Married, father of three, it’s taken me 51 years to get over growing up in Detroit. Some would say it shows.
Top 10 time at the Bar always leaves me feeling a bit twitchy, overwhelmed with the prospect of composing trigger-happy, praise-riddled reviews of…well…not much. Call me a curmudgeon, but nothing piques my interest much anymore (at least nothing from this millennium), so my spending has slowed down to a trickle.
Here goes. Living in the past, hold all calls…
AC/DC – Black Ice
The best line in 1986’s “Night of the Creeps” (still criminally unavailable on DVD – somebody wake up!) belongs to the great Tom Atkins, who, as Detective Ray Cameron, gives a houseful of anxious co-eds a heads-up: “Girls, the good news is your dates are here. The bad news is they’re dead.” He may as well have been talking about AC/DC in 2008. Rest assured “Black Ice” will sell by the bushelfulls, the band more than content with their roles as seekers of the basic musical common denominator that will lead all of our 15-year-olds into the sea, moving backward at the speed of light, their faith in the power of rock and roll to change a life unshakable. Get out of their way!
The Cramps – “Garbageman/TV Set”
When a clearly-agitated, bug-eyed Lux Interior adamantly proclaims, “You ain’t no punk, you punk” to kick off “Garbageman,” it’s probably best to nod your head and say, “Yessir!”, thanking God and all the muses that he’s going to let you live. For now. It’s just about impossible to overrate this rigomortized Cramps mind splitter, which surfs out of nowheresville on the back of the sinister dark-hearted twelve strings of Bryan Gregory and Poison Ivy Rorschach and the jungle pulse laid down by Nick Knox, perhaps the coolest drummer EVER. It wouldn’t surprise me if autopsies of all three revealed battery acid in their veins. Spiritedly rudimentary, “Garbageman” is deliberate musical primitivism from a band who look to be cursed with bad genes and broken chromosomes and sound like they invented whatever genre you may want to lump them under. And if they didn’t, well…you tell ‘em, not me.
The Jesus & Mary Chain – “The Power of Negative Thinking: B-Sides & Rarities
Most of this box set is ear-bleeding psychedelic noise, a dense helix of sound, corrosive love songs drenched in adrenaline backwashes of sludge and slow-motion fuzz rubbing elbows and knees with shimmering pop delights like “The Hardest Walk,” “Some Candy Talking” and “Psychocandy,” the brothers Reids obviously smitten with sweets, the…um…pudendum, and any and all analogies and metaphors for both. At times, Jim Reid’s crystalline, near-fragile whisper almost begs to be nailed to the deck to keep it from floating away yet there are moments – like the monaurally-titled “Suck,” “Ambition,” “Head,” and “Cracked” – that sound like some terrible accident in a tool and die works, as troubling as they are magnificent. You know you’ll recover, but you’re not sure when.
The Reducers – “America’s Best Unsigned Band” DVD
Chances are, New London, Connecticut is the last place you’d expect the chosen keepers of rock and roll’s eternal holy flame to be hiding, but living their lives as if they’re part of the federal witness protection program has always suited The Reducers just fine. If you come to “America’s Best Unsigned Band” in search of “Behind the Music”-style tales of reckless ingestion of hard liquor and illicit drugs, Tarzan sexuality, macho party exploits, compromised major-label albums which quickly race into the murk of bargain bins, or musos veering off the rails without a map and wandering the desert of public obscurity, you may as well not bother. The Reducers just may have been slackers before there even was such a term, perfectly content to turn a simple Friday or Saturday gig around town into something special and depending on planetary alignment, perhaps the greatest night of your life, complete with old-school, Brit punk-influenced songs masquerading as time bombs set to explode within three minutes, crashing guitars galore, pogo dancing, and oceans of suds. Rest assured: if you wanna rock, they were put on this earth to be your personal jukebox. Long may they run.
MC5 – “Kick Out the Jams”
This album is now nearly twice the legal age to vote and drink in every state in the Union, the electronic apocalypse that forever placed Detroit, a noisy nowhere land in mid-America, on the map, an amp-rattling shack bash that’s required listening for anyone studying thermodynamics. The title track, “Ramblin’ Rose,” “Rocket Reducer No. 62 (Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa),” the atmospheric, grimy slice-of-life “Motor City Is Burning,” and the tortured lament “I Want You Right Now” are alternately abrasive, mangy, and breathtakingly homicidal, ultimate needle-freak breakdowns punctuated with basic monster-mash guitars which howl like coyotes and die in glorious blazes of confusion. If that sounds like your idea of a party, then you can’t live without it for another minute.
T. Rex – “The Slider”
When a recent drunken argument masquerading as a conversation amongst friends turned to perfect albums, I immediately spit out “The Slider,” still fully convinced 36 years after I bought it in 1972 as a perpetually-stoned 15-year-old that there’s not a wasted note on it. No pun intended on the “wasted” part. Unfortunately, the luxury of nearly four decades and now a lyric sheet have proved absolutely worthless in cracking the code of electric metal faun Marc Bolan’s insular world, one crammed and frought with hubcap diamond star haloes, mambo suns, white swans, Les Pauls, wizards, unicorns, gongs (banged), inner-planet love, and large, over-powered American automobiles. But don’t let that stop you. It still swings like Godzilla’s nuts in a tsunami.
Nathaniel Mayer – “Why Don’t You Give It to Me?”
I come to both praise and bury Nathaniel Mayer. His ticket was punched 12 days ago as of this writing. He was blessed with one of those voices you can recognize with a kettle boiling in the kitchen, an airplane overhead, and a garbage truck loading up in the street outside, surely one of Mother Nature’s greatest special effects, forged in fire and brimstone by the Goat Lord in a workshop somewhere far down below, bent, folded, spindled, mutilated, and stomped into shape then cooled in the River Styx. He was an authentic American primitive hewn from the same piece of oak as Howlin’ Wolf, James Brown, Mitch Ryder, and Iggy Stooge (minus the acid, Ashetons, and barely-concealed man root, that is) whose every move should have been closely attended by a HazMat crew in full radiation togs. You’ve been warned.
New York Dolls – “Stranded in the Jungle/Who Are the Mystery Girls?”
The Dolls’ cover of this Cadets R&B chestnut is hardly the best song on “Too Much Too Soon,” but its novelty appeal provides easy ingress for the uninitiated into their proto-punk back catalog, a slim but influential body of work the planet’s still trying to figure out 35 years on. The guitars of Johnny Thunders and Syl Sylvain snarl, spit, and howl like a box of mongooses, cobras, and feral cats shaken up then fed into a wood chipper and while Nolan and Arthur “Killer” Kane may not have been bothered about studio gigs by Berry Gordy or the Funk Brothers, they nail the back beat to the floor then douse it with sprinkle of pomade, Night Train, and jaundiced blood. As for Johansen, this may well be where the seeds of his desperate, lamented (at least in my house) Buster Poindexter persona began to germinate and then fester for the next ten or twelve years. Thank God that ship’s sailed.
Johnny Thunders – “So Alone”
The Johnny Thunders ethos is among rock and roll’s most powerful and romanticized necrophilic myths, the former and now very-dead New York Doll constructing a template for tonsorial, sartorial, and sonic splendor with the practiced dress-to-kill-or-be-killed pose of a punk/gunslinger/junkie who’s just turned the corner from skid row where he’s developed a taste for drinking Vitalis, blazing, bastardized licks heisted from Chuck Berry via Keith Richards, diabolical, droning string bends, and snotty vocals promising a hustle, a fix, loaves, fishes, or a subway ride to nowhere. He was a guy who never worried about which fork was for the salad. “So Alone” is about as coherent as the dope-woozy, doom-struck, wise-cracking stumblebum Thunders ever got – or pretended to get – on his own, relying on hired sidemen like Phil Lynott, Steve Marriott, Peter Perrett, Steve Jones, and Paul Cook to bang it down and tart it up. There’s no denying the guy was spoiling for a fight just about every time he strapped on a guitar, stuttering and wailing with the best of them. How much of it he remembered afterwards is moot, but he was capable at will of approximating the sound of several household appliances throwing tantrums, dinosaurs in rut trying to get small animals off their backs, or a woman in hair curlers beating her kid in a supermarket. Adding the solo guitar machismo of Jones and the power-punching drums of Cook to the mix was a flat-out stroke of genius.
Alice Cooper – “Good to See You Again Alice Cooper” DVD
If you pop “Good to See You Again Alice Cooper” into the DVD deck, do yourself a huge favor and haul ass immediately to the bonus features, one of which allows you to play only the concert(s) presented here, minus the series of “comedy” vignettes which unnecessarily attempt to tie things up into, uh, who knows what. Whoever scripted the thing must have been banged to the gills on some queer mix of speed, mescaline, hash or cocaine because it plays out like a nightmarish hybrid of “Blazing Saddles” and “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” collectively about as amusing as Bob Saget’s snarky asides on “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” Jerry Seinfeld’s stand-up act, or a heart attack. Minus the laugh track and defibrillators. Is there no limit to the human suffering some people must endure? But the live footage, culled from two Texas stops on the 1973 “Billion Dollar Babies” tour, is more than enough to make you forget Nixon, Watergate, the energy crisis, and terrorist bombings in the Mid-East. Just a few short years after moving back to the singer’s birthplace, Dennis Dunaway, Michael Bruce, Neal Smith, and Glen Buxton managed to master the Motor City’s innate science of rhythm and delirium which, in conjunction with Alice’s cadaver shuffle, mannequin dismemberment, snake wrangling, and guillotine waltz, left my parents fully convinced the ruination of Western Civilization was in full swing and the moral fiber of American teenagers was in deep jeopardy.
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DAVID BYRNE live in Rome
