Bubblegum for the Soul

A Three Chord Song is Still Magical

First of all, welcome to my first official music taste-making venture, and I only venture to make this taste because I am genuinely moved to do so.  As you might know, if you read this blog on any regular basis, that I spend so much time in my head that I need my rock n’ roll music to grab me by the lapels and kiss me square on the mouth.  That’s just how it is.  Maybe it’s because I’m from the Midwest.  Maybe it’s because I was brought up on a steady diet of Motown and Thin Lizzy. Maybe it’s because I am frightfully in touch with my inner fourteen-year-old-boy.  So it is no wonder that Neil Young has my favorite guitar tone, the only really “girly” vocals I like are the Shangri-La’s, and I am so grateful for the existence of The Horrors, The Hives, and The Duke Spirit.

I like my rock to basically to hit me in the root and heart chakras, (if it hits the crown that’s a bonus) and light me up like the proverbial pinball machine.  So when I discovered upon moving to Los Angeles in 1998 that a lot of the music scene was about its own very strict, clean genre of power pop borne of Badfinger and the Raspberries, I was like a gay man thrust back into the closet.  I was never gonna get kissed full on the lips, let alone tapped on the root chakra. 

Further, just like the rest of the country, people here had become quite reserved in their creative expression. The idea of “demographic” and “genre” had long had its lethal shrink wrapping effect, and for many years I was relegated to listening to the hard stuff in my room.

My friend Dan West told me about a year ago that he was going to be playing a in a “mod band” called Sidewalk Society.  Dan really is one of my favorite musicians and one-off characters of all time, and unfortunately uncannily knows how to get directly to my groupie button and presses it with great Pavlovian force.   He can play sublime rock n’ roll guitar, as well as inspiring jazz piano, and write big and truly great songs in any number of genres.  I was a fan of his rock band Aguafantastica eight years ago and watched him play many jazz gigs where some of his playing was so out that I thought I was heading for a psychotic break. So when he told me was in a “mod band”, I just knew it couldn’t be one of those treacly, cutesy affairs where girls in mini dresses dance in the back and sing along to clean, sterile “lalala’s”.  

In fact, when I entered the club to finally see them live, the band’s gang mentality was evident.  The aforementioned Dan (bass), Danny Lawrence (guitar), Jerry Buszek (drums) were huddled in a surly little enclosed circle, discussing something. When they began to play at a volume inappropriate for the club (though Dan L. says they seem louder than they actually are), I felt dread and then glee.  Almost immediately they grabbed me by my corduroy lapels and lip-locked me, and went on to play a caustic yet melodic set of short, effortless tunes that reminded me in spirit and form of early Led Zeppelin, The MC5, and The Kinks.  So as much as this was power pop, it was heavy metal.  It was music played in the actual protean spirit of mod and in that vein, power pop as defined by The Who.  It was aggressive, dirty, mischievous, emotional, and, yes, melodic.  It was, as they say, a joyful noise, however it was not without that flavor of “fuck you” that I so crave.  I am happy and embarrassed to report that my root chakra was indeed pulsating red and my drawers got warm, not unlike they did once when I was listening to ACDC’s “Thunderstruck” at full volume in a convertible speeding down the 101 several years ago.


I was so moved in fact by the event that I blurted to Dan W. that maybe I would like to write about them for my blog, and even do the most Teen Beat of activities and interview them at their practice space.  I went and talked to them one night and stayed up way past my bedtime.  Sidewalk Society is lucky enough to be practicing in the welcoming, comfortable rehearsal home of the Wondermints, so there was no lingering malodorous aftermath of the butt-rock band who played before, wet spots on the carpet, or mics that smelt oddly of Doritos. Okay, I didn’t smell the mics, but this was not like any practice space this “reporter”’s ever played in.

I had a wonderful time talking to these very intelligent and talented men. It was the sort of conversation you have with your best friend in a dark bedroom listening to some great, weird, unknown record you got at the Goodwill. It is a pleasure to talk to musicians who are smart, passionate, self-aware and who see rock n’ roll as the monument to our collective troubled fourteen-year-old  that it should be.  These are, as they say, troubling times.  As I am writing in the pointed, rather truncated form of a blog, here are some of the highlights:


1.    The Past

In the great Spinal Tap tradition, the two Dans met in junior high in the San Fernando Valley, who along with all the other mods, punks, and stoners, were fomenting their own aesthetic blue print.  And as much as you may want to deny it, the person you were when you were eleven is the vital, golden core of your being.  Just ask Picasso.  (And thank you Jerry, for reminding me.)

D.L.:  I was getting attacked in school for wearing three button suits with a Kinks button, called a punk rocker, getting shit thrown at me, and chased.

D.W.: Danny and I met in school, and it was immediate – he was a kindred spirit.

D.L.:  He had “The Who: Sell Out” under his arm at school…and I was like holy shit, there’s nobody here who even knows what that record is.  And that was the conversation starter.  We were both obsessed with this album at eleven-years-old.

D.W.: That became every lunch break.

D.L.:  We discovered we were obsessed with all the 60s bands, which was not fashionable at the time.

D.W.: We were also obsessed with the same girl.  But that faded.  We bonded on “The Who: Sell Out”, and there’s always been this consciousness of, “how is this constructed?”  Open voicings, the constantly moving rhythm section, it’s part of our DNA.

As we would hope and expect, both went on to play in bands together and separately as teenagers that performed at major venues and brought in sizable crowds.  They were not old enough to drink at these clubs, but they could play on their stages.

D.L.: We would do things like write songs at sound check and play them that night.  We opened for The Untouchables at the Roxy and I made up words on stage.  We had the punk attitude with the sixties aesthetic.  We were free form.  A lot of that stuff was buttoned up.  We were not.

D.W.:  There was more Who Live at Leeds in it, rather than The Jam.  There was always more of the abandon of coming up with things spontaneously.

D.L:  And that had a kinship to the punk thing.


2.    The Circle Game

The two Dans of course went on to play with other bands that varied from “alt“ rock, to psychedelic and art rock projects.  They then came back together two years ago again after many years of being apart.  Jerry, who was with the Ditty Bops and currently plays with his own band The Sexxies, soon joined them. 

D.L.:  All of us loved playing in that free form way.  We had it in our DNA, but it had been suppressed because we wanted to do things that were more “meaningful” and “interesting”.  And we had done all these other things.  So it came full circle.

D.W.: You spend so many years doing this uptight shit, and then finally you just get to rock.

Jerry:  I started playing with Dan in Aguafantastica, which was very much like that: here’s the structure, the song’s got eight parts.  This is a totally different part of your brain.

D.W.:  Yeah.

Jerry: You don’t have to play like Frank Zappa just because you know how to play like him.   A three-chord song is still magical.

D.W.:  All of the musical experiences we’ve had, in structured bands and non-structured bands, when you actually get into the moment of playing, all of those experiences are in your subconscious, so you can make something happen in the moment based on all the sides of the spectrum—they’re in there.  You know about form whether you have a chart or not.  You develop an intuition for things. It’s like coming full circle and just plugging into the pure emotion of the music.    This is why I got excited about music in the first place: the abandon of it, just making something out of thin air.  And I always related that to jazz.  John Coltrane would bring in a sketch to the studio and they’re recording and it’s released four weeks later on a record.  But everyone was so in tune, it just took wing, it came to life. 


3.     Mod

D.L.: I would never call us a mod band because that puts us in this “thing”.  It’s a much broader thing when you’re based in the rock n’ roll of it; it’s not a box.  Mod is modern jazz.  If you’re going to be a mod in America it’s called soul music.  It’s Tamla, Motown and Stax.   Franz Ferdinand, who I like, did a cool thing with it too.  It’s a big melting pot.

Irony and kitsch have watered everything down… “We wear Mondrian dresses and go-go boots”.  It’s not that basic, it’s not that cheese.  We’re not saying, “it’s cute to be sixties”.  The first press coverage of Mod was in 1964 of a teenage Mark Feld (Bolan) giving an interview.  We love T-Rex.  David Bowie was a mod. Led Zeppelin were mods.  All of these people come from the Mod thing.  It’s the rock n’ roll of it.  At the core of it we’re inspired by it and we go with it.  We’re just more comfortable in our skins now.



4.    How rock got a bad case of the gout.

Jerry:  I think it all started with Boston’s second album.  The first album was made in Tom Scholz’s basement, over night, by himself on an 8-track machine.  The next album took two years two make, and had two good songs.  Then the third album took three years to make: One good song, and diminishing returns.

D.L.:  That’s the seventies. 

5.    Stump the drummer

Jerry:  We have the same references.  Just about any reference, except if it’s Pink Floyd or something like that.

D.W.:  The early Pink Floyd!

Jerry:  When you learn music or find stuff, it’s like a river and it takes you in different directions and some times the river stops for you.  It’s like, I really don’t like that, so you don’t go there.  Like prog rock or something.  You stop at that river and build a little brain dam there.  But I think our rivers flow in the same general direction.

Tracy:  So what drummers do they ask for, or genres?

Jerry:  Well, it could be as broad as Motown, or Ringo playing Motown.  Or Kenny Jones.

D.L.:  Which is taboo for pretty much everybody but we understand what Kenny Jones actually did.

Tracy:  Why is it taboo?

D.W.:  Everything he did in the 60s and 70s, with the Small Faces, he’s fantastic.

D.L.:  Because he fucked The Who up.

Tracy:  How could he have wrecked it?  Because he wasn’t Keith Moon?

Jerry:  I think the eighties ruined most musicians.

T:  The eighties was not a good time for The Who.

J:  It wasn’t a good time for people from the sixties.  We’ve discussed that.

D.W.:  Reaganomics.

T: People lost their identities.

D.W.: Trickle down didn’t trickle down in lots of ways.

J: The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison.  We’ve had this discussion before.

D.L.: Many times.

J:  And we all agree pretty much. That there’s only a few people who escaped the ‘80s and did okay.  Tom Waits, maybe David Bowie.  That could be a conversation.

D.L.:  Neil Young I think did.  The cool thing about Neil Young in the eighties is that it was on purpose.  It was totally fucking irreverent.  It was like “fuck you for trying to make me more Neil Young than I am.”

J:  But I think that’s kind of academic, that’s like an intellectual exercise, rather than a musical one.  To me, that’s no fun.

D.L.:  The music he did I’m not into.

D.W.: I can’t listen to that stuff.

J:  You’d listen to “Harvest” before you would ever listen to anything from the eighties, unless you’re in a certain mood, but this a whole discussion that could go all night long.

D.L.:  This is the kind of stuff we do instead of practice.

D.W.  But to me, I’m a Buffalo Springfield guy, with Richie Furay, Stephen Stills, and Neil Young, and Steve and Neil competing and you get “Expecting to Fly”.

D.L.:  Well that’s a given, Dan.

5. Bobby Sherman Moment

Tracy:  To all three of you, what are you looking for in a girl?
(Caveat to the reader: Danny L. is married, Jerry’s found his lady, and Dan W. is still waiting):

Dan. L: Honesty is the big one.  Plus the obvious things.

Jerry:  A good taste in music.  My favorite movie is “Annie Hall”, and I was always finding girls who were like Annie Hall, where there is something wrong with them and you can fix them.  And I am so over that now.  I’d get young girlfriends, and they’d have all these troubles.  And then I would introduce them to good music.  There were several girlfriends where it was like, “you don’t know about the Kinks?”  And I teach them the Kinks, play them all the songs and nothing is coming back at me.  So I want someone who can teach me something.

Dan W.:  Someone I can talk to and feel safe with.  Be emotional and open with.  If I’m having a hard time, or they are, it’s not a relationship killer.  It isn’t like: “Oh God. He’s real.  I wanted a guy who wore a suit and had an attitude and never felt anything and just made money for me and could support my coke habit.”

Tracy: I love it!  You’re right. That mentality’s out there.

D.W.:  That’s the L.A. fear, kind of paranoia I have.  That’s why I stay home.

Jerry:   This town, 100 percent of the people that come here are dreamers.  They come from all over the world with an idea, and I am one of them.  Me and my buddies from Kansas we lived in the Midwest our whole lives, let’s get away from cows and corn and shit, and let’s go to the big time.  Well tough it out, we’ll do it together, we’ll be big and famous.  And you come here, and everyone’s like that, but they’re more cut throat, or they like money more than you do.



Sidewalk Society’s album is now in production and will be out in early 2010.  It’s going to be a scorcher.

The Church of Howard Beale

Thank God for Paddy Chayefsky, the writer of Marty and Network.  Mr. Chayefsky was around in the days when screenwriters were auteurs as much as the directors.  They had vision, kids, vision!  Just think of Robert Towne (Chinatown) and the genius Preston Sturges (though he also directed) as well.  That’s why though I’m not a huge fan of Juno at all, I do appreciate that it did bring back the romance of the screenwriter with its author Diablo Cody, who now has a mythos as big as her movies.

I loved Network (1976) when I was a kid, because one:  Howard Beale (Peter Finch) screams: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” (omg he SWORE! and he’s MAD!) and because Faye Dunaway wears the most bitchin’ taupe seventies businesswoman ensembles ever.  Seriously, Faye in Network and Babs in What’s Up Doc are true fashion icons who’ve inspired me for decades.

However, I watched this movie again (several times in a row because I am obsessive) and was aghast by how absolutely psychic and brave it is.  It is so absolutely prescient it’ll give you goose bumps.  I think many snarky young leftists had their ideological cherries broken by Noam Chomsky.  I realized today that I had mine broken by Howard Beale and Paddy Chavefsky when I hadn’t even hit puberty yet.  This is the power of laying subversion into some huge pop culture event: it’s like slipping acid into someone’s Coca-Cola.  Sadly, it’s an art that’s been lost— but maybe not forever.

As you may know it is in front of the Supreme Court to abolish McCain-Feingold and to allow corporations to give to political elections as if they were individuals.  I will make no comment on this development, and will ask psychic (and unfortunately dead) screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, through the magic of le cinema, to talk about it.

Porn Star Barbie

If you live in Los Angeles, I am sure you’ve seen her.  She’s sixteen to twenty-one-years-old, with long long hair (that may be extensions), wearing short shorts and high heels.  She probably texted a picture of her tits or ass to her boyfriend(s) or girlfriend(s) at some point earlier that day.  Her boyfriend may be in his thirties or even forties.  Now she’s walking out of a Jamba Juice texting someone to meet her across the street at the Starbucks on her Blackberry.  It’s weird how life really has become one of those shocking pulp novels or a Larry Clarke movie.  Quite honestly, it really always has been.

I believe it is Ferenczi (Freud’s analysand) who spoke of the hypertrophic development that occurs in children who are banged up and traumatized.  Children who are abused or neglected in essence protect their innocence by creating an adult persona that can handle whatever is going on around them that is objectively unconscionable.  Unfortunately what happens later is the persona unravels and you get alcoholism, mental illness, you know, the usual.

So what we’ve got now is a new breed of young girl who seems to have formaldehyde flowing through her veins. Chronologically they are quite young, yet there is a spent, rusty, viscera-smeared aura about them.  You know the ones I mean:  Lindsay Lohan, the passe Paris Hilton, and most interestingly, Sasha Grey, the “intellectual” porn star.  I spose I could go Paglia on this and say these girls are our modern flappers, and that really they are expressing openly a form of femininity that has existed since Geishas.  But I think that’s a lame cop out.

Or I could go on a whole diatribe on Miss Grey, and demonstrate my squareness by talking about how absolutely shocking it is that the twenty-one-year-old porn star who makes references to Godard and Joy Division is the new “it girl”.  If you don’t know who she is, simply Wikipedia “Sasha Grey’s Butthole”.  Yes, that’s her.  The one who chose porn as a career, who has an industrial band, who’s in a Steven Soderbergh movie.  But you know what?  Her existence is just a normal progression in the current ebb and flow of cultural phenomena.   I refuse to go into how “this little girl was traumatized and how lost she is and blahblahblah”.   Many many women have been sexually abused one way or another.  A lot of women didn’t have fathers.  She knows exactly what she’s doing.   She’s mastered the trauma and is selling it. She’s like Madonna on steroids. She’s like Jack Ass or extreme sports or any of that, a monument to the current notion that sexuality somehow equals the mores and customs of pornography.  What I find humorous is that people still find porn transgressive at all, when it is as boring and brutal as football (no offense to you sports fans). 

Grey’s of the “stripper school of feminism”, or what I like to call “Madonna feminism” (“I am in charge of my objectivication”), which I guess is way cool, except she takes it to its ultimate apocalyptic end under extreme capitalism. So she will sit with an interviewer from Rolling Stone and talk about how she believes it is every girl’s right to want to be gang-banged, ass fucked on camera, etc., and in so doing she is empowering herself. She’s a marketing person’s dream come true.  She’s got a built-in niche, plus she’s taking it up the ass for the common good.

My niece is five-years-old.  There was a recent article in Details with statistics showing that kids are watching porn as early as eight-years-old.  So in three years my niece may know what ass-to-mouth is, and she may have some girl five years ahead of her in school who wants to be Sasha Grey.  Here’s the thing.  There are thirteen-year-old girls who want to be Jenna Jameson now.  So I guess the arty ones will want to be Sasha Grey.

As a child, I felt so absolutely stigmatized by all the stuff that I knew that I had no business knowing.  I guess as is the normal course of events, this knowledge has been enshrined and institutionalized culturally.   The boundaries between “child” and “adult” continue to melt and morph into a ragged mess, and perhaps we’ll see that “childhood” is a collective fantasy we all made up together.  Perhaps it is something that should have been but never was, and knowing that is a good place to start.

Wall o' Feedback

So I was trying to play around with the layout and deleted my blog plus your comments.  I need help with anything having to do with three dimensional reality.

In the spirit of complete dissonance that is is this blog, I am posting your feedback as a disjointed tone poem.  And as for Mr. Coltken: yes, I think the idea of a salon on Youtube is a great one!  And to Sneaky Lungs: your comment is so very appreciated and gives me the strength to go on!  Blogging is really the province of the isolated, and I certainly have a permanent address there to a degree.  So sometimes I need some strokes. Also, I really don’t want people to be sheepish here.  I have learned to take it when I dish it out.  Plus we all have to exercise our voices or they just dry up. Sanity is definitely connected to an active larynx.  You’ve got to let those chakras do their thing.

Here are your comments that are a response to the post before hand.  Yay Cubism!

This won’t happen again.

Dan E <dpfde@earthlink.net> (unregistered) wrote:

I do still like you, of course. My constructive criticism would be that the layout/format of your blog sucks balls; it’s hard to find stuff (as I discovered when I was trying to turn a Stooges fan friend on to your writings and video clips), the navigation isn’t very intuitive, it’s tough to tell at first if an illustration is meant to go with a specific entry or not, and it sucks to be hectored about joining DisqUs whenever I leave a comment. All of these things stand a much greater chance of turning off your potential readers than your excellent, thought-provoking writing.

alvinbond <tinpanalan@earthlink.net> wrote:

Yes.

redcoltken <redcoltken@yahoo.com> wrote:

Like you??? I fucking love you.

OK - to put this in healthy context - I love your mind and the way you can vocalize what I have been feeling - it makes me feel that I am not the only unsane person in the room.

I was thinking about a salon based upon youtube - a discussion that is taped then the best parts of it are put online - to see what happens.


Xander <speedbagger@msn.com> (unregistered) wrote:

Yup.

sayid_tomato <mefkin@aol.com> wrote:

I have not encountered any of the problems that Mark has.


I do, however, agree with Alvin. Unless “Do you still like me?” is a rhetorical question. In which case - is there such a thing as a rhetorical answer?


makrfelcher <thecalifornianavels@hotmail.com> wrote:

We have the Orb, we have the Orgasmatron—what are you complaining about? Long live Big Brother!

Arielle <sneakylungs@yahoo.com> (unregistered) wrote:

I have wanted to say for a while that I read almost all of your posts and that they are, as ever, like a much-needed (and wanted) hot poker to the soul….and also that you are the best music critic around, probably anywhere. I haven’t commented in a while because my capacity for clever discourse seems to have disappeared and I feel sheepish about it because you and your wonderful blog deserve better!