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.

The Rest Is Conversation

The Rain Comes Again

The rain comes again
Trying, as we all do
To get to where it must go
From where it is

It will go back
As we all do
To where we belong
We may linger; we do not stay

It has no malice
Comes quietly
Leaves silently
Wearing away even stone

The leaf catches it
It cannot hold
The turf waits
Only a moment

Unnecessary, but welcome
Aren’t we all?

Don’t Be A Jerk

[ Editor’s note: It’s the summer; sometimes we rerun things]
[Author’s note: There is no editor.]

It’s been hot here. Sticky hot. The Queen takes the children to the beach each day. It’s at the end of the street we live on, just a few miles. The beach in our town is an afterthought, really; the town’s anima is centered around being on the water, not in it. But the Big One has swimming lessons at the beach, and the Wee One sits in the gentle lapping waves, up to his waist, and dredges sand through his fingers, and is content.

The beach has a lot of rules. I think the beach should have one rule: DON’T BE A JERK. That would about cover it. But things are never that simple anymore. People get together and start laying out the rules landscape, and forget when to stop. After a while, the rules, and especially the impetus behind the rules, starts to conflict with itself. And after a while, you could sum up the rules as: DANGER -WARNING -NO FUN ALLOWED. GAMBOLERS WILL BE CHASTENED.

Safety is paramount, to an idiotic degree. There’s a float you can swim out to, and rest a spell, and swim back. Woe be it to anyone who dives off the float into the water. This is strictly impermissible. A few years ago, a youngster broke his neck diving into the water, and the town, with an eye towards lawsuits, forbade diving. But as I understand it, the poor fellow that hurt himself did so because he didn’t dive off the float, he dove off a rock near the shore, into shallow water. If he had done what is now proscribed, he would have been fine. It’s curious.

Judgement and reason are assumed to be beyond the capabilities of the average person here. And the idea that children should be policed by their parents is apparently no longer current.
Any plastic device for amusing yourself is not allowed. Now, I understand why the sign says: No Glass. Accidents happen, and broken glass at the beach I can live without. But glass is easily replaceable by other containers, and so no ox is gored. But the interdict against boogie boards, and inner tubes and so forth extends to water wings. They’re plastic, so no dice. In other words, safety is paramount to the nth degree- someone might get hurt!, so everything is banned, but taking a chance on a tot drowning for the lack of two little rings of airfilled plastic is preferable to allowing some barbarian to show up with anything so declasse as, well…plastic anything.

Dogs are banned, of course. But why? It’s not because the dogs really can’t go to the beach and coexist with bathers; it’s because civility has broken down to the point where people can’t be expected to take responsibility for their animals. People bring really mean animals to public places now, and take pleasure in menacing people. They always put you off with a “My dog doesn’t bite,” if you ask them to restrain their pit bull named “Satan” because he’s menacing your children. And he leaves the brown, cylindrical objects in the sand that smell disagreeable when you step in them, and his owner can’t be bothered to clean it up, or bring the dog off the beach when he’s in the grunting mood. So no dogs. More rules, because no one remembers the Golden Rule. No not that one, the one I just coined, the new one: DON’T BE A JERK.

The beach is mostly empty these days, although the steamy heat has driven that Demosthenes of Boston, Hizzoner Mayor Tom Menino, to the radio each day announcing a weather alert and telling us in mumbled spoonerisms to drink lots of water and look in on shut-ins. Thanks for that, really. I was planning on sitting in front of the open oven door all day in a ski parka until you warned me off it.

Note to Tom: After Demosthenes cured his faulty speech by filling his mouth with pebbles and yelling over the sound of the surf, he took the pebbles out. You seem to have left a few in there.
I read in the paper that eleven people have died of heat related causes in Phoenix this week, and it reached 116 degrees on the thermometer there. If you investigated a little further, you found that ten of them were homeless people, and you can’t force them to stop drinking dehydrating liquor and come in out of the sun, there’s a rule against that, and they died of heatstroke. The eleventh person was an elderly woman who was found in her apartment, which was equipped with air conditioning, which she had turned off. Waste not, want not got her.

So maybe mumbling Tom has a point. But people who used to look after the elderly, like their friends or relatives, did so because it was the right thing to do, not because the Mayor told them to. We live in a time where the national legislature feels the need to pass legislation called “Good Samaritan Laws,” making it a crime to see someone in distress and refuse to help. But isn’t it all the other laws and rules and codes and statutes that they passed, and the insane litigation that they turn a blind eye to, and sometimes encourage, that made us so distant from one another in the first place? People are afraid to interfere in anybody’s affairs, not through an aversion of being a busybody, but because they’re afraid of being sued. Or assaulted.

The Queen and the Wee One and the Large Child settled themselves on the blanket in the sand yesterday, and tried not to break any rules. Another party settled down beside them. They had brought a nuclear powered boom box, and felt no compunction to respect the wants or wishes of others a few feet from them, and blared rap music at flight deck volume. No one ever seems to blast Respighi at that volume, I’ve noticed.

Now my wife could go to the authorities in town, and dutifully, in a few days, the DPW would come on down to the beach, and add another line to the “Prohibited” sign, to specify music. And so the worst of us will make it impossible to have any music at the beach, which is unfortunate. That’s not the way it should be done, and they’ll find another way to annoy everybody next time, anyway. Because rules are for squares you know, the people who don’t need rules on civility and parental probity in the first place. You know, people that don’t want to listen to hateful misogynist singsong or death metal at the beach. Rules only apply to the people that need them least.

I say: Take down the sign with the laundry list of real and imagined threats to civility and safety. Replace it with a smaller one:

DON’T BE A JERK

And give the lifeguard a pistol. Problem solved.

People Get Ready

I was a child in the sixties, a teenager in the seventies. The natural trajectory for a young man in the suburbs would be to embrace rock music. I never really did.

They were too much like me, perhaps, the arena power chorders. Aerosmith used to play in my high school gym, after all. I wouldn’t change the channel if Bachman Turner Overdrive came on, and I had a well worn copy of Frampton Comes Alive, just like everybody else, but that was about it.

There was a jukebox in the lunchroom at our public high school. It was a revelation to me after spending my grammar school years in Catholic School. The nuns would have no more brought in a juke box than a Wiccan into our lunchroom. Upon reflection, it’s the nuns that got it right. It was a symptom of the profound unseriousness of the place that the public high school supplied the same soundtrack a teenager demanded in his non-school life to muddle through it.

I could probably list every single song in that jukebox, down to the most obscure, and it was over thirty years ago. Not much of it was very good. But it was generally fun and disposable, like popular entertainment should be, but rarely is, any more. There was:
Led Zeppelin
Harry Nilsson
Dr John
Hollies
Beatles
Rolling Stones
Eric Clapton
The Beach Boys
Badfinger
Moody Blues
More Led Zeppelin
Grand Funk Railroad
Elton John
Wings
Billy Paul
Billy Preston
Earth Wind and Fire
Still more Led Zeppelin
Gilbert O’Sullivan
Looking Glass
Marvin Gaye
Aerosmith
The Rasberries…

Well, you get the picture. Nothing much recorded at La Scala. Nothing much recorded in a gospel church. Now having enough money to put into a jukebox was a foreign concept to me. The thing would play anyway, and you’d hear everyhing in it no matter what, eventually. I recall the only time an insurrection against the thing was mounted, when some wisenheimer pumped a buck or two into the thing and selected “Dogs Barking Christmas Carols” 15 straight times. After about five minutes, a grim and resolute shop teacher marched over, pulled the enormous contraption away from the wall, and yanked the plug. I’m certain it’s the only cheer the prickly old fellow ever heard from his charges.

This one comes back to me though, and kindly:

The man, and the topic, was a world away from me. I was unlikely to adopt his huggybear/trotsky cap or his owlish glasses. But really, to a fifteen year old, looking into a world of dead ends, who could say it better, and funkier, than Curtis Mayfield?

Ask him his dream
What does it mean?
He wouldn’t know…

The Disk Dog Ate My Digital Homework

I took lots of stunning photographs of Newport, Rhode Island on Monday afternoon. By stunning, I mean I was stunned to find out the information was corrupted and I lost 75% of them.

It was only a few years ago I would have blasted away with a 35mm Canon “cannon,” brought the coated plastic plugs of film to the processor, paid a small child’s ransom, and received eight hundred assorted out of focus unusable snapshots. So I’m not going to complain about what might have been; it was never very good. At least degraded ones and zeroes don’t cost anything but your time.

But it’s you, dear reader, who was cheated; I still had the lovely afternoon with Mrs. Sippican, and the bangers and mash I had for lunch in an open air Irish cafe has stayed with me as tenaciously as any pleasant memory. (Pounds chest gently; Excuse me!)

When you are a photographer, you are disconnected from the proceedings in a very real way. You are an observer. And when you have that lens-y thing in your hand, you’re always looking at the world differently, searching for the next thing to point it at. I had the most fun inside the museum I extolled yesterday, because the camera was put away. And I have a much more vivid memory of the child’s bed in the attic room than I do of that cabbage rose I stuck the lens right into from yesterday’s essay.

That’s why you read books to understand things. A movie is another’s idea of something. The act of conjuring up the vision in your own head of the topic at hand, a requirement of reading, makes the vision yours. And if I had the pictures, I could write fabulous bon mots about the whole affair, and you could assemble a gossamer image of it in your head, and vicariously live in Newport for a minute. Now you’re more or less SOL.

Except for these:
Extreme age softy molded by the touch of a million hands and the gentle scrape of a million shoes. There is nothing quite so lovely as something cared for but old. Nothing that gets used to replace this configuration of material, design, maintenance, and just plain love will ever get to be this old. Fiberglass, steel, plastic, resin — bah! It’s all designed to look brand new for a little while and then get chucked in a dumpster. There’s no picturesque in plastic.
Roses. Fence. Grass. Wood. Paint. Repeat as necessary.

What a magnificent mess. I’ve spent countless hours looking for such a wreck to resuscitate. I gave up after a while, and built my own wreck, but still. This place has had the most benign sort of neglect. It’s the “fixing” that kills a place like this. The average handy person at the Home Depot would ruin everything about this place that makes it interesting, all because the paint is peeling. Vinyl siding would have been plan one for everybody involved, no doubt; I’d like to slap everyone that even considered it. Pressure treated this and false muntin that, and in no time, this place would have looked like every other suburban tract house in the snouthouse/ranch/colonial/japo-scandinavian/moorish tile/wrought iron/gay nineties/swiss chalet/corbusier abbatoir/bauhaus/prairie/cottage style. Then we could have knocked it down and put up a concrete block dry cleaners.

Don’t laugh; The Samuel Whitehorne House Museum I showed you yesterday was turned into a dry cleaners/flophouse, and about to be torn down, when old Doris Duke purchased it and restored it.

Sometimes –you can’t do it; they can’t help.