Contributor David Gendelman

In early 1979, Alex Chilton formed the Panther Burns with Tav Falco. Chilton was nearly a decade removed from his stint as lead singer in the Top 40 band the Box Tops and almost five years from his last recordings with Big Star, the pop band whose work had sparked a legion of dedicated followers. Over those five years, Chilton had begun his definitive move away from everything he’d done before. He made two solo records that had grown deliberately more simple and primal, crossing rockabilly with outrage, and he’d then moved himself behind the scenes to produce the first singles of the band the Cramps, rockabilly revolutionaries of an even more primitive sort. With his next project, the Panther Burns, Chilton found his least refined band to date and again pushed himself seemingly out of the spotlight, this time in the role of the guitar sideman. Yet he appeared to still have a great hand in the band’s direction. The Panther Burns had started almost as an art project, but a year later they had evolved into a rock ‘n’ roll dance band. They were like no other dance band around.

Jim Duckworth, a jazz guitarist who would soon join the band on drums, saw them for the first time in December 1980. “I’m walking down the street, I’m not even at the club yet,” Duckworth says, “and all I can hear—they’re on stage playing, and it’s in between numbers—but all I could hear was this shrieking, screaming feedback. Not your Jeff Beck-style feedback… more the guitar’s too close to an overpowered amp, shrieking feedback. It was that Metal Machine Music [Lou Reed’s 1975 experiment-in-noise record] on crack sort of thing… They had a synthesizer player. He had no conception of what they were doing. He played between tunes, during the tunes; it was all the same to him. They were doing this back-to-basics roots-rock thing and it was hilarious. It was the funniest fuckin’ show you ever saw. It was loose and it was raw and it really worked. When those guys were on, it was a beautiful thing.” read more

by: David Gendelman

published: November 12, 2009

in column: Feature Story

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Stop Rock and Roll: How the Drags Blew Clean Up

by: David Gendelman

The Drags: Courtesy of Empty Records The 3B Tavern, Bellingham, Washington, 1995. The bar is packed well past capacity with a sea of sweat-drenched bodies. 1950s monster-movie posters decorate the walls around them. CJ Stritzel, just over six feet tall with large shoulders, a narrow figure, and thick, black-framed glasses, stands on stage. He’s wearing a dark, short-sleeve button-down shirt, which, like everyone else’s in the bar, is soaked in sweat. He’s banging away at his guitar with a fluidity that makes it look like a fifth limb. There’s a lot of noise coming out of the amplifier behind him. It sounds like barks, or explosions, nuggets of an emotional hailstorm. Red-painted flames light up the wall behind him, as though they’re coming directly from the amplifier. His face is a snapshot of concentration. It’s hard work to get those sounds.

On the other side of the stage, Lorca Wood looks down over her bass guitar. She’s wearing a black t-shirt with the sleeves torn off. Blonde streaks mix in with the black hair matted down wet against her forehead. She, too, is locked in concentration on the riff she plays, one every rock ‘n’ roll fan recognizes but can’t name; in her hands, it sounds like a rolling thunder. Keith Herrera sits at the drum kit behind both of them. His kit is small, just a snare drum, bass drum, floor tom, and cymbal—and he probably can hardly see it behind the sunglasses he wears—but he’s getting the most out of each of them, his hands a blur. He, too, is drenched in sweat.

Some 300 people are on the floor of the club in front of them. A few are slam-dancing into each other—after all, some of them use the term “punk rock” to describe the music the band is playing. The rest are dancing in place or standing transfixed, heads bobbing, feet tapping, and sweating. From the back of the room, they make a unified mass, like a hyper-ventilating body moving together in time to the song.

by: David Gendelman

published: November 9, 2009

in column: Feature Story

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