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Column: Over a Beer
In Which an Oversized Ska Fan Annihilates My Face
’Twas the great Henry David Thoreau who once took a break from rolling around in pine needles to say, “When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.” I take this to mean that, had Thoreau been alive today, he would have been the type at concerts who starts violently moshing 20 seconds into the opening band’s first song. Looking at pictures of Walden’s author, it looks like he could have done some serious damage in the pit, especially when you take into account that prickly beard he loved to sport. That thing looks about as friendly as a Brillo pad.
All the physicality involved in modern concert-going—moshing, slam dancing, crowd surfing, etc.—has never bothered me too much. It’s just one of the things that come with the territory (assuming said territory is larger than a Tim Hortons and the featured act is more aggressive than David Cassidy). It’s like putting up with drunken slobs at college football games. You know it’s going to happen, and all the scowling in the world isn’t going to change anything. Besides, who can’t relate to being so moved by a certain sound or piece of art that you just completely lose control of your body and can only express your joy by bruising everyone in your immediate vicinity? I experience that at least three times a day (which, coincidentally, is why I’m banned from my neighborhood deli).
Hot Sauce Possibly Tore a Great Union Asunder
Our world is teeming with mysteries both complicated and confounding. Was there ever a “lost” city of Atlantis? Will we ever prove the existence of extra-terrestrial life? What the holy living hell are the writers of The Office huffing this season? Seriously, did you see that wedding episode? Holy Mother of God, was that painful. I’m pretty sure that “mental picture” gimmick gave me swine flu. Also, why would a paper company have a haunted house for area children? Way to lay some lazy groundwork for a series of uninspired “wacky costume” jokes. And that “viral video” thing with Kelly, Andy, and the new receptionist just makes me want to drive to Memphis and blow up Graceland (which is the ultimate way to express your dissatisfaction with a prime time sitcom).
The aforementioned mysteries, however frustrating, pale in comparison to the ultimate riddle plaguing our great land at the moment. It concerns a group of artists from the West who rose to prominence in the early days of a period I like to call “Bonzo’s Time.” Their product was complex in architecture yet simple in delivery; occasionally, it was clad in spandex and soaked in beer. It pleased many, though, like a sweet-smelling rose or warm open-mouthed kiss from a teenage runaway in the bathroom of a Wichita bus station. A few years ago, this group cast out one of their own for reasons unexplained, leaving him to roam California’s purgatory with nothing more than his stylish mullet, ever-present five o’ clock shadow, and novelty bass guitar shaped like a bottle of Jack Daniels.
Arbitrary List of Century’s Greatest & Best Songs
Last week, Pitchfork counted down the top 200 albums of the past decade in their Ken Burns-y musical aughts retrospective entitled “P2K.” Would you believe Rock ‘n’ Roll Gangster by Fieldy’s Dreams did not take the top spot? So much for my theory that the rap album Korn’s bass player made in 2002 defined the current generation. It’s a shame, because I was really looking forward to watching TV 20 years from now and seeing self-important montages of razor scooters and MySpace set to the dulcet, heart-mending tones of “Child Vigilante” and “Baby Hugh Hef.”
Seems kinda silly Pitchfork wasted so much bandwidth discussing albums when taste-maker/trend-setter Rob Zombie declared that format dead half a decade ago. Don’t worry; this 200 best album list thingy was merely an after dinner mint compared to the steak and potatoes au gratin P-fork unleashed last August: The “Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s.” 500! I bet you didn’t even know they made 500 songs since 1999. It’s true. While radio has seemed like one long, insufferable John Mayer song interspersed with pieces of Britney and Nickelback since the millennium began, there have actually been a plethora of artists slaving away at music having nothing to do with beer commercials or seducing young actresses. Crazy, I know, but true.
Let’s be frank: Out of the 500 songs dissected on Pitchfork’s list, the only ones anyone gives a fig about are the top 10, and that site’s apex faves read like the playlist Jim and Pam probably listen to every morning at grandma volumes during their commute to Dunder-Mifflin. Have a look-see:
How Devo Prevented Me From Going All John Rambo
As far as gigs in the vast sterilized wasteland that is Corporate America go, this one was pretty sweet. The building was clean, cool, and quiet. The other employees appeared friendly. The job itself seemed like my financial and professional salvation. They had every one of my favorite sodas in the commissary (even Vault, FTW). On top of all that, the company itself was physically situated just across the street from Sea World. Every day, I could burn a 10-minute break by going up to the top floor and watching the dolphins frolic verily in their giant blue training tank. With slightly less clothing and more chocolate, this place could have been Heaven’s waiting room.
Unfortunately, my tenure at this organization was tainted from the moment I first arrived. Turns out I was never supposed to be hired. The individual who brought me on was told explicitly by his boss not to do so, but he did anyway, because he was one of those middle-management rebel types who didn’t play by upper m’s rules. A regular loose cannon in khakis, that guy was. I didn’t know about any of this until well after I was fired, so it was a bit of a shock when, in an attempt to exact revenge and get me terminated, the head of my department stopped giving me work to do a couple months in and told Hiring Boss I was jerking off all day, every day. Of course, I got called into one of those tiny corporate Nazi interrogation rooms for a “Hey, what’s going on, I hear you can’t handle this job, what’s up with that?” discussion/passive-aggressive tongue-lashing.
Velvet Revolver Should Hire a Damn Muppet
So Velvet Revolver is still looking for a singer. When we last heard from America’s hardest rockin’ tax shelter (March or April of 2008?), rail-thin frontman Scott Weiland had just hissy-fitted his way out of the band, completely fed up with drummer Matt Sorum’s relentless vest-wearing. This left Matt, bassist Duff, guitarist Slash, and that other guitarist with the skull cap who wasn’t in Guns N’ Roses high and dry, utterly singerless, caught with their leather pants around their ankles and a sad look on their face at a rural Vermont box social. Now here we are a year and a half later. So much in the world has changed—black president, new orange juice containers, return of the old orange juice containers—yet VR remains in neutral, unable (or unwilling) to trudge forward.
Clearly these guys are wary of splitting their fanbase, Van Halen-style, with the wrong dude. Hey, I get that. There’s a predetermined aesthetic to uphold. Hence, throwing a classic showbiz pistol like Rip Taylor into the equation, no matter how great his talent, would be a huge mistake (handlebar mustaches and sacks of confetti have never been that rock ‘n’ roll anyway). You gotta stay ultra thin, hyper cool, and post-color TV. Richard Belzer falls into that category; unfortunately, I think the Belz is way more into jazz than rock music. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him on several occasions either wailing on a saxophone under a crescent moon or enjoying someone else wailing on a saxophone under a crescent moon. Federal law mandates there is no place for saxophones of any kind in Velvet Revolver.
Less Than Zero OST: Eight Barrels of Awesome
“You have so much crap here,” Mother said into the telephone. “You need to come and figure out what you’re keeping and what’s garbage.”
“Fine,” I casually replied. “Send me 400 bucks and I’ll fly down there already.”
And so it came to pass. Last week, I journeyed to the suburban Florida compound my parents own so I could sort through seven boxes of “crap” they wanted nothing to do with while soaking in an overwhelming amount of sepia-toned high school memories. I was lured, not by the notion of being a “good son”—freeing up x amount of floor space so the birth-givers had a place to put their curio cabinet full of Gone With the Wind collector’s plates from the Franklin Mint—but by the prospect of excavating untold musical riches. Indeed, I could no longer remember what gems I had left behind when I high-tailed it out of the Sunshine State oh so many years ago.
This Just In: Old People Hate New Music
“I used to be with it, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it,’ and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary to me. It’ll happen to you…”
- Abe Simpson, “Homerpalooza”
Truer words have never been spoken by a yellow, saucer-eyed, FOX-owned cartoon character. I think of the above quote every time I see one of those “Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Dead” articles in the mainstream press. You know the kind I’m talking about—wherein some legendary geezer takes up too many inches harrumphing about the lack of quality tunes floating around out there in the ether. One of these very articles popped up last week, matter a-fact, on CNN.com, under the panic-stricken headline: “What Will Save Rock ‘n’ Roll?” Apparently rock ‘n’ roll fell down a well and the Green Lantern is out of town.
In this seemingly unnecessary story, E Street Band guitarist “Little” Steven Van Zandt plays the Homer Simpson role, literally citing the sucktitude of today’s rock ‘n’ roll as the reason the record industry is sinking faster than the Lusitania (“Who are we kidding here? Nobody’s buying records? Because they suck!”). Modern rock’s suckiness, the apparently computer-illiterate Van Zandt claims, can be traced to the fact that this generation’s musicians are eschewing the time-honored tradition of playing cover songs in bars (so’s they can focus on original material, the bastards!) and ignoring the importance of ripping off the popular rockers who came before them. Seriously. Quoteth Steve:
Communist Puppets & Riverboat Gamblers At 75 MPH
WARNING: The events in this story are presented as remembered. These hazy visions pulled from the recesses of one writer’s mind may contradict what is known as stone cold fact. If times, dates, or specific individuals are presented out of order, it is not intentional.
When people ask me to name the best concert I’ve ever attended, I usually say, “Oh, that’s gotta be either the time I saw Iggy Pop in 2001 or the time I saw the Damned in 2000. Both had great energy and really put on a solid show, y’know? Just really entertaining, fun, loud rock n’ roll, and that’s what it’s all about, man.” I then toss my head back quickly, whipping my shoulder-length David Cassidy coif through the air, while simultaneously pushing up the sleeves of my “ALCATRAZ INMATE: PSYCHO WARD” t-shirt. These moves never fail to impress the slack-jawed teenage runaways who congregate outside the trailer office of my drywall business.
The sad fact of the matter, though, is the above statement is a bald-faced lie. I only say it because it seems to shut people up and doesn’t really beg further question. Truth be told, the best concert I ever attended was a predominantly hardcore punk show at a VFW Hall in the otherwise unimpressive burg of Casselberry, FL, around the same time as the aforementioned Iggy Pop show. Weirdo terror-noise outfit the Locust was headlining; I’m sure they’re the reason I went, but they are far from the only reason this event was so great. This show was basically a giant freak-ass circus, a cavalcade of musical and visual insanity from the moment my friends and I stepped into that hallowed veteran’s hall until the final buzzing notes of the Locust’s set.
An Open Letter to Chuck Biscuits
Hey dude, what’s up? Not much over here. So, uh, like, what’s the deal? Where are you?
Seriously man, it’s been like a decade since you’ve graced humankind with your sick, sick drumming skills. What’s up? Did we piss you off or something? If we pissed you off, just tell us, man, and we can talk about it. I’m sure it wasn’t intentional (unless it was something Gary did—listen, that guy’s an asshole, no one likes him, so don’t even pay attention to anything he says).
Some people say you went into an early retirement, Chuck, because you were “fed up” or “tired” of playing music. I don’t know, man. That dog really won’t hunt with me. I’m beginning to think someone forced you into exile on account a’ you knew too much about something or were so good you were making them look bad. Was it Mike Ness? Did Mike Ness slap an injunction on your ass because he couldn’t handle your powerhouse style on “When the Angels Sing?” That’s so bogus, man. So bogus.
Everyone you used to play with is still on the scene, you know. Danzig, Circle Jerks, D.O.A. Hell, I’m pretty sure Black Flag’s reunited a couple of times in various forms since their late 1980s demise. Are you injured, Chuck? Did you fall off a roller coaster or something? Is it your rotator cuff? You know, I think Ross the Boss from Manowar messed up his rotator cuff after a few shows in Germany once, but he was back rockin’ and rollin’ after six or eight months of recovery. I know that kind of thing is a bitch when you don’t have insurance, but come on, man, we really need you to get back in the game.
The Eight Worst Albums of 2009
by: James Greene Jr.
The only way I could retain my status as Crawdaddy!’s resident iconoclast was by refusing to round this list up to 10. I’m sorry, kids, but JG2 just can’t play by your workaday rules. I only wear white after Labor Day, and I don’t go to 10 like all the other little sheeple. I’m sorry if that really irks your taters. I just can’t change who I am to be the cog in your machine. I rail against your staid, Gilmore Girls way of life every chance I get. Now enjoy this work I created in exchange for monetary compensation.
1. Weezer, Raditude
You knew this had to top the list. Bashing Weezer became our national pastime in the Aughts, but this was really the first release they gave us that was totally absent of the raw spark that made them so interesting and fun in the first place. Raditude is repackaged slurm from the wrong end of Cheap Trick’s gooch posited for the Sparks-guzzling Jersey Shore generation. Not buying it? Go listen to that song about riding escalators at the mall again and tell me you still respect Rivers Cuomo.
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by: James Greene Jr.
published: December 29, 2009
in column: Over a Beer
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