Eighties Seconds Street

Let’s have a second helping of eighties music, shall we?

There were various things going on. Rock music went down the rabbit hole of self absorbtion, was lured into a swamp by Sargeant Pepper, and eventually drowned in a puddle of overseriousness and studio filigree. The Ramones swept the board clean by saying: three chords two minutes ten words four guys. Period. Sorry, ELO.

The glams and blues rockers and the operatic types stuck to the arenas, a sort of Broadway for fist pumpers.

Punks were like a dose of castor oil. They were supposed to be fast acting purgatives to the system. They decided they liked the trappings of the elite freaks they had sought to topple, and became a kind of Cromwell to the rock edifice’s King Jameses. They said they wanted to destroy it, but they liked replacing it just fine, thank you.

A lot of people snuck in there with the punks. If you could use your plumage or plinking to attract attention to yourself, you could always do what you wanted later. The Police were the paradigm here. We’re punks today, and playing jazz tomorrow. I’m making the comparison right now, you heard it hear first: Eighties music was the equivalent to the blogosphere of the last five years: Set your hair on fire, get noticed, attract an audience, and then run with it.

But there was another stripe of entertainment I loved that flew in under the radar too: The Buskers.

The Buskers are not a band, but it would be a great name for one. A Busker is a troubadour, the fellow standing in the subway with his guitar and maybe a friend strumming a guitar and cadging change. A Busker is the guy in the beachside bar on thursday night telling jokes and playing folkie guitar and singing along–with you. The hardest thing in the world is to stand alone, or perhaps with one friend, and entertain a crowd. The worst bands have the most people in them in the rock world, generally. Beware the spackle trying to hide the musical cracks.

There were a million of these guys (and dolls) spawned in the eighties. They’d tart themselves up every which way, get an audience, and then do whatever they wanted. And I always loved to hear the intrinsic entertainment in the offerings.

The kings of this are Squeeze. They made a maiden video of astonishing fun and spunk with Chris Difford croaking “Cool For Cats” genially, the double entendres spilling out like a drunken Chaucer. There were chicks dancing right on stage, and a kind of barroom band banging away behind, and their mod/cavern rocker/pre-draft Elvis/Louis Jordan jump/ stripped down rock ethic won everybody over. And then they let Glenn Tilbrook loose.

Glenn Tilbrook is still the best male singer outside of opera I have ever seen perform. He’s a really inventive and talented guitar player too — both electrified rock and folkie. And it’s really rare to find someone that can write interesting things and has the necessary musical ability to perform them properly. Let’s face it, we suffer through Dylan’s and Van Morrison’s voices to get at the lyrics and the vibe. I went to a what was supposed to be a Squeeze show, and ended up in a tent watching Difford and Tilbrook perform alone, strumming guitars and singing. They explained that they had lost all their money, and had to go out and sing for their supper, alone, again. No matter.

It was like listening to the Buskers on the platform at the subway to heaven. All of the aural wallpaper was stripped away, and just the voice, accompanying guitars, and good humor shone through, and you saw what entertainment was supposed to be no matter the form: a connection between the song, the singer, and the audience. There’s no fist pumping like the arena. There’s no fashion show contest between the audience and the performers like the glam rockers and divas. There’s no posturing and nihilism like the metal bands. There’s no distance like the arena or the festival.

Watch this, from 1989. It’s just plain fun, and fun to watch them freak out the interviewer who forgets exactly who he’s questioning. You asked, so he told you, dude. Quirky ain’t a pose with them, just you.

It’s like elemental entertainment; the difference between the television and the fireside. One’s more sophisticated. The other, the older one, radiates real warmth, and though it’s really just the same thing over and over, the flames dance, don’t they?

[Editor’s note: Blogosphere please take note –I have determined, right there at the end of this video, the exact place and time the idea of mass self-mutilation by tattooing occurred to the entertainment industry, and through them, the general public.]
[Author’s note: There is no editor]

Senses Working Overtime

I know you like the back of my hand, dear reader. And right through these here internets, I can feel the vibrations and emanations. Your chakra and your aura and your vibes come through, and as I lay my hand on the cpu, I can hear it, in my very bones:

The eighties were a time when the world was waking up from a kind of torpor, or stasis. New possibilities were opening up. The shooting wars had calmed down a bit. And the ideas from the technology and commerce side of the aisle were ascendant, and things got downright hopeful compared to the enuui mixed with depression the seventies encapsulated. My high school yearbook in 1976 had a two page spread that simply had the word APATHY in big letters across it. Hey, when you’re taking a beating, sometimes it’s best to curl up and wait for the blows to stop raining down.

Anyway, XTC encapsulates the marvelous and clever hive of activity that eighties music was, if you scratched the chrome off the arena rock edifice and looked a little deeper. They embodied the ideal of a few talented guys writing quirky, pleasant, tuneful ditties for our –and their own — amusement. It was nice to see people look like they were having fun, and not taking themselves too seriously for a change. To paraphrase Jeff Lebowski- God, I hate the Eagles.

XTC look like dweebs, and they are. The lead singer and one of the founders, Andy Partridge, canceled a whole tour because his wife hid his valium, and he was terrified to go on stage without it. He really belonged in a cubicle somewhere, or a library or something. He wrote songs about his comic book collection. His sort of Star Wars action figure collector comic book guy ugly guitar buyer home studio recorder computer geek TV Guide obsessed Avengers wannabe persona didn’t exist yet then in pop culture. Everybody’s like him now.

We dragged poor Andy out onto the stage he feared so, to distill the intellectual and the artisitic and the pop culture wag “vibe” into those toe-tapping songs. My, they were clever.

Enjoy it. I did. You’ve worn out your Talking Heads records anyway.

What Is Hip?

Well, this is:

You know who’s hip? The geeks, the joiners, the outcasts, the loners, the scholars, the poor benighted souls holed up in their basement banging away at their instrument while contemporaries drift through their daily amusements. The guys and girls with the slide rules and the soldering irons and the metronomes and the rickety chrome fold-up music stands. The ghastly dweebs with ink here and there on their hands and exacto knives in their drawer and pushpin holes in their subject material. They’ve got glasses like deep sea sub windows and pants hiked up like a flood’s coming. They’ve got collections of manuscripts or lp records or fruit crate labels or Beatles butcher covers but they haven’t got any furniture or a set of clothes that match.

And they’re busy all the time while their friends are out having the mindless fun we all covet but the hermit can’t participate in, because the fun stops the minute they show up.

Eventually, the geeks stand up facing the beautiful people, and let it out –the distilled essence of their efforts, the cream skimmed off the top of their monastic intellectual efforts. And the shiny happy people, the people that know how to dress, and to schmooze, and to look like more than they are, the ones that travel effortlessly through this life –they turn, and are transfixed, and say:

That is hip.

I Feel Fine

I’ve made money, in varying, modest piles, playing four different instruments at one time or another. I never learned to play any of them properly. Funny that; the topic of playing them properly never came up — it was rock music. I’ve been paid to show up and own the instruments occasionally. It ain’t rocket science.

My older brother can play properly. He’s a scholar, and a performer, and a teacher. That’s the correct formulation for any endeavour, by the way: learn, do, teach.

Anyway, I told him, a long time ago, that I wanted to learn to play the guitar. He said fine, and plopped The Compleat Beatles down in front of me. It’s two very heavy books of sheet music of all the Beatles’ songs. It’s in there, he said; just learn it.

I remember how he had painstakingly learned to play Beatles and Stones and assorted pop songs in our parents’ living room by implacably picking up and dropping the needle on the scratchy records and listening to little bits of it over and over and over, and pecking them out on his guitar. And then he would perform them with his friends and get girls mooning over him like a Beatle.

He was eight years older than me, and I got interesting looks from some of my teachers in high school, of the female eight-years-older-than-me variety: You’re Garrett’s brother? He didn’t… ahem — er, mention me, did he?

I got away with murder, I’m tellin’ ya.

Well, he’d figured it all out a long time ago, the hard way, and so could point you right to the right place, right away. And he’s right, of course, the distillation of the american country blues and pop song and the british music hall ballad is all in there. The Beatles dug it all out of there for you.

All that’s left is for you to go and get it.

Lennon flubs the lyrics halfway through. Like it matters.