As we continue our discussion of popular music and its discontents, I opened up the paper this morning to find a charming tribute to the place and milieu in which I grew up: the New Jersey hardcore scene. Although it’s partly a record review, the piece does a good job capturing the local vibe of being near, but not quite of the City. One of the groups featured, Titus Andronicus, are of a younger generation than I am, and don’t sound very good. But Ted Leo is a real eminence gris whom I remember from his days in the beloved neo-mod band Chisel (Citizens Arrest were definitely before my time).
Chisel were based in D.C. But somehow they preserved that New Jersey sound, which evokes the experience of being pressed up against the plate glass window of a cool, expensive restaurant or lounge, watching the goings-on within from the cold street. Springsteen had that sound, of course. But so did punk bands like the Bouncing Souls, Lifetime, and a dozen even more obscure, mostly short-lived outfits of kids with guitars.
None of this is great, or even good music by Roger Scruton standards. But pure aesthetic achievement isn’t the only thing we should, or do, value in music. The new Ted Leo record contains some terrific, thoughtful rock ‘n’ roll. What’s more important to me, though, is that it sounds like home.
March 14th, 2010 | 7:23 pm
I actually thought “The Airing of Grievances” was pretty good. Ted Leo, of course, is excellent.
March 14th, 2010 | 8:10 pm
So, the rockin’ question of the week is:
What bands sounds like home?
Answers will vary by generation(including sub-generations) and locality. I love how Sam here can somehow hear an affinity b/t the boss and these punkity outfits that has to do w/ the (suburban?) NJ exp. of being up against but not in NYC’s megalopolis of hip.
I hope to be able to share a Socal suburban answer later this week. Maybe is home is where your heart was in childhood and early teen-dom. I certainly feel no aching nostalgia for my post-teen places of New Mexico and New York City, as wonderful as they were. And I love Virginia more than either of those, but not ever in the same way as California.
March 15th, 2010 | 12:48 pm
Will, I listened to the “The Airing of Grievances” over the weekend. Meh.
Carl, surely the SoCal answer is Social Distortion?
March 16th, 2010 | 2:48 am
One need not on the level Roger Scruton to give an account of the music from which where one comes from. Scruton, as excellent as he is, cannot account for the places one comes from. So this must be from a certain hard core version of New Jersey. It speaks for itself, except it must be able to defend itself too. You New jersey guys are lucky enough that the NY Times takes you into account every once in awhile. That is, in part, the reason why Bruce Springsteen is taken so seriously.
One could say that Social Distortion is the sound of So Cal as much as Black Flag, the Minutemen, and X–please play the “Flag” as X had it in their great song from More Fun in the New World that I can’t remember. I think it is called “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts.”
So in Galveston Texas there were no bands nor was there a scene. Back in the 80s we listened to music not being played on the radio nor getting write ups in the NY Times. If i had to pick a local band to remind me of my youth it would be local acts who played cover songs. There is a serious lack of local music from where I come, no wonder everyone moves to Austin after they graduate from high school.
Nonetheless, ZZ Top has a song called “Down at the Balinese”, Jimmy Webb wrote a song that Glen Campbell made famous called “Galveston”, and Townes Van Zandt has a song called “Rex Blues” about a guy who runs a local singalong folk/country venue that i have had the honor of getting kicked out of twice–once because i was an obnoxious drunk and the other other because I slapped the bass too hard during a live version of a Ramones cover.
i don’t want the NYTimes to do an article on a band that would be a retrospective of where I come from. Not only would it get it wrong, it would validate al that was worst about my hometown. In Galveston you would hear about “hard core” punk as well as Jimmy Buffet. It would all be a lie. No ne has hit Galveston where it hurts. I suppose I should do it.
March 16th, 2010 | 4:11 am
I do like this line from the Hold Steady–
“There are nights when I think Sal Paradise was right/Boys and girls in America–they are
(have?) such a sad time together.”
You know it’s bad when Gen X singers relunctantly admit to the insight of Jack Kerouac.
March 16th, 2010 | 3:39 pm
Well, Social D might well be the answer for the lower-end of the suburban middle class–guys sort of like the main punk character in Repo Man, for example. There was a lot of old-style gang-like hooliganism (think: The Pharoahs in American Graffitti, but with skateboards) in SoCal in the early 80s undertaken in the name of “punk.” It was a mosh-pit-centered, brawl-prone thing, and those with more upper-middle-class origins or artsier pretensions/interests tended to shun it once you get past about 1983. The later revivals, or the NJ thing, were a different story, I assume. I suspect X tended to be beloved by a slightly higher rung of the middle-class ladder (they’re the favorites of the rich Hollywood kids in the Less Than Zero novel…never seen the movie), even if they did develop a tasty working-class (C+W-ish and rockabilly-ish) aura in their music. So my impression from looking slightly from the outside and a couple years later, was that X and even Black Flag were considered very avant in the early 80s, but by around 83 punk, under the banner of hardcore, was increasingly associated with boorish adrenaline-junkies like G.B.H., and yes, Social D.
Myself and those of my fellow teen/college hipsters I felt most akin to, as fans of Indie/undergound, were into a number of variously psyche-y things from various places–artsy things, yes, but with some oomph…you know R.E.M. from Athens, the 4AD-ish bands from Britain, Echo, Furs, U2, and it goes without saying the early incarnations of all of these, as well as various post-punk weirdness–Savage Republic, the psychier T.S.O.L. and SST bands like Husker Du, at the more extreme edge stuff like Sonic Youth. We also had a ballyhooed Calif movement called the Paisley Underground, an attempt to link bands like the Dream Syndicate, True West, Rain Parade, the Bangles(the Bangs, initially), and the Three O’ Clock. The first two were kinda Velvet Undergroundish, but the later three, in the earlier incarnations were quite good, and to my mind capture a certain Socal vibe of dreamy alternately sunny-or-melancholic mellowness that one had last really heard in the better Beach Boys stuff, the quieter surf instros(Pipeline not Wipeout), the Byrds, and in the glorious Da Capo and Forever Changes albums by Love. A certain aural scent there difficult to put into words.
And of course most those “Paisely” bands were pretty retro, a’ la 1965-67, which brings me to what was going on in my hometown of San Diego, where three even more defiantly retro bands set the scene: the Crawdaddys, the Tell-Tale Hearts, and the Paladins. These bands were not about a dreamy Calif vibe, but about rock n’ roll, with a capital N’. And no words can do justice to their totally unsung greatness–although the Paladins were comparatively long-lived by hooking up with the countrywide roots-blues scene. Maybe it was a broader Socal retro virus, which you can hear in some X and Los Lobos, and of course in the Blasters, and yes it was all over the world to some extent early 80s (think: the Jam, Elvis Costello, the Pretenders, Nick Lowe), but it seemed these San Diego bands were just further gone into the stance of acting as if the late 60s, 70s, and 80s simply had not occurred, as if that was the true “punk” solution. This fierceness of concentration on particular past slices of rock n roll history/possibility seemed connected, one must say, with the musical excellence. I guess it was a California-wide phenom as well, since bands like the bay area Big Sandy and Flyright Boys had a similar take with Western Swing…and there was that LA swing revival led by Royal Crown Revue and such(tho RCR were sort of like the Stray Cats–a bit more about the fashion than about the music…tho’ unlike the Cats they had a harder music to reprodoce). Mocked, and at their most fashionably mockable, these scenes were very much like that odd 90s song by somebody that goes “oh oh, I look like Buddy Holly, oh-oh, or-a-Mary-Tyler-Moore,” but there was something wonderfully refreshing to it as well. I mean, in the 1980s if you had to choose between looking like those kids on MTV and the John Hughes movies, or looking like those kids in Quadrophenia or the Outsiders, the choice was pretty obivous. And duh, everybody in these scenes intuitively knew that somehow the late 60s had screwed up rock and roll and that the punk rescue mission of the late 70s hadn’t turned out so hot. So you might as well go back. Out of tune with the times? The Socal 80s retro folks shrugged their shoulders…really what was so great about music these days? And, very key point, you got to dance.
Well dunno how my ramble got to here, but there it is–my lil report about a time twenty-or-so years ago when what was most happening Socal-wise from my perspective was what had been happening twenty-or-so-years ago before that.
before that.
March 17th, 2010 | 8:35 am
This is great stuff. And, as you say, very California. That’s what I meant about “home” being an aesthetic quality in its own right.
I confess that I always found the retro thing too kitschy. Although may have something to do with the local version, which was New York Doll-ish hard glam. But I love the bands that evoked country and rockabilly without turning into novelty acts. Rank and File are another good example, and the Mekons in the UK. Incidentally, I saw X on one of their occasional reunion tours a few months ago. They were really pretty good–unlike most bands in that position, they actually appeared to be enjoying themselves.
I think you’re right about the social milieu of Social D, and hardcore more generally. It was not much different on the East Coast, ten or fifteen years later, although the fashionable veganism and lefty politics of that scene kept at least some of the brutes away. The only scene I can think of that remained hardcore through the ’80s, but also artsy and upper middle class was DC. There you had bands like Marginal Man, whose guitar player was Senator Inouye’s son.
March 17th, 2010 | 3:25 pm
Bouncing Souls are still going strong. Their song, “Letters From Iraq”, was used recently for a cable show.
March 17th, 2010 | 11:06 pm
Carl. Did we go to college together? i kid, but, man, you know your music and know how to make good distinctions. The SST crew and the paisley underground and everything in between.
I didn’t mean to dig on Social Distortion, but they seemed to be a band who opened the door to all that Orange County style music.
To stick with music from where one comes from, I’m stuck with Texas–and even more so from Galveston (including Houston) Texas. We had no music scene and listened to others. When I grew up it was all Texas legends like Willie Nelson and Dog Sahm–but I was into rock n roll.
So we listened to the Paladins. Good call on that one–excellent music, it’s rock ‘N roll.
Keep on rockin’.
John
March 18th, 2010 | 2:57 am
I failed to mention the film Rep Man. My good friend Daniel Traber (and he would not mind me mentioning his name in this regard) has an interesting book which has a good chapter on the movie Rep Man. That said i wanted to recognize Carl’s love for Los Lobos. I wanted to give props especially La Pistola y el Corazon. Good stuff.
December 2nd, 2010 | 2:32 am
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