Springsteen's SXSW speech and me

By turns funny and thoughtful, bawdy and shot through with the sex and rebellion of adolescent awakening, Bruce Springsteen's keynote address at South by Southwest is many things.  (Not that I was there: I listened to it via the link above).  It's advice.  It's an education.  It is a rock 'n' roll disciple painting poetic, electric thumbnail portraits of his heroes and what they showed him: the level of intensity that's possible, the sense that there is another way to live...a way out.  It is also about how the meaning and power of music still stand when you're no longer an adolescent.  It kept bringing me back to a point in my life when I was on my own search for identity, and Bruce became my compass.  (I guess I'm gonna call him "Bruce" in this, if that's alright with you).

"Music is my savior/I was named by rock & roll/I was maimed by rock & roll/I was tamed by rock & roll/I got my name from rock & roll".  That's a line from Wilco, and that's the eternal story Bruce was telling in his speech.  And though the reference points would be different for me--and though my times were far more comfortable and sheltered than Bruce's--I felt like he was telling my story.  Born in 1971, I found the life-force in my adolescence in the post-punk "alternative" cats: R.E.M., the Replacements, the Talking Heads, the Violent Femmes, and on and on.    

It was only later that my story and Bruce's art converged.  I was a rather adrift college kid at the end of the 80s when I grabbed Bruce's music like a life preserver.  In the years from 18 to 21--the years I became an adult--he started speaking to me deeply, whereas I hadn't been able to relate to him at all as a kid.  His speech at SXSW thus recalled for me many nights of very personal, private listening, blasting bootlegs through headphones all night long while writing papers or cramming for exams.  These were the same years that I got deeply into film, and Bruce's music was so cinematic: it offered a persona, a stance, just like the movies I'd see trying to "learn how to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be."  The movies I was discovering and Bruce's music seemed to echo across each other's skies: Scorsese's "Mean Streets" and Bruce's "Jungleland" intertwined in the landscape of my imagination. 

This is a guy who started out where many of the young musicians at SXSW are now, playing in bars, and who went out and proved it night after night after night--all night, every night.  But if the unspoken story of the speech was that of a young fan listening to the titans who grew up to take his place as one of them, Bruce crucially found that he could never be the Center of It All in the 70s and 80s, the way Elvis or the Beatles had been before.  For the animating spark of his speech he looked to the famous concluding paragraph of Lester Bangs's "Where Were You When Elvis Died?", words that always moved me tremendously:

"If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others' objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation's many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis's. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won't bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you."

In his speech, Bruce showed how right Lester was even as he turned his formulation on its head.  We are hopelessly fractured and sectarian now.  There is no consensus figure: for every would-be titan who might seem to you the embodiment of what it's all about, there's someone out there to proclaim, "They suck!" (Bruce intones these words with withering glee, especially when turning them back on himself).  By the time I came along I was into "alternative," whereas for Bruce rock & roll itself had been the alternative.  If anything, though, when Bruce spewed out that bravura litany of far-flung rock splinters and sects--pausing only to ponder something called "Nintendo core"--the point was to diagnose the hilarious health of the scene.   

When he talked about how much the Animals meant to him--by far the most important British invasion band for him, it seems--it took me straight back to hearing him do "It's My Life" on one of my bootlegs.  Just like he says, the song fit perfectly with the cataclysmic, punk-influenced "Darkness on the Edge of Town" material.  This song was not an "oldie" the way Bruce played it: this was life or death.  This singer was saying, listen: this is MY story. 

"It's my life, and I'll do what I want...It's my life and I'll think what I want."  I remember sitting stunned and exhilarated by the sheer force with which he spit out that "Don't PUSH ME!!"  (And that "Show me I'm wrong" line--the one Bruce says blew him away--that always knocked me out as well.)

The Animals brought class consciousness to rock & roll, the same way Bruce brought a budding class-consciousness to me in the years we've been talking about.  (I didn't come by it organically: though I've worked some physical jobs, the specter of, say, a factory life should I play my cards wrong never loomed.)  Picking up his axe, Bruce gave us a little songwriting workshop, fascinating for a non-songwriter such as myself, on creative "theft".  The rhythm of the Animals' version of "(Please Don't Let Me Be) Misunderstood" became the framework for "Badlands".

He talked about turning to country music as he grew up--that is, adult music.  Same as it was Bruce's attempts to bring adult subject matter to rock & roll that struck such a chord with me as I became an adult.  Bruce explained why he needed both Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie: Hank said "My bucket's got a hole in it," but he didn't say why.  He never went there, maybe couldn't go there.  Woody supplied the "why".  

He wrapped up the speech with an idea I got from him--or maybe from reading Dave Marsh thinking about him (in my search for identity and my place in the world--I suppose what I've been describing is a resurrection--there was Bruce, there was film, and there was Dave's writing).  I tried to use it when writing papers at the time, and I've tried to hold onto it to this day when doing any kind of critical thinking: "Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideas alive and well inside of your heart and head at all times.  If it doesn't drive you crazy, it will make you strong."  And then he showed what it might mean to do just that: "When you walk onstage tonight to bring the noise, treat it like it's all we have.  And then remember, it's only rock and roll."

Looking around at the committed young bands at SXSW, Bruce showed Lester he was wrong in a way that I'm sure would thrill the man's great heart.  Solipsism does not reign.  We're still out here, fractured though we may be.  And, to paraphrase Wilco again, we still love rock & roll.  

"Devils Don't Forget"

Watching Bob Fisher's plays make me feel the way I feel when I watch David Lynch's films or read Haruki Murakami or Kobe Abe's fiction.  And I mean that as the highest sort of compliment. 

Pauline Kael once wrote of "Blue Velvet", "If you feel that there's very little art between you and the filmmaker's psyche, it may be because there's less than the usual amount of inhibition.  Lynch doesn't censor his sexual fantasises, and the film's hypercharged erotic atmophere makes it something of a trance-out, but his humor keeps breaking through, too.  His fantasies may come from his unconscious, but he recognizes them for what they are, and he's tickled by them." 

I think the same is true of Bob's theater: his work is powerful because there's very little mediation between his id and what ends up on stage.   When you go to see a show by his company, the Mammals, you descend into the basement and into Bob's world.  You're in his unconscious, where all those fantasies come flailing around.  There's a tremendous amount of pain there, and violence against women, and just plain violence.  But it can also be arousing, a darkly comic turn-on.  

He gives us a Grand Guignol, pulp fiction, penny dreadful world, a world of old Poverty Row B-movie film noir thrillers and Universal Horror films.  If I have made a lot of cinematic references, it's because the Mammals makes a uniquely cinematic theater: there's as much Tarantino in there as there is Beckett and Brecht.  It's there in the language, which has the fun, zingy poetry of a Ben Hecht.  But it's in the actor's faces and bodies as well, which evoke a visceral classic cinematic physiognomy, a hard jaw or a curvy form, and extends all the the way to the lighting: the palette of "Devils Don't Forget" is black and white, almost chiaroscuro, which makes the rare strokes and dabs of color all the more vivid.  

The hero of "Devils Don't Forget" is Buster, an amnesiac with blood-stained gauze still clinging to his temples.  Played by Dennis Frymire, he is tormented by various gangsters, femme fatales and monsters.  There is Don Hall as the well-dressed Udo, who wields a switchblade and is a sort of amalgam of those torturers who approach their work with that certain joie de vivre (think Mr. Blonde-Frank Booth-droog).  There is the lissom Annie Hogan, who sure knows how to rock a clingy scarlet gown.  Sara Gorsky plays the woman Buster can't remember but also can't forget.  In a cold world, Sara is warmth: the heart (as the great old atheist once said of religion) of a heartless world. 

Sarah Koerner tickled me as a singularly unsympathetic bartender, hacking like a consumptive and pouring the world's most begrudging cup of coffee.  Gabe Garza is Dumdum, Udo's hapless muscle, evoking in size and demeanor one of the dimmer members of the Sopranos clan, and whom Udo bullies.  And then there is "the Father", some kind of alien or beast with two backs (Justin Warren and Erin Orr), one half of whom pushs its other half in a wheelchair: twisted, poxy decrepitude on wheels.  

Bob's is not a nihilistic vision, not at its heart.  Like Buster, who tells us that his whole life could have been redeemed if he had only been able to comfort an old veteran, there's a humanity at the core of the vision, or at least a grasp to hold on to humanity.  At one point Buster mimes taking something from his pocket and tells us he is holding an egg in his hand.  Although we can see there is nothing there, he asks an audience member to cradle it, wills them to see it.  Like Buster, Bob would like to get you to believe...I'm not sure in what, but in something.  Perhaps the imagination.  In a culture that tries to shut you down at every turn, the Mammals still make theater that wants to open you up. 

Maybe you'll surface from "Devils Don't Forget" as you sometimes do from a particularly vivid, disquieting dream, to find--if only in the instant before relief comes flooding in and you begin to forget--that, just for a moment, you're unsure of what is real and what is not.  

["Devils Don't Forget" is playing Fridays and Saturdays in February at 10:00 p.m. at Zoo Studios at 4001 N. Ravenswood Ave., Ste. B-1. For reservations: 866-593-4614 or themammals@gmail.com]

Robbie Fulks ♥s the Velvet Underground

The vision or version of the Velvet Underground's music that Robbie Fulks and the boys played at the Hideout on January 16 may not have been a complete one--you couldn't do that with such a dimensional band--but it was nonetheless a very personal one: each member of the band had contributed a few personal favorites to the setlist.  It was an irreverent, ramshackle show that walked us around that deformed hydra that is the Velvets’ music, not afraid to tweak its whiskers.    

We tip-toed past the gentle (“Sunday Morning”, “Stephanie Says”), lilted to the pop (“There She Goes Again”, “Who Loves The Sun”, “She’s My Best Friend”), and stomped by the ferocious (deep cut “Guess I’m Falling in Love”, a galloping "What Goes On", the electric charge of "I'm Waiting For The Man").

And they didn't leave off the literary: they actually did Reed’s deadpan-dry, black-comedy short story classic “The Gift”!  I amused (and somewhat scandalized) my friend Beth, who knows not of the Velvets, by reciting key lines of the story in her ear alongside Fulks, who donned spectacles and sat at a lectern (though he didn't try to put on Cale's Welsh accent, despite calls from the audience).  "Waldo Jeffers had reached his limit..." 

We gaped at Grand Canyon-like majesty (“All Tomorrow’s Parties”).  We went looking for redemption in the lovely "Jesus", and found it in the life-affirming “I Found a Reason”.  Lastly we lingered on the whimsical (“I’m Sticking With You” and that little coda “After Hours”, which I've always found oddly moving). 

We’re not gonna play some of your favorites, Robbie told us straightaway, not out of some hipster thing of ‘we’re not gonna play the ones you came to hear,’ but just because there are too many great ones.  And so there was no “Femme Fatale” or “Pale Blue Eyes” or “Sweet Jane” or “Rock & Roll.”  

Perhaps they gave short shrift only to the VU's ice-pick-to-the-skull moments, when sound scorched the world and cracked it open.  They did not quite produce a note piercing enough to split our minds open, though there was a groovy Robbie original (a throwaway ditty with a refrain like, "hey, hey, how'd they get that sound? Ooh, the Velvet Underground") that mashed into a lurching "Sister Ray" and back.  Young couples out for a night out with their arms around one another suddenly found themselves bobbing their heads and grooving to lyrics like “She’s busy suckin’ on my ding-dong/I’m searching for my mainline/I said I couldn’t hit it sideways/Couldn’t hit it sideways….”. 

It was a memorable night of homage to the band and the records from which all "alternative" rock and roll flows.

A hot night in cold Chicago with Victor & Penny

The January 6 evening with Victor & Penny was an absolute rollicking blast.  The duo, whose not-so-secret identities are Erin McGrane and Jeff Freling, play "antique pop", the titular music of their debut album.  We'd gathered at cozy Katerina's for the CD release party.  (Having just enjoyed an intensely garlic'd and delicious meal of eggplant parmesan and lemon chicken directly before I got up to introduce myself, I consider it a testament to the kind of people they are that they didn't once wince or grit their teeth as I proclaimed how smitten I was with their "Santa Baby" video.)  The striking, knowing Erin, with her light-up-the-room smile, has a lissome voice that plays drolly with Jeff's.  Her ukelele and his red-hot jazz guitar put the swing, the jump, the dance and the roll in their early 20th-century rock & roll.  These are deep cuts discovered down the more playful byroads of American music.  Special guest Scruffles McThompson sat in, thumping out some groovy upright bass.  As the set drew to a close, lindy-hopping dancers swung round the floor, helping V&P bring it home.  

Put "Antique Pop" on the shelf next to Louis Armstrong and Bob Wills as music that it's impossible to be down while listening to.  For me it's a souvenir of a memorable night of music, food and wine.  

Lou and Metallica and the glory of love

It's almost certainly a mark of my own perversity, but after listening to it two or three times, "Lulu", the new album that answers the question no one was asking--what would happen if Lou Reed and Metallica got together?--has quickly reached the point of fascination for me.  It seems to be reviled as a howler in just about all quarters.  But then we've always laughed at Lou, haven't we?  Or with him--that deadpan visage behind the shades would never quite allow us be sure which, or even to what extent the joke was on us.  I mean, it's probably an indicator of what an asshole I am, but I think "Take No Prisoners" is the funniest live rock album ever, especially when he's letting himself go on the subject of his critics.  "Critics.  What does Robert Christgau do in bed?  You know, is he a toe fucka?"  And later, warming to his theme: "These are the assholes who make or break the best rock bands that are very heavy and intelligent".  Heavy and intelligent: maybe some intimation there that makes sense of this collaboration with Metallica...but I think another remark on the record is a truer harbinger: "I never said I was tasteful.  I'm not tasteful." 

When he wasn't making jokes, though, and even sometimes when he was, Lou was giving us records as rich as any novel: all of the Velvet Underground albums, "The Blue Mask", "New York", "Magic and Loss", etc., etc.  Sometimes he did it in one song, like "Street Hassle" or "Coney Island Baby".   

Don't get me wrong: there is some stuff on "Lulu" that I never need to hear again ("Little Dog" springs to mind).  I dunno, maybe it's as awful as everybody says and I'll play it a few more times and then never again.  But for now there are tracks here that are everything I could have wanted from a Lou/Metallica collaboration: "The View", "Mistress Dread", "Pumping Blood".  It's got what Lou lovers want in a Lou album: the passion, the perversity, the personal.  The brutally honest look at his own frailties and faults, not just for the purpose of self-laceration, but to learn to embrace them...and finally to love them, which is to say to love himself. 

As for Metallica, one thing I've long dug about them is their musical curiosity, the way they get off on other types of music besides metal.  They go to see Springsteen; they listen to the Beatles' "(I Want You) She's So Heavy" for the first time.  James Hetfield has talked about these experiences, how they were quite outside the realm of the music that the band had grown up listening to, but how blown away they were once they gave it a chance.  A lot of Metallica fans, at least the ones who moan on the Internet, seem to hate this very tendency in them.  (Presumably these people are still typing from their darkened bedrooms in their mom's house beneath their "Kill 'Em All" posters.  I know that's a snotty comment but I don't give a shit.  Can you tell I've been listening to a lot of Lou lately?)  I've seen some Lou fans crying on the Web as well, though not as many. 

Oh well: puritanism of whatever stripe is deeply anti-rock & roll, not to mention a fucking drag.

So what perspective do I bring "Lulu", myself?  Lou is amonst the handful of singers to whom I relate the most, right there with Dylan, Elvis Costello, Springsteen, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen.  Angry, tough, abrasive, funny.  And while I haven't kept up with what Metallica has been up to for, oh, at least a decade, there was a time when they were a fave rave.  So I was happy to hear on "Lulu" that their crunch still satisfies: James Hetfield's teeth-baring vocals and Lars' drums, so pounding, so precise.  Lou has always gotten off on guitars (I recall an offhand comment he made on one of Quine's bootlegged Velvet Underground tapes while riffing on an intro, something like, Can you imagine that with, like, a million guitars behind it?), and he's always made it a point to play with hot guitarists.  Kirk Hammet certainly fits the bill, though the three guitars on "Lulu" (Lou, Hetfield and Hammet) mesh more than they solo, painting sonic textures while bassist Robert Trujillo drops depth charges.  They're really playing as a group here, with Lou as bandleader.  Listen to the interplay of the instruments on the prologue to "Cheat on Me".  As for Lou's vocals, on "Lulu" he sounds younger, more tender and vulnerable, than he has in years, sometimes even sounding like he did with the Velvets.

What is "Lulu" about?  I have no idea, beyond what I read about it's being based on a series of German plays.  Lou's singing from the point of view of a woman for most of it.  He gets really earthy here, almost as though the idea was to continue the song cycle begun on "Berlin", but maybe with the idea that that chronicle of abuse of various stripes (domestic, drugs) erred on the side of being rather too happy-go-lucky, all puppies and rainbows.  Here he yelps about "the smell of your armpits, the taste of your vulva," elsewhere raving about "blood spurting from me" and a "colored man's dick". 

In fact he lets you know where it's at right from the beginning: "I would cut my legs and tits off when I think of Boris Karloff and Kinski/It made me dream of Nosferatu trapped on the isle of Doctor Moreau/Oh wouldn't it be lovely/I was thinking Peter Lorre /When things got pretty gory as I crossed to the Brandenburg Gate".  You can throw the towel in right there if you're so inclined.  As for me, he had me with the entwining of Karloff and Kinski.  I love my rockers to be film-literate.

As fun and mad as the thrashers are, they are not the best things here.  "Lulu"s capper is a gentle song called "Junior Dad" that ends with a gorgeous extended coda of guitar washes that sound like cellos and violins.  But then, as much as he's known for limning the limits of loathing, the contours of contempt, the secret of Lou's music is that it's really about love.  It always has been.  About the redemptive power of love in this world.  A world of meanness, yes, which all honest art must reflect...but that's never the whole picture, must not be the whole picture in any art that is honest and whole.  After all, it was Lou who warned us all those years ago about those "evil mothers" who would tell us that "everything is just dirt".  I get the same feeling listening to "Junior Dad" as I do from "Set the Twilight Reeling" or "Coney Island Baby", and I think of the lines in that latter song which have always layed me out (emphasis mine): "When you're all alone and lonely in your midnight hour/and you find that your soul it's been up for sale...well, remember the princess who lived on the hill/who loved you even though she knew you was wrong."

And then the lines that cut to the heart of it, of what it's always been about: "And the glory of love, the glory of love might see you through."   

"Junior Dad" contains these lines:

"Pull me up
Would you be my lord and savior
Pull me up by my hair
Now would you kiss me, on my lips

An island of lost souls

Sunny, a monkey then to monkey
I will teach you meanness, fear and blindness
No social redeeming kindness."

And then he whispers, in awe, in a moment of transcendence:

"Oh, state of grace."

Next up for Metallica?  I was thinking I'd like to hear 'em back up Neil Young.  Or you know, I've thought for years that the way Dylan's singing these days, he'd sound great fronting a death-metal band.