Tag: punk

Categories
Music Music Features

Hell on Himself

Prolific is the type of word reserved for someone like Richard Hell. Born Richard Meyers, Hell dropped out of high school and moved to New York at the age of 17, had his poems published by Rolling Stone and New Directions before he was 21, then grew tired of the whole aspiring-writer thing and became one of the founders of the New York punk scene.

After putting down the typewriter and picking up the bass, Hell played some of the first punk shows on the CBGB stage and released iconic records with his bands the Neon Boys (later Television), the Heartbreakers (featuring Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan), and finally Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Hell isn’t on tour supporting his new autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, but he will be speaking and doing a book signing at the Brooks Museum of Art this Thursday evening. The Flyer caught up with him to ask some questions about his latest project.

Memphis Flyer: You started writing the autobiography in 2006. How did you approach writing it, did you turn to old journals or is it mostly from memory?
Richard Hell: I am lucky that I have a lot of background material to reference. Not only was I publishing writing as a teenager but there was a fair amount of coverage in magazines and papers that was really useful. Plus my mother is a pack rat; she’s kept boxes and boxes of things from my childhood. The homemade pamphlet from when I was eight years that supplied the title for the book came from her. I’m almost neurotically serious about being as accurate as I possibly can, and since the publication of the book I’ve discovered one or two things I’ve got wrong and I fixed them for the paperback. As far as the process of writing, I just winged it and went with the flow. When it came to me reaching back to the earliest days, there was no system or organization, I just trusted that the stuff that I remembered would be relevant.


Was there anything that you’d forgotten that came back to you once you started writing?

It’s always cool to get a flash of recollection of something really vivid that you hadn’t remembered, no matter what it is. When you write something like this you realize that you do kind of just naturally create this narrative of your life as you go along. You know how when you’re first starting to fall in love or something like that, you and the person you’re falling in love with tend to gradually reveal to each other the stories of your past and your life? It was like that. Things you’re proud of, or find amusing, or sometimes ashamed of, they all get revealed when you become close to someone. There’s this whole repertoire of the things that you’ve been through that you remember gradually.

So if you moved to New York City to be a writer, when and why did you pick up the bass?
It was a conjunction of things. When I came to New York at 17 I started to get frustrated, it just seemed really isolated, there wasn’t much audience for young writers. It’s a specialized acquired taste, poetry. It washard to imagine where (being a writer) would lead because I didn’t like having jobs, I sure didn’t want to go to school, and I didn’t want to become a teacher even if I did qualify. I just couldn’t see how to make my life as a poet work, and I wanted my work to be my life. I wanted it to be interchangeable, and at the same time my best friend (>>>>>)was an aspiring professional musician, he was in a similar position and didn’t know where to get started. But anyway, this was when the New York Dolls were just starting, they were an example of these kids who just decided to put themselves out there. They felt like they were just being themselves, not adhering to a pre-established audience, and they were really popular but not about being commercial. They served as an example of how it was possible to get out there and do what excited you and make it work. All of those things taken into account, we got the idea to start a band and so I picked up a bass and started coming up with a way to express how things looked to us in songs, using whatever writing skills I had already developed.


There’s been a lot of talk that most of what’s published in the book on NYC punk Please Kill Me is either embellished or just completely made up. What’s your take on that book?
There’s a lot of like inaccuracy, some of which coming from people twisting stories to serve their own purpose. There’s no fact checking. That being said, being true to the spirit of what went on, in terms of just conveying what it was like it to be there, it’s by far the best picture and the most accurate. There are specific things that aren’t true, overall the whole impression of what went down is really on the mark. I like the book, there are a lot of books about that time and place that are just silly and stupid, and they get credence and stuff gets perpetuated in the press that is just wrong, but Please Kill Me is a great book.


Did you see your autobiography as a way to give a different take on what those parts of your life were really like?
Not really, it came very low on the list of my incentives to write the book. It was good to have the chance here and there to correct false stories that had been distorted and had been reported. The main reason I wrote the book was because I was curious to see what it would add up to if I put this whole sequence side by side. I wanted to see what the picture ended up looking like; I wanted to find out for myself. At any moment you have this perception of who you are and what you’ve been through, you have this vague idea of what the whole picture is like but it just happens in little fragments moment to moment. I wanted to see what it looked like if I made it all into one object.

How is writing different for you, does it provide a spark that playing music didn’t?
I mean the thing for me about writing is that it’s a relief from life and music. Music entails all this other peripheral stuff, touring and being a public figure and having to make a lot of money. It’s not easy to survive as a writer but it’s sure not as expensive as making records. I mean you’ve gotta be conscience of your popularity all the time in music. There are a lot more peripheral demands in music. The thing that I really liked about music was making records, writing songs and making records, but there is so much else you have to do, including feeding all these mouths. It’s not just expensive to finance a music career, you have to work really hard to sell a lot of records to make it feasible. Writing is so much simpler; I’ve always loved writing and loved books. It wasn’t much of a sacrifice to move on, I do sometimes get wistful about all the songs I could have written, but I don’t really have any regrets.

How difficult was it writing an autobiography compared to the works of fiction that you’ve published? Was there anything that was intentionally left out?
Well in some ways it was easier because I had all the material, I didn’t have to wonder where things were going. But that’s the fun part of writing fiction is surprising yourself every day with where the story goes. The main difference is the weird challenges and problems created by writing about yourself. You have to be conscience of the temptations of anyone who has written an autobiography, to have everything you write be self-serving. But at the same time I didn’t want to misrepresent myself, I mean yeah I’m pretty egotistical so I didn’t want to be falsely humble but at the same time I didn’t want to misrepresent anything that happened, so that got a little tricky. It’s interesting to see the responses to the book, the way people react to what I wrote, but I basically feel like I pulled it off. I’m satisfied with how I dealt with that problem. I think the book is a fair representation of what happened and who I am. I said a lot of ugly things, one odd thing is that people sometimes talk about what I creep I am. Maybe not that word but it boils down to that, sometimes people actually do say creep, but often enough people don’t take into account that I chose what to say. They say that I am a creep because I’m calling myself a creep. It’s not that I’m calling myself ugly but I chose to say those things and to reveal those things about myself. I could have done it differently.


Do you think that people who don’t know you as someone who shaped American punk rock will still enjoy the book?
I will flatter myself and say that the ones who are literally minded will enjoy it, I think it’s a good book (laughs). Part of the motivation was to describe what a life like mine was like, what it was like to be an aspiring young artist in NYC in the 70s. A lot of the great works in history are about the young person coming to the city to create their life. It’s an inherently interesting subject. It is almost just incidental that it has to with music. I don’t even pick up the guitar until a third way through the book.


In the book you talk about how the Sex Pistols owe more than a little to you for your look that they adopted through there manager Malcolm McLaren. What are the differences between a statement like “I belong to the blank generation” as opposed to “Anarchy in the UK.”

I don’t really think about either of those things, I wrote that song and I put it out into the world, But I don’t really know how to answer because I’m not a student of the Sex Pistols.
Are you a fan of any rock and roll memoirs or autobiographies by musicians? Is there anyone from that New York Scene that you think needs to write a book?
I think please kill me is the best book easily. It’s true there are a lot of mistakes on it, I disagree with a lot of the emphasis, certain people get more attention than what is warranted, but still it’s by far the best if you’re looking for a fan literature.

An Evening With Richard Hell

Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

Thursday, October 17th, 7 p.m.

$6 museum members/$8 nonmembers

Categories
Music Music Features

Goner Guide

Thursday, Sept. 26

Gonerfest traditionally opens with a low-key, outdoor show at the gazebo at the corner of Cooper and Young. This year, however, the opening promises to be a lot less low key, with Japanese legends Guitar Wolf bringing their brand of acrobatic, primal, ultra-high-energy garage primitivism to the neighborhood that is not aware of what is about to hit it.

The first night of Gonerfest 10 opens at the Hi-Tone with the Blind Shake, a Minneapolis three-piece in the noisy Hüsker Dü tradition, whose fantastic second full-length album Key To A False Door just dropped. Next up is the confusingly named Octa#Grape, a sort-of San Diego supergroup led by former Trumans Water noisemeister Glen Galloway, and then the reverb-drenched Frenchmen Catholic Spray. Detroit’s Tyvek plays straight-ahead, pogo-worthy punk appropriate to their hometown’s reputation. Their previous Gonerfest sets have been pits of riotous energy. The first Memphis band on the bill is Ex-Cult, who played one of their earliest shows at last year’s Gonerfest and have since gathered a following by barnstorming the nation supporting Ty Segall. Closing the first night is New Orleans’ organ wizard Quintron, whose headlining set at Gonerfest 6, which wound up a tired bunch of punks into a giant, all-night dance party ­— as Eric Friedl says, “It was a big, sweaty mess” — and is on the shortlist for best Gonerfest performance ever.

Friday, Sept. 27

Friday kicks off with an afternoon show at the Buccaneer featuring the ramshackle Florida rock of Gino and the Goons and poppy Swedes The Martin Savage Gang.

The Hi-Tone show begins with a trio of Tennessee’s finest. Fronted by Memphis noise rock legend Richard Martin and including Friedl, the indescribable True Sons of Thunder must be seen to be believed. (“We don’t know what we’re doing, but we’ve been doing it for 8 years, so we must be doing something right,” Martin says.) Viva L’American Death Ray Music marks a rare appearance from a pair of Memphis’ favorite sons, Nick Diablo and Harlan T. Bobo, who have decamped to Brooklyn and France, respectively. Nashville’s Cheap Time are Gonerfest veterans with deep Memphis roots and solid, assured songwriting by leader Jeffery Novak.

The first of two Seattle bands at the fest is Head, a favorite of Goner’s Zac Ives. Detroit’s Human Eye, led by Detroit’s Timmy Vulgar, brings their psychedelic blacklight stage show and sci-fi weirdness back to the Gonerfest stage, where they dominated two years ago.

The big story of the tenth Gonerfest is Friday night’s headliner. “Mudhoney is by far the biggest band we’ve ever had play,” Ives says. The Seattle band was there at the conception of the ’80s “Seattle sound,” and their first single, “Touch Me I’m Sick” marked, if not the beginning of the grunge era, then at least the first time most people outside the Pacific Northwest heard the sound that turned rock-and-roll inside out and made the former underground the mainstream. They were labelmates on Sub Pop with Nirvana, and Mudhoney just released their tenth album, Vanishing Point, on the venerable label. In 1998, they recorded the album Tomorrow Hit Today under the tutelage of the late, legendary Memphis producer Jim Dickinson. Where others from that era either flamed out like Nirvana or went arena rock like Pearl Jam, Mudhoney has stuck to its guns, keeping the tempos up and the lyrics snotty. Many, if not most, of the bands playing at Gonerfest owe a stylistic debt to Mudhoney, whether they know it or not.

Saturday, Sept. 28

Gonerfest Saturday afternoons are in many ways the heart and soul of the festival. The festival invades Murphy’s in Midtown with 10 bands alternating on two stages, one inside and the other in the parking lot.

“That’s one of the shows that people from Memphis usually come to,” Ives says.

“It’s a good way to check out Gonerfest without the whole ‘subway ride to hell’ thing,” Friedl adds.

This year’s Saturday includes sets from Memphis punk provacateurs Manatees and Harlan T. Bobo’s newest project, the hard-rocking Fuzz. Other highlights include Gonerfest stalwarts Digital Leather, a synth-punk project by former Jay Reatard collaborator Shawn Foree; Oxford’s Talbot Adams; and Austin art-punks Spray Paint. Closing the afternoon show is Wreckless Eric, a British punk rocker who was there at the creation of the sound in 1977, and whose long and varied career has seen at least 17 albums under many different names and has taken him all over the world.

For those who have survived the preceeding two days, Saturday night at the Hi-Tone is stacked with talent. The night kicks off with the spacey, soulful sounds of Iowa’s Autodramatics and ’90s Australian punkers Onyas, featuring guitar strangler John “Mad” Macka, will throw down before Memphis’ own Msr. Jeffrey Evans leads his CC Riders out of retirement. Next up are Alabama synth weirdos Wizzard Sleeve, who are Gonerfest vets and perennial Memphis favorites. The penultimate band is Destruction Unit, led by former Memphian Ryan Russo. “They are one of the best bands on the planet,” Friedl says. “They’ve got this kind of Hawkwind thing going on, with everyone flying around the stage for 45 minutes.”

Saturday night’s headliners are the Australian gut bucket rock legends the Cosmic Psychos. The highly influential band’s first three records, Down on the Farm (1985), Cosmic Psychos (1987), and Go the Hack (1989), have been rereleased on Goner Records, and the band is currently touring America. The documentary film Blokes You Can Trust, about the band’s origins as Australian farmers and the startling contrast between life on the farm and life on the road.

“It’s not just about the music. If you like good documentaries, you’ll love this movie,” says Friedl.

The film is screening five times during Gonerfest, and is a must-see, not only as an introduction to the bands long legacy but also because it’s a great, funny, and endearing film where you’ll find out that when, on the song “Down On The Farm,” Ross Knight sings “I love my tractor!” he really means it. The Psychos fun, down-to-earth, no nonsense rock-and-roll will be the perfect capper to a stacked Gonerfest lineup.

Categories
Music Music Features

The Baron of Love

CREDIT: Don Perry

Ross Johnson is weak and afraid. At least that’s what he says repeatedly in his sardonic new lyrics for the classic elevator jam “Theme from ‘A Summer Place'”: “Boys and girls laughed at me because I was weak and afraid,” he chants. “It’s a lifestyle that’s working for me.”

Johnson, the mild-mannered University of Memphis librarian and elder statesman of Memphis punk, lets his listeners know that he’s okay with being a useless screw-up so they can be okay with it too.

“There’s trouble in this here world,” Johnson further confesses in a recording called “Naked Party,” “but the payoff,” he adds, explaining justice as he understands it, “is that you get to go to a nekkid party once in a while.”

In the liner notes for Make It Stop: The Most of Ross Johnson, Goner Records’ hysterical, perfectly paced 24-track retrospective of Johnson’s often bizarre but always entertaining output, former Memphis Flyer music editor John Floyd describes the dark, confessional content as being uncomfortably personal, even for people who don’t know the artist and have no idea that his rantings are, to a large extent, painful autobiography. As accurate as Floyd’s assessment sounds, Johnson’s on-again off-again bandmate Tav Falco, leader of Memphis’ art-damaged psycho-roots band Panther Burns, has the definitive take.

“Not since Lenny Bruce and Lord Buckley have I knelt before the shrine of crossed funny bones, wicked innuendo, and hep diatribe like I kneel before the altar of Ross,” Falco says. “[Johnson’s lyrics] bristle with salty perceptions, uncanny epiphanies, and hysterical distortions over which a dark and unutterable muse presides.”

Not one to be easily categorized, Johnson sets the record straight. “It’s just a bunch of yelling,” he says after a few fumbling attempts to say something smart. “That’s what it is. It’s a bunch of yelling.”

But, as yelling goes, it can be glorious, like Jerry Clower, the loudmouthed hayseed comedian, reading boozy short fiction by Denis Johnson and Raymond Carver. Kent Benjamin, a former Memphis scenester and writer for the Austin-based music magazine Pop Culture Press once acknowledged in print that the best parts of any Panther Burns show were when “Tav was out in the parking lot,” leaving Johnson and Alex Chilton on stage as a duo.” Chilton would riff away while Johnson would rant wildly to delight the handful of stalwarts who actually made it all the way through an early Panther Burns show.

Whether he’ll cop to it or not, Johnson is one of the founding fathers of Memphis’ rootsy Midtown punk scene.

“I am a source of gossip and a parasite,” Johnson corrects. “And I have been very lucky over the years to attach myself like a barnacle to a ship’s hull to some very talented people like Chilton and Jim Dickinson.”

For all of the self-deprecation, Johnson’s bona fides are in order. In the 1970s, he wrote reviews for Creem editor Lester Bangs. By the end of that decade, he was drumming for Panther Burns. He’s also the man responsible for the unhinged rant “Baron of Love Pt. II,” which may be the only truly brilliant part of Chilton’s interestingly uneven but generally over-praised novelty album Like Flies on Sherbet. He’s drummed for North Mississippi blues singer Jesse Mae Hemphill and pounded the tubs for a ragged, revisionist honky-tonk band called the Gibson Brothers, which featured both Jeff Evans and Jon Spencer. He was also an early imbiber and frequent performer at the Well, a blue-collar bar at the corner of Madison and Avalon that became the Antenna club, where Memphis’ punk-rock scene was born.

“I remember [Panther Burns] was playing the Western Steak House, and Charlie Feathers was there,” Johnson says, recalling the days when Elvis’ favorite restaurant was still open and serving up rock-and-roll and meat. “Tav said we were going to do the Charlie Feathers song ‘Tongue-Tied Jill.’ Well, Charlie just put his head down and said, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ That’s when I learned that while applause is a real thrill, I also enjoyed negative attention.”

If negative attention is what Johnson craves, he’ll probably get plenty for Make It Stop, which, if taken at face value, might come off as the misogynistic ramblings of the most annoying alcoholic at the club.

“There were certainly moments I wished the barroom floor would just open up and swallow me when my love for the booing got too painful,” Johnson admits, allowing that the three predominant themes in his music are “the misuse of ethanol,” conflicts with women, and all the guilt and shame he feels about the aforementioned two things.

But Make It Stop isn’t all bad blood, bad livers, and bad intentions. The wonderfully offbeat collection features tracks as disparate as “Rockabilly Monkey Faced Girl,” which finds Johnson wildly shouting inspired gibberish in the spirit of honky-tonk savant Hasil Atkins, and a beautifully wrecked guitar-driven cover of Floyd Cramer’s classic “Last Date,” with R.E.M.’s Peter Buck in the driver’s seat. “Hash House Pallor” references loungy, horn-driven TV themes of the 1970s, while Johnson’s winking cover of the Gentrys’ “Keep on Dancing” quickly turns into a comic meditation on paranoia and “ass whoopings.”

“My parents are dead, but my sister is alive and she would be ashamed to hear the word ‘blackout’ used to describe the condition I was in when I recorded some of this,” Johnson gleefully laments, sounding like a Catskills insult comic falling on his own rapier wit. “Sometimes it’s hard to listen to.”

And it is. But all wincing aside, it’s extremely satisfying, and for the adventurous listener, it’s well worth the extra effort.

Categories
Music Music Features

R.I.P. Punk

For the last several years, Los Angeles-based photographer Theresa Kereakes has focused her lens on Memphis garage-rock icons such as Monsieur Jeffrey Evans, Jack Yarber, and Harlan T. Bobo, adding their images to her already vast musical pantheon.

Late last month, as part of a continental “tour” that includes stops in Atlanta, Toronto, Houston, and Oxford, Mississippi, Kereakes returned to Memphis — not to shoot more photos, but to begin installing an exhibit of her work, which goes on display at Goner Records Thursday, November 1st.

Titled “Punk Rock Day of the Dead,” there’s not a Memphis musician in the bunch. Instead, Kereakes — who showed past work here as part of 2005’s Gonerfest 2 — turns a critical eye on “live fast, die young” L.A. musicians such as Germs frontman Darby Crash, who died of a drug overdose in 1980; AIDS casualties such as Black Randy (who founded West Coast art-punk group Metrosquad) and Lance Loud; Jeffrey Lee Pierce, who died of a brain hemorrhage at 37; and former Cramps guitarist Bryan Gregory, who dropped dead of a heart attack four years before his 50th birthday.

“Out of all the people I have pictures of, the ones who really resonate are the dead guys,” admits Kereakes, who, during punk’s heyday, also captured legends like Johnny Thunders, who died under mysterious circumstances in New Orleans when he was just 38, and Stiv Bators, the cocksure Dead Boys vocalist who died in his sleep after being struck down by a Paris taxi.

“One time, Stiv painted ‘R.I.P. Sid Vicious’ on a billboard for the movie Heaven Can Wait,” she recalls. “He called me up and said, ‘You know, Sid’s died. You’ve got to come see this billboard on Sunset [Boulevard].’ I shot a picture of it, which was used as the lead picture for Creem magazine’s obituary of Sid.

“Later on, when Stiv was touring with Lords of the New Church for the last time, he’d become such a monster. He was doing every kind of speed imaginable, which turned him into the biggest jackass. I’d still drive him around and take him places, but I was angry at him. Then someone called me from Paris and said Stiv was dead. I said, ‘Put him on the phone — now,’ because he was someone who’d fake death two or three times a week. But they said that he was really dead.”

Today, Kereakes considers herself a survivor of a scene where “even the ones who weren’t drug addicts, alcoholics, or complete fuck-ups” are lucky to be alive.

“We’d drive all night to concerts. I remember doing a five-hour drive in the rain to San Francisco to see the Sex Pistols. I’ve lived fast and hard, and somebody’s been watching over me. It puts a lot of things in perspective,” she says.

“Back in the day, during the first punk rock gestalt, I think we had the right degree of narcissism. We knew we were special. We were gonna take over the world,” says Kereakes, whose ’70s-era portraits of the Cramps, Avengers vocalist Penelope Houston, and the Velvet Underground‘s John Cale appear in Punk 365, Holly George-Warren‘s coffee-table tome on the musical genre, published by Abrams this month as part of the 30th anniversary of a revolution that began with the October ’77 release of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.

“I couldn’t do this show in my hometown,” Kereakes declares of “Punk Rock Day of the Dead.” “In L.A., there’d be so many expectations. They knew all of these people already, and there’s so much information people would bring to the party — too much ‘I don’t like that guy.’

“Memphis is different,” she says. “It’s more fun, because people really like the music, and there’s no judgment about the musicians. I find this town so warm and welcoming. I’m a huge Oblivians fan and to be able to walk into a place and find people like Jack, Eric [Friedl, founder of the Goner Records label], and Jeff Evans, and document what they do seems so important.”

Surveying her work, which includes a portrait of an uncharacteristically fragile-looking Darby Crash holding an acoustic guitar and an action shot of Stiv Bators sharing the spotlight with Dee Dee Ramone, Kereakes says of her numerous friends who have crossed over from notoriety to immortality, “Unfortunately, dead, they’re worth a whole lot more.”

Categories
Music Music Features

Long, Strange Trip

The world’s most gifted fiction writer couldn’t come up with a story as fascinating and tragic as that of the Meat Puppets. Formed in 1980 by brothers Cris and Curt Kirkwood and drummer Derrick Bostrom, the Phoenix trio began as purveyors of what can only be described as artsy hardcore — explosive, sloppy, irreverent, and absurdly noisy for the time period. The band’s first EP, In a Car, showcased this approach perfectly when it was released on the tiny World Imitation label in 1981. The record is a partial jab at the violent suburban hardcore that was then coming out of L.A.

The EP caught the attention of Greg Ginn, Black Flag guitarist/ringleader and owner of SST Records. SST re-released In a Car, following it with the release of Meat Puppets (1982), a very short album that’s essentially an extension of the EP. SST would be the Meat Puppets’ home through the end of the ’80s. Though by this point the band was making music that classified them as hardcore, they did not feel comfortable moving within the punk and hardcore scenes. That’s going to happen when you’re dealing with guys who were fond of running around in the desert in the middle of the night, blazing on LSD.

Unsurprisingly, the band’s second album signaled a shift in style — a major shift in style. Meat Puppets II was still furious, unhinged, and loud as hell, but on this album the band introduced a fusion of punk and country/folk that sounded unlike anything happening at the time of its release in 1984. It would be a major influence for years to come, serving as the original home for the Meat Puppets songs that Nirvana covered on its MTV Unplugged album (“Plateau,” “Lake of Fire,” and “Oh Me”).

Up on the Sun (1985), the band’s third full-length, dialed up the country, ’70s hard rock, and jammy Grateful Dead/Quicksilver Messenger Service-style psych folk (see the amazing “Enchanted Pork Fist”) to further distance the band from underground indie contemporaries. Up on the Sun made the Meat Puppets a staple of college radio and, along with its predecessor, established a “Meat Puppets sound.” Sadly, the band would continue to release solid albums throughout the latter part of the decade, but none would approach the artistic highs reached on II and Up on the Sun. The SST releases were reissued by Rykodisc in 1999, all with loads of bonus tracks and excellent liner notes.

The Meat Puppets left SST at the turn of the decade and broke up for a short time. After reforming, they made the major-label move to London Records. The resultant Forbidden Places (1991) was their seventh album and a better than average Meat Puppets amalgam of ZZ Top, country, indie rock, and traditional rock that would go straight into the cut-out bins once grunge and alternative rock stole the spotlight.

For two years, the band kept a relatively low profile until they were asked by Nirvana to open the In Utero tour in 1993. It was at the end of this tour that Nirvana taped MTV Unplugged with the Meat Puppets sitting in as guests. All of this provided serious exposure for the band, and their next album, Too High To Die (1994), was poised to be a success. This didn’t happen until Kurt Cobain committed suicide, after which MTV got a lot of mileage out of airing the unplugged performance. The single “Backwater,” still occasionally heard on the radio today, moved up the charts to become the Meat Puppets’ first and only hit. This would prove to be both a blessing and a curse, but probably more of a curse.

The band’s next album, 1995’s No Joke!, made no mark on the charts, and during its recording, bassist Cris Kirkwood’s drug problem would reach a destructive point. The band split up, and Curt escaped the insanity by moving to Austin. Then, in 1998, Cris’ wife, Michelle Tardif, was found dead of an overdose in the couple’s bedroom. Cris then went missing for a while before reappearing to tackle his addictions via rehab. He would still struggle with drugs for years, until he experienced a life-changing incident.

On December 29, 2003, at a post office in downtown Phoenix, Cris got into an altercation with a woman over a parking space. A security guard attempted to escort Cris from the premises, but the former Meat Puppet punched him and stole his collapsible baton. As the scuffle escalated, the security guard drew his sidearm and shot Cris once. The bullet nicked his lower spine, putting him in the hospital in critical condition and causing temporary paralysis. As a final blow, Cris was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon with intent to do bodily harm, to which he later pled guilty.

After serving a prison term and finally kicking drugs, Cris reunited with Curt, and at the end of 2006, word began to spread that the brothers were preparing to play live. At this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, the new incarnation of the Meat Puppets was unveiled to generally favorable reviews. A few months later, Rise to Your Knees was released, the first Meat Puppets album in 12 years to feature both Kirkwood brothers. The album sounds like a cross section of the band’s SST years, even if it does have a few alt-rock touches left over from the early ’90s.

Cris and Curt Kirkwood can still speak musical telepathy to one another live, reason enough to witness, this week at the Hi-Tone, this happy chapter in an insane story.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Girl group pop and all-boy punk push forward by looking back.

“We are the Pipettes,” sing the Pipettes by way of introduction. “If you haven’t noticed yet, we’re the prettiest girls you’ve ever met.” A prefab girl group not unlike the Shangri-La’s or the Spice Girls, the Pipettes rock matching polka-dot dresses, horn-rimmed glasses, lacquered make-up, and cute nicknames (Gwenno, Rosay, and RiotBecki) as a means of repackaging prepunk sounds for post-punk audiences. More blatantly retro than Lily Allen or Amy Winehouse, but also just as modern, they’re as much a project as a band, one that emphasizes their physical as well as musical attributes.

In one sense, this girl group might seem as suspicious as a boy band, but the Pipettes have a lot of fun with their constructed image. Their debut cleverly updates girl-group sounds to address modern concerns from a distinct — and playful — female perspective. In other words, what Ronnie Spector could only hint at, the Pipettes can sing about openly. On “Sex,” which kicks off with a “Be My Baby” drum intro, they shut up a talkative date with a trip to the bedroom; “Dirty Mind,” about an imaginative lover with OCD, could be a response to the Prince song of the same name. And of course there are (slightly more) innocent songs about boys (“I Love You”), romantic confusion (“Why Did You Stay?”), and dancing (“It Hurts to See You Dance So Well,” which could get by on title alone).

Ultimately, it’s the Pipettes’ musical attributes that truly sell these dramas. Each has a strong and expressive voice individually, but together, they sound even better, mixing their vocals up in harmonies that are compelling and surprisingly complex. It helps that the Pipettes have a resourceful backing band, the Cassette, who effortlessly re-create the swing and shake of the ’60s while pulling a few tricks from ’80s English synthpop — all without intruding on the Pipettes’ vocals. Everything comes together on the album’s two best tracks, “Your Kisses Are Wasted on Me” and “Pull Shapes.” The former features their most ecstatic vocals and catchiest kiss-offs, and in a just world, the latter would inspire a global dance craze. — Stephen Deusner.

(Sire)

Grade: A-

On their recent single “White People for Peace” (its self-deprecating title crucially revealing), four-piece Florida punk band Against Me! rails against a bad war with a “protest song in response to military aggression.”

(Cherrytree/Interscope)

But, like so many great punk bands before them, they’re most articulate when keeping politics local — trying to change the larger culture by changing their own scene first.

The title/lead track on this endlessly rocking major-label debut — produced by Butch Vig, who sweetens and strengthens Against Me!’s sound as he once did with Nirvana — refers not to a genre of music but to a metaphor for greater change that starts with bandleader Tom Gabel himself and extends to his fans, friends, and scene cohorts. Gabel actually opens the album by singing these lyrics: “We can control the medium/We can control the context of presentation/Well, is there anybody on the receiving end?/Reaching out for some kind of connection?”

Those lyrics don’t exactly scan, but they do sing when backed up by a rush of anthemic guitar rock and gang vocals, and when they’re underscored (but not undercut) by Gabel’s self-conscious wit, by a personal touch, as on “Thrash Unreal,” the raggedy, empathetic portrait of a young woman who might be an Against Me! fan, and by a willingness to implicate themselves in their own cultural critiques, as on “Americans Abroad,” where the band relives a European tour by wondering how different they are from the “arrogant, ignorant American” stereotype.

“We can be the bands we want to hear/We can define our own generation,” Gabel sings — no, promises — on “New Wave.” This is not the kind of thing you hear from young, white guitar bands anymore. The spirit of hopeful punk defiance evokes Hüsker Dü, while the band’s combination of direct, somewhat academic-sounding political language with an otherwise working-class perspective recalls the Minutemen. Those ’80s indie bands were both smarter and less collegiate than the generations that followed them. In this regard, Against Me! is a throwback, and, with indie/alt rock in a particularly mumbly, navel-gazing state, a welcome one. — Chris Herrington

Grade: A-

Categories
Music Music Features

Friday, May 4th Band Listings

Plain White T’s

Cellular South Stage

6:10 p.m.

Since its formation a decade ago, Chicago emo-core group Plain White T’s have recorded three albums, participated in the 2005 Take Action Tour and the ’06 Warped Tour, and grown from a trio to a full-blown quintet, while lead singer Tom Higgenson has survived a devastating car wreck that nearly cost him a kidney. Last year, Plain White T’s cut their Hollywood Records debut, the hook-laden Every Second Counts, which features power-pop anthems such as “Our Time Now” and “Hate (I Really Don’t Like You),” served up with crunchy guitar chords courtesy of Tim Lopez and Dave Tirio, Mike Retondo’s rapid-fire bass work, and De’Mar Hamilton’s hammer-like beats. Expect to hear both hit songs in the group’s live set along with fan favorites such as “Hey There Delilah,” off the group’s sophomore effort, All That We Needed.

Sum 41

Cellular South Stage

7:40 p.m.

With a punk-meets-hip-hop style that harkens back to early-’80s Beastie Boys, Canadian rockers Sum 41 have made a career out of ridiculous antics, fifth-grade humor, and rousing punk-pop lyrics. Their fourth full-length, Chuck, was released three years ago, followed by a high-energy (and high-volume) live effort, Go Chuck Yourself, which came out in 2006. Frontman Deryck Whibley — who comes across as cartoonish as the Gorillaz at times — invites inevitable comparisons to Blink-182 vocalist Tom DeLonge, employing plenty of sarcasm and some explicit language to get the party started. Expect a mostly male crowd dominating a makeshift mosh pit in front of the stage, dancing and posturing to tunes such as “The Hell Song” and “We’re All To Blame.”

The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus

Cellular South Stage

9:15 p.m.

Florida quintet the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus have perfected the emo sound that dominates today’s alternative music scene. Frontman Ronnie Winter tackles domestic abuse on the song “Face Down,” the first single off their platinum-selling debut Don’t You Fake It, singing, “Do you feel like a man when you push her around?” Remove the thought-provoking lyrics of tunes such as “Your Guardian Angel” and “Cat and Mouse,” and you’ll hear elements of Jimmy Eat World and Hawthorne Heights — which is why the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus won over so many fans on the Warped Tour last summer. With their appearance at the Beale Street Music Fest, they’ll up the ante for likeminded modern-rock outfits with their hard-won insight, which, ironically, has taken them to the top of the Billboard charts.

Iggy & the Stooges

Cellular South Stage

10:55 p.m.

Iggy Pop, rock’s original bad boy, has rejoined guitarist Ron Asheton and drummer Scott Asheton (with Mike Watt filling in for the late Dave Alexander on bass) in the Stooges after a 30-year absence. Progenitors of the punk-rock and metal movements, the Detroit-based quartet made their reputation on hard-driving albums such as early-’70s classics Fun House and Raw Power as well as via Iggy’s oft-chronicled onstage antics, which included self-mutilation, crowd surfing, and chaos-inducing dance moves. Re-formed in 2003 to the joy of rock-and-roll nihilists everywhere, the Stooges have delivered stellar sets at music festivals ranging from England’s All Tomorrow’s Parties to Australia’s Big Day Out. Although the Stooges’ new studio album, The Weirdness, hasn’t earned the critical acclaim of its ’70s predecessors, the Stooges are sure to strike a chord with anthems such as “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “Raw Power,” which have influenced countless other bands, including Guns N’ Roses, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and Slayer.

The Derek Trucks Band

Budweiser Stage

6 p.m.

Derek Trucks, son of the Allman Brothers Band’s Butch Trucks, capably tosses off blues riffs, funk licks, and jazzy chords like a master musician, his technique belying the fact that he has yet to hit 30 years old. Both live and in the studio, nuance reigns supreme as Trucks alternately shows dedication, restraint, and unbridled energy on a grab bag of tunes that often includes country-blues songs, free-jazz numbers, and certified hits such as Curtis Mayfield’s “Freddie’s Dead.” Expertly wielding a push-and-pull attitude that veers from solid traditional leanings to pure experimentalism, Trucks is also an able bandleader who controls the sheer dynamics of the group with an easy hand, à la Jimi Hendrix. His forte is propelling the freewheeling Southern jam-band style originated by the Allmans — whom Trucks apprenticed with — into the 21st century, forging a new path for fellow acolytes such as Widespread Panic and Medeski, Martin & Wood.

Jerry Lee Lewis

Budweiser Stage

7:30 p.m.

Way back in 1957, this twice-married, once-jailed, 21-year-old Bible-college dropout from Ferriday, Louisiana, was determined to become Sam Phillips’ next discovery. His first single, the pumping piano tune “Crazy Arms,” did moderately well. Then all hell broke loose when Jerry Lee Lewis cut “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” at Memphis’ Sun Studio. Onstage, the Killer fulfilled every parent’s worst nightmare, delivering a solid mule kick to his piano bench and shaking his hips in a frenzy. Lewis reinvented himself as a straight country star in later decades, but a slow-building rock-and-roll comeback (which began with the late-’80s big-screen biopic Great Balls of Fire and includes his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) has rightfully restored Lewis to his position at the forefront of rock royalty. In concert and on his latest album, last year’s Last Man Standing, you can still hear the insolence: Elvis might’ve started the revolution, but Jerry Lee Lewis confirmed it: Rock-and-roll is here to stay.

Gov’t Mule

Budweiser Stage

9 p.m.

With onetime Allman Brothers Band alumnus Warren Haynes at the helm, this musical apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree. Since the mid-’90s, Gov’t Mule has purveyed its Southern-tinged down-and-dirty musical style into a touring machine that attracts jam-band fans and hardcore rockers alike. Originally a power trio, the band nearly derailed after the death of founding member Allen Woody in 2000. Now a quartet, Gov’t Mule is bigger and stronger than ever: Their latest album, High & Mighty, is a rollicking road trip that touches on reggae (“Unring the Bell”), African pop (“So Weak, So Strong”), and New Orleans funk (“3 String George”). Live, expect plenty of extended jams, à la the nine-minute “Endless Parade,” a free-form classic-rock extravaganza that, along with “3 String George,” closes out High & Mighty.

The Allman Brothers Band

Budweiser Stage

10:55 p.m.

Hailed by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as “the principal architects of Southern rock,” the Allman Brothers Band has persevered for nearly 40 years, overcoming hardships, handicaps, and tragedy that would fell many other groups. Founded by brothers Gregg and Duane Allman in Macon, Georgia, in 1969, they proved to be the South’s original jam band, following the Grateful Dead’s lead in combining blues, country, R&B, and jazz influences into a heady, often drug-fueled rock-and-roll party. Despite the deaths of Duane Allman and bassist/co-founder Berry Oakley in the early ’70s, the remaining members of the group soldiered on, recording classic albums such as Eat a Peach and Brothers and Sisters and inspiring Southern rockers such as Lynyrd Skynyrd and Blackfoot in their wake. Led today by organist Gregg Allman, the Allman Brothers Band continues to boogie, aided by original members such as drummer Butch Trucks and percussionist Jai Johanny “Jaimoe” Johanson, bassist Oteil Burbridge, and second-generation Brother guitarist Derek Trucks.

North Mississippi Allstars

AutoZone Stage

6 p.m.

Favorites on the jam-band and Southern-rock scenes, the North Mississippi Allstars — anchored by brothers Luther and Cody Dickinson (who play guitar and drums, respectively) and bassist Chris Chew — might live across the state line, but in Memphis, they’re hailed as hometown heroes. Influenced by regional talent such as R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, and Otha Turner — the holy trinity of hill-country bluesmen — the Allstars spend approximately 300 days a year on the road, spreading the north Mississippi blues sound far and wide. On their last album, 2005’s Electric Blue Watermelon, and in their contributions to the score of Black Snake Moan, you’ll hear the Allstars take those roots-based influences to an even higher level, fusing folksy tradition with contemporary rock.

Chevelle

AutoZone Stage

8 p.m.

Although this Chicago-based power trio honed their craft amidst headbangers on the Ozzfest circuit, Chevelle’s sound focuses more on the tightrope between sound and silence than bona fide heavy metal. Contrasting thumping guitar riffs and melodic vocals, frontman Pete Loeffler harnesses pure energy for his inspiration. Anchored by his younger brothers Sam (drums) and Joe (bass), Loeffler truly comes unhinged on hit singles such as “The Red” and “Send the Pain Below,” both from the band’s 2002 Epic debut, Wonder What’s Next. While their next studio album, 2004’s This Type of Thinking (Could Do Us In), brought inevitable Tool and Korn comparisons, the brothers Loeffler prove their individuality with tracks such as “Panic Prone” and “Vitamin R (Leading Us Along).” The band’s newest album, Vena Sera, which was released last month, features a lineup change (with brother-in-law Dean Benardini replacing Joe Loeffler on bass), heavy, headbanging riffs (check out “Brainiac” or “Midnight to Midnight”), and, on songs like “Well Enough Alone” and “Humanoid,” plenty of emo-oriented lyrics.

Social Distortion

AutoZone Stage

9:40 p.m.

Led by Mike Ness, Social Distortion made a big splash in Southern California’s early-’80s punk-rock scene with songs such as “Mommy’s Little Monster” and “Another State of Mind.” A decade later, the group rebounded with Los Angeles’ retro-vibed rockabilly enthusiasts when it released original tunes such as the rangy-and-twangy “Ball & Chain” and a well-suited cover of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.” Today, Social Distortion is an accepted member of the pop-music mainstream — body-covering tattoos, black eyeliner, and all. They’re an edgy, roots-influenced rock band in the vein of the Rolling Stones, still going strong with songs such as “Reach for the Sky,” “Don’t Take Me for Granted,” and “Nickels and Dimes,” all from their last studio album, 2004’s Sex, Love and Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Three 6 Mafia

AutoZone Stage

11:20 p.m.

There’s a reason why Three 6 Mafia are the most revered — and the most hated — group from the Dirty South. Triple 6 has had North Memphis on lockdown for the last decade, while at the 2006 Academy Awards, they proved unbeatable as well, instantly catapulting from Most Known Unknowns to the most famous rap group in the world. This weekend, reality TV’s newest stars will make the journey from “Hollyhood” to their home turf, turning up the volume on crowd pleasers such “Tear Da Club Up,” “Stay Fly,” and “Poppin’ My Collar” as well as an encore presentation of their Oscar-winning “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.”

Popa Chubby

TN Lottery Blues Tent

6 p.m.

It might be time for Bronx-born Ted Horowitz to change his name permanently: With more than a dozen searing guitar-based blues albums to his credit as Popa Chubby, the young musician has certainly established himself as a favorite on the club scene. With his 2002 breakthrough, The Good the Bad and the Chubby, he matured into a strong, postmodern player, whose work — all original tunes — ranges from the hard-rockin’ (“If the Diesel Don’t Get You Then the Jet Fuel Will”) to sultry Southern soul (“I Can’t See the Light of Day”) and beyond. His latest effort, Stealing the Devil’s Guitar, shows that he’s also a student of the north Mississippi blues scene, weighing in with a spirited cover of the late Jessie Mae Hemphill’s “In This World.” On his studio recordings, Popa Chubby’s insightful lyrics are darkly humorous; delivered onstage in his trademark growl, songs such as “Smuggler’s Blues” and “Preacher Man” are sure to draw comparisons to Tom Waits’ bluesy oeuvre.

Hubert Sumlin &

Willie “Big Eyes” Smith

TN Lottery Blues Tent

7:30 p.m.

Greenwood, Mississippi-born Hubert Sumlin got his start on KWEM radio in West Memphis, playing with Pat Hare and James Cotton back in the 1950s. Howlin’ Wolf took Sumlin north to Chicago, and blues guitar hasn’t been the same since. Sumlin’s unpredictable twisting riffs and solos — check out “Killing Floor,” “Mr. Airplane Man,” and “Wang Dang Doodle,” for starters — led him to be crowned the King of the Outer Space Guitar. Now in his 70s, Sumlin never ceases to astonish and amaze. Don’t miss this performance, which will be anchored by legendary drummer Willie “Big Eyes” Smith.

Richard Johnston

TN Lottery Blues Tent

8:55 p.m.

In recent years, Johnston, a late-blooming street performer, has become one of the rising stars on the independent blues scene, winning the 2001 International Blues Challenge and releasing a best-selling debut album, Foot Hill Stomp, dedicated to — and inspired by — the late north Mississippi hill-country blueswoman Jessie Mae Hemphill, who joined Johnston onstage at the Beale Street Music Festival last year. Solo, Johnston is sure to wow audiences with his world-weary howl and his picking ability on the cigar box LoweBow, a one-stringed cousin of the electric guitar.

Koko Taylor

TN Lottery Blues Tent

11 p.m.

The Memphis-born sharecropper’s daughter who became the Queen of Chicago blues, “Miss ‘Wang Dang Doodle'” herself, Koko Taylor is undoubtedly the last of the brassy-voiced blues shouters. One of the perennial performers on the blues festival circuit — and the holder of more Blues Music Awards than any other female blues singer in history — Taylor got her start at the legendary Chess recording studio before cutting 10 albums for Alligator Records. Nearly sidelined after a devastating van wreck while on tour two decades ago, she nevertheless rebounded, recording hit albums such as 1990’s Jump for Joy and Royal Blue (which featured B.B. King, Keb’ Mo’, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd) a decade later. Taylor’s latest, Old School, which was released last month, features five new originals as well as cover tunes penned by fellow Chicago blues-scene veterans such as the late Willie Dixon and Magic Sam.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Bad-Vibe Bands

At first blush, the Stooges and Steely Dan — who will close out the Beale Street Music Festival on Friday and Saturday nights, respectively — have nothing in common beyond their proximity in record-store bins. They were two of the very best American rock bands in that diffuse, transitional period between the breakup of the Beatles and the rise of punk, but it’s hard to think of two major rock bands more different: in sound, image, background, and fan bases. (The only people who like both bands: rock critics.)

The Stooges, whose original run lasted from 1969 to 1973 (with a hiccup of a breakup in between) and whose original recorded output consisted of 23 songs and just over a hundred minutes of music across three albums, were essentially the bridge between mid-’60s garage rock and mid-’70s punk. Led by snarling, combative, confrontational singer Iggy Stooge (later Pop), the Stooges were middle-class Michigan kids who blasted away at suburban nothingness with the biggest, ugliest sound they could muster. Iggy later described the band as “juvenile-delinquent kids, running wild in America.” (By contrast, Steely Dan could have described themselves as overprivileged collegians, smirking lazily in the dorm lounge.)

The Stooges’ first, eponymous album, produced by the Velvet Underground’s John Cale (who didn’t seem to quite get them) included a few duds and three eternal anti-anthems — “1969,” “No Fun,” and the elemental “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” Iggy, at age 21, opens the record — and closes the decade — with a summertime-blues lament for an age of literal rioting in the streets: “Well, it’s 1969 okay/War across the U.S.A./It’s another year for me and you/Another year with nothing to do.”

The band’s last album, 1973’s David Bowie-produced Raw Power, added a fourth classic, “Search and Destroy,” which not even a Nike TV commercial could ruin. But, in between, was the megaton bomb: Fun House, which opens with Iggy yipping and howling before the band launches into the menacing groove of “Down on the Street.” Intense dirges “Dirt” and “Loose” were a self-lacerating peak no punk band would ever match. The title track, with Steve Mackay joining on a squawky saxophone, is like a spazz-out, garage-rock version of a James Brown jam.

If the Stooges were a pure rock band, Steely Dan was nothing of the sort. After launching their 1972 debut Can’t Buy a Thrill with the beautiful, bitter radio-rock classic “Reeling in the Years,” the band became AOR staples throughout the decade. Yet musical partners Walter Becker and Donald Fagen never really seemed that fond of rock. Rather, Becker and Fagen assembled their sui generis sound from every element tangential to rock-and-roll — jazz, traditional pop, blues, and R&B. And, unlike the Stooges, who got an unlikely record deal on the strength of their assaultive live shows, Steely Dan eschewed the traditional origin-and-development arc of the “rock band,” forming in the studio and pretty much staying there. Steely Dan has almost always been a two-man operation — with a rotating cast of studio musicians — and the “band” ceased touring after 1974 until an unlikely return to the stage in the ’90s. Where the Stooges were committed to total audience

The Stooges

engagement, Steely Dan preferred not to interact with the concert rabble.

Where the Stooges spoke directly and simply, lashing out with a first-person revulsion that was clearly their own, Steely Dan’s songs were tricky, laden with irony and delivered by untrustworthy narrators, qualities hard to hear through a sonic aesthetic that could sound like cocktail hour for upscale fortysomethings.

But the very source of Steely Dan’s charm is in the tension, such as it is, between the band’s low-life lyrics and high-toned jazz-rock soundscapes (a dynamic reinforced by the knowledge that this totem of serious, musicianly respectability is named for a dildo in William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch). Those plush, meticulous backing tracks are perhaps best heard as the idealized interior soundtrack of the typical Steely Dan protagonist — invariably a well-educated and well-off white guy of questionable moral character for whom things aren’t quite working out. Fagen has even sort of endorsed this reading by confessing that he and Becker think of their albums as comedy records to some degree.

Steely Dan albums are populated by junkies, losers, and killers, but these subjects tend to be approached with distance and irony. The Stooges were the “dirt” they sang about. And yet this ostensible perversity unites the bands. Both the Stooges and Steely Dan were bad-vibe bands, essaying a societal sickness without ever making message music. They approached the same bad shit from very different perspectives, and the more you listen and learn about them, the more the distinctions begin to blur. Steely Dan’s songs are more writerly, to be sure, but are also suffused with cryptic, sneakily personal references. And, as primitive as the Stooges may have sounded, they were no savages. In later years, Iggy explained the band’s music as a deliberate, thought-through artistic strategy: “Slowly I came up with a kind of concept. A lot of it was based on the attitude of juvenile delinquency and general mental grievance that I’d gotten from these dropouts I was hanging out with,” he said, comparing the band’s basic, overwhelming sound to the drill presses at hometown Ford plants.

The bands also shared a jazz connection, though Steely Dan were inspired by bop, and the Stooges were more attracted to the atonal attack of free jazz.

The Stooges and Steely Dan have also made comebacks this decade, a move that, on record at least, has worked out better for Steely Dan. (In concert, this dynamic could well be reversed.) This is predictable: Steely Dan’s music has always sounded “old,” so, in a way, Becker and Fagen may just be catching up with their own sound. By contrast, the Stooges’ “juvenile-delinquent” rock doesn’t befit AARP members, and on the band’s recent comeback album, The Weirdness, you can hear Iggy and original bandmates Ron and Scott Asheton (with Mackay back on sax as well) struggle to keep pace with the past.

Where Becker and Fagen have only grown more familiar with the questionable characters they’ve long given voice to, Iggy struggles to enliven an aesthetic rooted in a snotty, personal dissatisfaction that doesn’t age well. The result is lyrics like, “I got the top down on my Cadillac” and “You can’t have friends/The money’s gonna see to that.”

Steely Dan’s comeback album, 2000’s Two Against Nature, was a triumph by comparison. The cheekily titled Two Against Nature was something of an album-length sequel to the band’s last hit single, 1980’s “Hey Nineteen,” in which a class of ’67 “dandy of Gamma Chi” tries to pick up a girl too young to remember Aretha Franklin, a mortality-enforcing romantic failure that leaves our hero repeating the refrain “The Cuervo Gold/The fine Colombian/Make tonight a wonderful thing” as jazz-fusion sings him to sleep.

Two Against Nature is consumed with tales of aging men in pursuit of sex, from “Gaslighting Abbie”‘s cryptic triangle to the protagonist of “Almost Gothic,” who is so infatuated with a Little Eva of Bleecker Street that he’s “sizzling like an isotope.” But most memorable of all is “Janie Runaway.” It’s the story of a Manhattan painter rejuvenated by jailbait Janie who ends the song angling for a threesome with her friend Melanie.

Two Against Nature completed Steely Dan’s comeback by beating out Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP for the Grammy, a feat that was widely derided as an example of the Grammys’ old-fogey instincts and probably was. But what critics and Grammy voters seemed to miss, equally, is that Two Against Nature is, in its own way, as prickly, confrontational, and outré as The Marshall Mathers LP — or anything by the Stooges.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Living With the Living–Ted Leo + The Pharmacists

Ted Leo doesn’t have a voice naturally suited to the brand of politicized pop-punk he’s been playing for more than a decade now. It’s thin and untextured, too studied in its enunciation and too weak in its falsetto to sound threatening or powerful. And yet, like many angry singers before him, Leo has turned what might be perceived as a shortcoming into an asset, writing lyrics that emphasize the cerebral over the physical and expanding his musical vocabulary to include tatters of reggae, new wave, and folk — whatever gets his point made. As a result, he comes across as an intelligent everyman who has reluctantly accepted a calling and steeled himself to succeed despite his limitations. As he remarks on “The Sons of Cain,” the galvanizing opener on his new album, Living with the Living, “I’ve got to sing just to exist… and to resist.”

“The Sons of Cain” showcases everything Leo does well: It rings out loud and fast, an adrenaline rush of pop-punk guitars whose double-time tempo and impassioned, imperfect delivery alone make it catchy. However, his political frustrations over the Iraq war and the brutal, militarized culture it has created seem to be getting the better of him on Living with the Living, with very few tracks living up to the promise of “The Sons of Cain.” “Army Bound” stalls continuously, even when it nabs the Kinks’ “Victoria” melody for its bridge, and “Colleen” never gets moving, thanks largely to its overly simplistic structure that tries to rhyme every single line with its title. Curiously, many of the album’s passages, like the half-rapped delivery on “Bomb. Repeat. Bomb” or the lengthy coda of “The Lost Brigade,” sound telegraphed and flat — like ideas that never panned out.

The album’s most damning flaw isn’t the uninspired and uninspiring music but Leo’s tone. Where he once sounded outraged but relentlessly hopeful, now he sounds outraged and bitter, his usually incisive lyrics turned blunt and accusatory. He sounds like he’s no longer trying to change the world and instead is just complaining. War is hell indeed. — Stephen Deusner

Grade: C+