A Year of Music

Stuck in my head this morning: “The Sideways Man” by the Digital Dinosaurs, a throwback to 60s-era Kinks disguised as a late-70s DiY tune. The bit that gets stuck in my head is the “ba ba ba ba bababa baa” backing vocals, which is also the bit that reminds me of The Kinks. You can find this song on the Angst in my Pants compilation or on Messthetics’ Greatest Hits (which I highly recommend). It’s less catchy than the usual stuff that invades my head while I sleep, but is insidiously accessible all the same.

Hyped 2 Death has more on the Digital Dinosaurs.

So I seem to be back to having Lester Bangs & Birdland’s “Kill Him Again” stuck in my head. It’s so agonizingly close to being a work of genius, in the same way that, say, Foreigner’s “Jukebox Hero” was. It would just need slightly less eccentric singing, or slightly tighter production, or something, and it would have been a perfect nugget of slightly leftfield rock and roll.

(People like to hate on Foreigner because they kept going way too long and because their songs were easy to like, but “Jukebox Hero” is as much about being young and being in Foreigner as it is about hitting the big time. I don’t think that would have been enough for Bangs, because he would have recognized Foreigner for the phonies they were, especially by the time they put out 4, but I think he probably would have admitted that “Jukebox Hero” is about as perfect a pop song as you’re likely to find. Anyway. I’ve loved that song since I was 9, and just about everyone I knew back then did too, so it bums me out to see people my age trying to act like they were always too cool to like Foreigner, or Loverboy, or Night Ranger. 80s hard rock 4EVA!)

Thinking about Lester again reminded me of Bruce Sterling’s story “Dori Bangs”. It’s an alternate history story about a world in which Lester Bangs met Dori Seda and they fell in love and didn’t both die way too young of dumb things (a combination of a bad cold and cough syrup abuse on Bangs’ part, respiratory failure caused by a flu and busted lungs on Seda’s part). Googling around for Sterling’s story ended up leading me to this page, and I think Ray is essentially correct. I love “Dori Bangs”, but that’s because I love the ideas in it, not because it’s a flawless story. There’s a lot more Lester than Dori in the story, and that just doesn’t seem right or true to me.

Dori Seda and her work aren’t very well known anymore, which is, to put it mildly, too bad. I only discovered her because she had a few comics in Twisted Sisters: A Collection of Bad Girl Art, which a girlfriend got me as a gift a long time ago. Dori’s stories are raunchy, self-aware and deeply funny, and she had a wicked way with a line. She lived in Berkeley and San Francisco’s Mission, and both places were a lot scuzzier than they are now. She makes early-80s grimy San Francisco and her friends (and dog!) come alive in a way that makes me feel like I missed a swinging party.

It’s easy to see why Sterling would have been wanted to speculate about what would have happened if these two oversized characters had hit it off, but in reality, probably nothing would have happened. Lester was famously retarded with women (although, according to Cynthia Heimel, yet another larger than life rock and roll character, he had his moments) and Seda’s love life wasn’t simple or strings-free enough for her to run off and marry a hairy New Yorker with self-esteem problems.

But it’s a nice idea.

Doesn’t it seem like every song from the 80s had a sax solo in it? Where did that come from? Why did it stop?

Stuck in my head this morning: China Shop’s “Kowtow”, only this time with all kinds of gratuitous funky horn accents. Strange things happen to songs while I’m sleeping.

Ladies and gentlemen, The Telefones (from Hyped 2 Death #3):

Don’t come around knocking at my door,
I don’t love you any more,
you won’t go bowling!

And don’t you call me on the telephone,
you know I won’t be home,
I probably will be bowling.

bowling, I like bowling (4x)

You ain’t nothing but an alley cat,
and worse than that:
you won’t go bowling!

You ain’t nothing but a gutter ball,
I think that says it all,
why won’t you go bowling?

bowling, I like bowling (4x)

(guitar solo)

YES!

(saxophone solo)

You ain’t nothing but an alley cat,
and worse than that:
you won’t go bowling!

You ain’t nothing but a gutter ball,
I think that says it all,
why won’t you go bowling?

bowling, I like bowling (4x)

YES!

(guitar solo)
(dual saxophone solo)

What’s wrong with you, she said,
are you crazy?
You can’t say things like that,
you can’t say things like that.

You’re back to making waves.
Her messages are plain.
I wanna be her slave.
There’s a fire in my brain.

What’s wrong with you, she said,
are you crazy, or something?
You can’t say things like that,
you can’t say things like that.

“Kowtow” by China Shop (from Hyped 2 Death’s Homework #10: American DiY 1978-1989 A-C) is yet another beautiful piece of post punk psychedelia, with its woozy backmasked guitars, stylized vocals, drum machine rhythms, and mournful Let’s Active atmosphere (if you ever liked REM and you’ve never heard of Mitch Easter’s band, you should do something about that). The combined effect is a startling mixture of jangle pop and electronic psychedelia, and the oddly affecting (and affected) singing seals the deal. I need more of this stuff.

Maybe it's just a product of Chuck Warner's preoccupations, but I've noticed that where the songs on Hyped 2 Death's Messthetics series tend to have lyrics concerned with things like collective action, urban anomie, industrial decay, DiY culture, and getting wasted, the songs on the Homework series tend to be more preoccupied with, uh, girls, being bored and getting wasted. The difference is that Messthetics is British (and Irish, I think) and Homework is American. Are we really that shallow?

Also, the only real difference between Homework and Teenline is that the songs on the Teenline comps are way more likely to sound like Cheap Trick or the Stray Cats. I like Teenline a little better, except there's no songs by Christmas or Lester Bangs on Teenline.

Following on from my earlier post, Citizen 23's "Janie's Got A Black Eye" is another brilliantly catchy snippet of rock and roll, packing social observation, a great (if muddy) post punk guitar solo, and a very catchy hook into a minute and a half. I can't believe it took me so long to pick up the Hyped 2 Death catalog. It's as essential in its way as the Anthology of American Folk Music, and just about as ground-level and vernacular.

Lester Bangs is one of those stars in the rock firmament who should need no introduction; he was a writer too good for his chosen discipline, and single-handedly wrecked an entire generation of music writers who should have stuck to writing boring, just-the-facts-ma'am criticism, instead of reaching for the flashy pyrotechnics and impassioned polemicism that characterized Bangs' best work and that they didn't have a chance in hell of pulling off. A much less well-known fact is that Bangs' passion for rock occasionally boiled over into pulling together musicians and rocking out himself.

Curiously, the only one of Bangs's music projects that most people know about is his live appearance with the J Geils Band, "playing" his typewriter in an all too literal translation of his critical persona into musical terms. But he also made a few records, and on the evidence presented on Hyped 2 Death's Homework #9, he had real talent, if only in choosing bandmates. "Kill Him Again" (by Lester Bangs & Birdland) is a work of offhanded, economical genius, starting with tentatively picked arpeggios before bursting into classic American chiming guitars (contributed by a brother of one of the Ramones), propulsive rhythm, poetically elliptic lyrics, and even a couple concise solos. Its sound is tough to classify, although the music wouldn't have sounded entirely out of place on the Feelies' or Modern Lovers' first albums. It's also insanely catchy, and begs to be replayed over and over.

It alone makes Homework #9 worth picking up, but Chuck Warner has a deeply intuitive sense of what separates an underrated gem from an opaque near-miss, and there's guaranteed to be at least a couple tracks on each of his compilations that will make you wonder where the hell you were the first time these now long-forgotten records were first released.