airstaff, much of WPRB was very much entrenched in the indie/underground scene of that particular era. While his programming did acknowledge those trends, he also dosed listeners with generous helpings of the avant garde, free jazz, Zappa, Krautrock, 20th Centrury Classical, 70s Marshall Boogie, fringe politics from across the spectrum, and schitzoid spoken word from all manner of radicals, revolutionaries, and acid casualties. More importantly, to the mix he added his own fierce intelligence, his incredibly eccentric humor, a tremendous appreciation for science, and an open door policy for any listeners who wanted to join the fray. As you might imagine, central Jersey doesn't offer too many rewarding avenues for seekers of adventurous art and culture, but to the avid listeners of WPRB's Friday night programming, the reality seemed very much otherwise.
I have many wonderful memories of Doctor Cosmo, but perhaps my favorite was the night he joined me on air when the DJ who followed my program failed to show up. Scrambling for a long track to eat up time, I put on "Die Donnergotter" by Rhys Chatham—a 20+ minute epic of ringing, hypnotic guitars. I'd surrendered control and had assumed a new position behind the guest mic while George slid easily into the captain's chair and engaged me in a lengthy on-air banter while "Die Donnergotter" churned away in the background. As the track approached its crashing apex, George calmly reached over and switched the turntable off so that the audio began spiraling down as we continued our on-air rap. In the kind of seamless transition that true radio geeks get their panties in a twist over, he then began manually rotating the record in reverse with his finger at what sounded like a perfect 33 RPM clip. Presto! Another 20 minutes of background music for us to push later into the evening with.
There are many songs that I'll never be able to distance from the immediate Cosmo-connection they hold for me, but "Die Donnergotter" is probably chief among them. I can only hope that wherever George is now, the guitars sound as great (whether in forward or reverse) as they did to my ears that night. To my friend, I say thank you and goodbye. I wish that we'd had more time together.
In the wrong company, it can be hard to explain why the death of an essentially unknown band's singer is something that I think about pretty regularly. In early 2001, Jerry Wick, singer and guitar player for the band Gaunt, was killed by a hit & run driver near his home in Columbus, Ohio. It took several days for the news to filter through the less-immediate communication channels of that era, but a friend recently reminded me that Jon Solomon and I jointly broke the news locally while on the air at WPRB. Given Gaunt's legacy at the station (beginning with 1992's Whitey the Man EP, they were one of the most played and universally adored bands among the airstaff), it's no surprise that Jon and I fielded phone calls from many listeners who were saddened if not downright distressed by this terrible turn of events.
On a personal level, Gaunt completed a lot of musical ideas for me, and Jerry was Gaunt. His hyperactive and sometimes overbearing persona is what gave the band much of its identity, and although they were quickly outpaced (in terms of success and recognition) by some of their contemporaries, Gaunt retained a unique and special identity—the way all things of tragically undervalued cultural significance do.
Their records? Uniformly great. Their live shows? Totally off the hook—Gaunt was the kind of band whose performances could make a roomful of curious strangers feel like close friends on the inside of 40 minutes. The first time I saw them was at CBGBs, and after that it was all Maxwell's all the time. Every four months between 1993 and 95, or so it seems in retrospect, usually with other great bands in tow. They put out a series of killer albums and a fistful of even better singles and EPs before locking horns with a major label for their final LP in 1998, which promptly flopped. A short while later, the band quietly parted ways, and about two years after that, Jerry was gone. That was ten years ago today.
Take a listen to him performing "Love, Death, and Photosynthesis". It's not really representative of what Gaunt sounded like, but it eerily foreshadows the man's tragic death in a manner that's befitting of someone so talented. It's also just a really great song.
More Gaunt/Jerry around the web:
Bela Koe-Krompecher's excellent blog chronicling his relationships with Jerry and Jenny Mae. Recently unearthed video for Gaunt's "Turn to Ash". (Facebook link, takes about 30 seconds to get going.) Thrill Jockey Records memorial page.
This time of year always reminds me of the night a squad car carrying John Lennon's body sped past me on the streets of New York City. On December 8th of 1980, I was eight years old and in the city with my family for a holiday-related dinner with relatives. We were out late—much later than my parents ever kept me out back home, but I'm sure they'd been drinking and having a grand old time. The relatives we'd dined with were somewhat wealthy, and in fact we had eaten dinner at Tavern on the Green, then regarded as one of the city's more exclusive (albeit touristy) restaurants.
I had only a dim awareness of who the Beatles were back then. In 1980, I was far more interested in reenacting scenes from Star Wars with my friends than I was in any kind of music. But the Beatles' legacy was forever burned into my consciousness after my father jerked me away from the street as that squad car came screaming past, the bloody head of its famous occupant slumped against the rear passenger window. The Dakota apartment building where Lennon was murdered is only a few blocks from Tavern on the Green's old location near Central Park West, and sometime shortly before 11 PM, we were walking back to the garage where my father's car was parked. But when we crossed 72nd Street and observed the chaos left in the aftermath of the shooting, someone—a tear-streaked woman, by my father's recollection—told us what had happened. We left the city and drove home to the dark suburbs of New Jersey without speaking, probably listening to the news on the radio.
In spite of the weirdness of having been only blocks away when one of history's most famous murders went down, I never got into the Beatles the way most other kids seem to, and I often wonder why that is. Until I got older and started getting an allowance, the only Beatles record in the house was Let It Be, which belonged to one of my older siblings. Perhaps Lennon's death coupled with the eulogistic tone of that album's eponymous track is what set my associations with the band on such a weird path so early on. When you're a little kid, a song's lyrics are often the first thing that hits you, and lines like "in my hour of darkness / she is standing right in front of me / speaking words of wisdom / let it be" certainly influenced the childhood anxieties I experienced in bed at night. Long after my parents had ordered the lights switched out, the images conjured by that type of poetry were a lot to wrap my head around. It's funny to think about it again thirty years later—by anyone's estimation, a long time has passed since then. It's also quite peculiar for a band that broke up two years before I was born to in some way serve as a milemarker by which to observe my own aging. Maybe that's what people mean when they call Lennon's music "timeless". Maybe it's why that term has always bothered me so much.
I was thrilled to see Dangerous Minds recently post about the Punk chapter of the 1995 PBS documentary series, Rock & Roll, finally showing up on YouTube. (It hasn't been re-run in years, nor is it available on DVD. My homemade VHS copy bit the dust eons ago.) As DM pointed out, it's one of the few docs that really makes a point of completing the critical circuits between 70s punk and the reggae sounds of that same era.
However, the hour-long chapters dealing with proto-punk (The Wild Side) as well as early hip-hop/electro (The Perfect Beat) are also excellent, and now also online. The proto-punk edition focuses on the Velvet Underground (great interviews with Lou, Cale, and Moe Tucker), Iggy, the Doors, and Bowie, and the hip-hop chapter takes on Kraftwerk, Afrika Bambaattaa, Grandmaster Flash, and follows the narrative up through Run DMC, Beastie Boys, New Order, and The Orb.
Of course, it's easy to nitpick and complain about what the filmmakers foolishly left out or willfully ignored (ESG? The MC5?), but I still give this series very high marks for their overall presentation of the subject matter. In recent years, only that suberb Rough Trade documentary has surpassed this, I'd say.
Begin watching The Wild Sidehere. Begin watching The Perfect Beathere.
Very few of us are able to write about the formative experiences of our twenties without coming off as nostalgic has-beens, wannabes, or never-weres. "I was there" is the sentiment that most of us would like younger generations to believe, but by following that path, we relegate ourselves to the dustbin of cultural relevance. When doing or being or participating stops involving a "now" and refers only to a "then", we quietly write ourselves out of the script. Bullied by the signposts of middle age, we become observers, bystanders, and eventually, outsiders in the same community we once felt so utterly connected to. As unfortunate and perhaps even depressing as the story sounds, it's a fascinating phenomenon to observe from within oneself, and by my count, no one is doing a better job of chronicling the metamorphosis than Bela Koe-Krompecher. His latest blog entry is a subtle commentary on the recent Matador at 21 festival, but it doubles as a deeply personal history of one man's experience in a critical moment of American music. In all honesty, he had me before the finish line of his first paragraph, in which he cites the dangers of observing the present "through the haze of dead bodies, former lovers, and the highs and lows of the past..." He elaborates:
1989-1990 were years of planting seeds, at least for the soft underbelly of the fermenting underground scene. At night we huddled in bars, clutching long-necks as if they were talismans, eyeing bands on crumbling stages while looking for lovers through the haze of cigarette smoke. Back then we got paid to listen to records and laugh at the responsibilities of the rest of the world. Very few of us had children, had jobs that required button-down shirt or, god forbid had mortgage payments to make. The thirst inside of us was for music, booze, and the sense of belonging that those two ingredients can provide.
Elsewhere in the same post, he writes:
My own enthusiasm was exhausting—records were more important than anything. More important than sex because a record can’t hurt you, more important than jobs because songs don’t have responsibilities, and more important than families because music can’t leave you.
There is a naked sincerity to such admissions—and I can't overstate this enough: Most people can't be so revealing without sounding hamfisted. Bela's voice is a rare exception in the fray, and I often find myself considering his words long after I've clicked away from them. You could do a lot worse with the next five minutes than reading his complete post.
