Sermon Archive
#1: How I Got Over 
The odds were stacked against it, but rock and roll changed my life--that's its story, and that's why it beats the hell outta poetry, fiction, tv, movies, anything you care to name today that purports to give trapped people a way out these days. It'll find your ass, if you'll look for it. It's supposed to be dead, too, but purveyors of such theories are full of shit. Rock and roll is about outreach; everything else is just an invitation to navel-gazing, which is the last thing you need at millennium's end.
I grew up in a household where music was Mantovani, Neil Diamond, Al Martino, the soundtrack to Camelot (literally and metaphorically). What was worse is that it was missing that seldom-celebrated essential figure in any rock and roll-bound kid's life: a big brother who could pass down records. I also lived in a little town in southwest Missouri. The first music I heard that I liked was Sonny and Cher, and my parents bought me Sgt. Pepper's for my 9th birthday--neither a particularly good omen. but it found me. It took a roundabout route, my first collisions with it were scattershot and strange in a decade saved by the Stooges and Dolls, Springsteen and the eternal Stones, the Pistols, Ramones, and Clash...but it found me.
I first caught that feeling of liberation off the radio from Spinners records. Phillippe Wynne's jubilant, scatting leads on "Mighty Love" and "Rubberband Man" and "Then Came You" (in dynamic tandem with Dionne Warwick) promised ecstasies that were just out of reach of my comprehension, but which hit my body dead-on. Elton John was my Jerry Lee and Little Richard, silly, fantastic, and fun; if you were 11 or 12 and stuck in the Bible Belt in his prime, nothing sounded as totally and wonderfully different from the details of your life than " Bennie and the Jets", "The Bitch is Back", "Rocket Man", "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", "Philadelphia Freedom", "Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting". Say what you want now , but then, he rocked, and revealed another world to a midwestern kid. Then there was Alice Cooper, supreme boogie-man to the 70's equivalents of the PMRC, but--just like Marilyn--crass as they come. The theatrics were one thing, but the guitar behind "Eighteen", "School's Out", and "No More Mr. Nice Guy" pushed me in front of my bedroom mirror and had me strumming and screaming. I thank my mom and dad for not shutting me down, and I still know those lyrics by heart. I was rawking, posting my personal top 40 om my 6th grade classroom’s bulletin board, taping shit off the radio and forcing it on kids who were still sleeping.
Next phase, another rock-life archtype: the chain reaction detonated by the accidental discovery. Coop and Elton were fading, Wynne had bolted the Spinners, and Air Supply and Kenny Rogers were making their MOR moves (the Christian Coalition and lil' George Shrub III remind me of them all the time). I was seeking refuge in Neal Adams' Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics on DC, and that series was drawing to a close after having gifted me with a teensy political consciousness and nurtured the gift of rebellion those first rock and roll icons had bestowed upon me. Shit was looking grim. One day, Mom gave me $5 to buy some comics downtown while she shopped, and the world as I knew it would soon be capsized, yet rescued.
I wandered into the now long-gone corner newsstand and found nothing but shitty art and bad stories on the comic rack, and wheeled to leave in disgust. Something caught my eye: the newest Rolling Stone cover, displaying a 5 o'clock- shadowed, v-neck undershirt-wearin' greaser glowering at me. OK, so I had the seeds of rebellion growing inside of me, but I was still a son of the Methodist church, and I'd been told the mag was for dope-smokers, about which I didn't know diddley. Still. A defiance burned in the guy's eyes that aligned with something true I felt but couldn't pin down--so I bought it and had it sacked. What the hell.
Later, in the privacy of my room, I got to know not only Bruce (remember: this was southwest Missouri, and Springsteen almost never hit the radio there), but...Dylan. Greil fucking Marcus, reviewing Street Legal in that issue, had stomped a mud puddle in the grouchy old fart's ass, but the excerpted lyrics [from "Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)", as I recall] jazzed me, and Marcus' allusion to Highway 61 Revisited sent me down to Ken's Records with my lifeguard’s pay, where I picked up those two records and Darkness on the Edge of Town. From that moment, my life's course careened perfectly out of control, into the live (in the explosive sense) domain of possibility instead of the dead one of carefully circumscribed outcomes. Two years later, I was ruining dates and becoming a dis-magnet for my friends as I tried to show and explain this rich, earthy ambrosia I'd drilled down and found; spurning Sports Illustrated for Creem; quitting football and writing my ass off; getting kicked out of class and assemblies; and giving church the bum's rush (my sunday school teacher laid into the Pistols one morning during the American tour uproar, not suspecting that any of her brood knew shit; I exploded, got booted, and my parents gave up on making me go. The “church” was lying about life, just like most of ‘em do now.
Trouble was, I was alone. Closest I could find to compadres were joint jockeys getting catatonic to everything from Rush to Zep to Judas Priest to Neil, and I just couldn't buy in (well, I made an exception with Young): energy is good , motherfuckers!!! Somebody had spray-painted ramones on the sainted baseball park wall, but damned if I could locate the perpetrators. I was aching for world conquest, but I needed fellow riders.
You can't go through life alone. You'll either be a pompous, arrogant, selfish prick, or a pathetic, self-destructive loner. And in college--bad as it is--I found two other men who joined me on the shining path of rock and roll. I realized that I wasn't some misguided crackpot--other folks loved this stuff. One of 'em validated all my suspicions that rock and roll was American nectar, a way to keep moving when most of the other voices said, "Stand still, boy"; the other led me down through the catacombs of the underground, studded with jeweled doors labeled "Black Flag”, "Replacements", "Minutemen", "Descendents", and "Husker Du", doors too few found until after death and dissent collapsed the rooms within (hell, they’re on the verge of being forgotten now). And, in short order, the stacked cards of this midwestern life got shuffled: I've been working as a rocking and rolling teacher--in termite fashion--for the past 15 years, instead of as an accountant, statistician, or real-estate agent; rather than marrying a some future soccer-mom hag, I found a beautiful woman who had Sister Rosetta, Bad Religion, Coltrane, Hank Sr., and the Ramones singing in her soul all along, and I've never been happier; I hear my god in voices as disparate as Eric Bachmann's and Wayne Hancock's and Jimmy Scott's, and I don't need some sterile building in which to kneel to it; and I know the sound of salvation is sweet, sweet racket and piercing cries and hollers in the night.
Don't be misled. Don't be afraid. Listen for that tumult, catch ahold, and ride it. You can be saved, brothers and sisters.
This is my prayer of gratitude to the noise that knows no master. Lead on.
#2: A Holy Trinity
It’s said that a tendency towards nostalgia is a sign of illness in an individual or in society. Maybe. But the lives of departed saints have always provided clues to the proper paths for the lost among us (and who here claims to be found?), whether they stepped on a rainbow 3000 or 3 years ago. The trick is to keep them alive in the memory.
In the world of rock and roll, to use the example of the Velvet Underground, it seems to take about 20 years post-departure for our saints to be regenerated as pervasive influences on our lives. True, Elvis has never gone away, but how many folks’ minds’ eyes picture the skinny, sexy, defiant country boy rather than the sweat- and pill-poppin’ corpulent poster boy for the power of the worm inside of the American Dream (in question form: whaddya do after you attain the Dream?)? So it’s about time, here in 2000, to turn away from the barely-smoldering fire in Plato’s garage and check out the silhouettes on the wall behind us. Fat guys, skinny guys, “rock” hair and shorn pates...what’s up? It’s just the Holy Trinity that carried us through the Ten Rings of Hell known as the ‘80s (well, maybe only the first 5 or 6, but permit me the conceit): Husker Du, the Replacements, and the Minutemen.
Maybe it’s just me, but you don’t exactly hear these colossus’ names being bandied about by the youngsters of the vanguard these days. Too fucking bad. For passionate intensity, drunken laughs, and a laser-lock on the puppet strings that control this horror-show in disguise called life, these bands couldn’t (and can’t be) beat. Not only that, but--goddamit!--their examples demand attention RIGHT NOW, MAN! Irony-overload, political correctness, by-the-numbers post-grunge post-techno post-rap-metal post-gangsta post-inspiring genre slavery, corporate co-opt, and militant know-nothing care-nothing shiny happy noise-making has reduced The Rawk to a fucking SUV commercial (no, I know--not a recent development but a gradual pathetic collapse). Once upon a time, folks....
Bellowing, cathartic (for both the band’s singers AND the listener) vocals, speaker-shredding guitar (“Rumble” x 1000!), surprisingly stirring melodies, zero pretension--these were the hallmark qualities of Minneapolis’ Husker Du. Whether the target of their onslaught was personal (“Pink Turns to Blue,” “Sorry Somehow,” “The Girl Who Lived on Heaven Hill,” “Makes No Sense at All”) or political (“Turn on the News,” “Real World,” “Folklore,” “Divide and Conquer”), the naked noise and emotion of Bob Mould, Grant Hart, and Greg Norton’s music could punch a hole through the thickest clouds--and clouds could get pretty thick in the ‘80s (no thicker than our present ones, however). Direct assault; no irony or pussy-footing or obliqueness. Plus a perpetual challenge to keep your Can’t tell you how many times since I first heard Mould’s guitar spraying stone-cutting sparks out of a Fayetteville, Arkansas college dive’s speakers on a rainy day that I’ve returned to that assault to bleed the rage and confusion out of my veins at the end of a futile day. Needle hits groove, couple of pops, POW!!!!!! It’s the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High,” strangled into a fuzz-packed, barely coherent, screaming-bloody-murder full-on PURGE, maybe the greatest ‘60s cover of all-time, surely the greatest rant of all-time. Run that through your nervous system a time or two and you’ll be ready to fight again. And brothers and sisters, today we gotta be ready to fight again every day ‘round here. And some of you better learn how to sound a call to arms, ‘cause we can’t just be looking back all the time.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat, though, and, if the Huskers couldn’t blast your cobs out, the Replacements could at least help you laugh ‘em away (or drink ‘em dizzy). Show me one band today that’s reckless. Just one. That totally alive feeling you get when you realize that the dude who’s driving the oil-burner you’re riding in has a but a fingernail on the wheel, not to mention a whiskey and coke between his legs that’s sloshing into his lap (we’re so politically correct today you’ll probably think that’s a morally irresponsible metaphor)....what band today can just stick it to you? To further milk vehicular comparisons, fucked-up street punks fighting for the wheel of the brakeless screaming ambulance they just jacked: that was the Replacements at their best. “Takin’ a Ride,” “I Hate Music,” “White and Lazy,” “My Favorite Thing,” “Hold My Life,” “Bastards of Young” all communicate the necessity of forfeiting control (at the least most of it) to a properly-lived life. Shit, yeah, there’s danger involved; Johnny did die, just like they sang, and so did Bob Stinson, their knee-walking-sloshed guitarist. But danger’s what we’re most afraid of right now, and it’s one of the prime spices of life (in fact, it may be the way out of our epidemic doldrums)! One example of this pathetic reality is the very man who fronted the ‘Mats, Paul Westerberg, who now appears content to be a pretty-boy cynic recycling the same minor chords into the same tired laments. No need to start drinking again, but Jesus! Try something new and scary, buddy! And when’s the last time you and your friends played the same record over and over and over and over during the course of a few days, ‘til you knew every lyric, every vocal nuance, every instrumental break? The Replacements delivered three of those in a row, Let It Be (‘84), Tim (‘85), and Pleased to Meet Me (‘87), perhaps the greatest string of consecutive “soul of rock and roll” releases since the Stones’ heyday. Who today can brag such a steady flow of wisdom and holy foolishness? Such a natural understanding of and feel for...The Rawk? Who?
Finally, with conformity running rampant in the industry and nary a big shot beyond Rage and Earle and Mos Def (and are they really big shots?) giving two shits about the disgrace We have become, our whole danged congregation could do a WHOLE heckuva lot worse than to reinvestigate the work of a SoCal trio who merely broke every rule of rock song structure and length while becoming (almost from their git-go, which was roughly the same as Reagan’s) rock and roll’s best political band while not letting their absolutely monstrous musical chops keep them from making punk rock....the Minutemen! The most liberating musical moment of my life may have come when a buddy spun their “Punch Line” EP for me while we were antsily awaiting a road trip to Dallas to see the Clash for the first time (Fort Smith, ‘82). Hard-charging rhythm ‘n’ lead guitar, popping, bucking-bronc bass, drumming straight from Beefheart’s avant-jazz woodshed, hollered vocals....and before I could take in the shock of the first song being over (51 seconds!), the second was already halfway downfield! I was already a punk rock convert, already had some free jazz under my belt, had developed a fledgling political sensibility (with some knowledge of how we were getting dicked by the “Great Communicator”), and dug modern poetry quite a bit, but I’d never dreamed it could all be synthesized by three regular guys from San Pedro. By the time my friend had flipped the record and the title song’s line “...when they found the body of General George Armstrong Custer/general, patriot, and Indian fighter/...he died with shit in his pants” had shattered my cranium, it was clear: this was the direction we (the seeds that have grown into The First Church and its brother-site, The Rawk) had to go! Through three more EPs, a jam-packed (and seldom wasteful) double-album, and a final LP which boldly struck out into even more surprising directions, we watched flabbergasted as Watt, Boon, and Hurley wrote sharper, clearer songs (45 on the double set!) that continued to challenge Reagan and Amerika on their own turf without being boring or pretentious, learned to play even more tightly and adventurously, fucked around with melody and extended song length and acoustic instruments and didn’t get burned, stayed true to the essence of rock and roll while bending and breaking its rules, even wrote the ultimate “rock and roll changed my life” song (“History Lesson, Part 2”). Just pocket-tee and jeans-wearin’ regular guys like us (all three of these bands knocked down the fashion wall between fan and “rock star”), working day jobs but landing direct hits on the Enemy Within: “Little Man With a Gun in His Hand,” “Split Red,” “Dream Told By Moto,” “Vietnam,” “West Germany,” “This Ain’t No Picnic,” “The Cheerleaders,” “Big Stick,” “Courage.” A five-year rocket-like ascent...that just as quickly was over when guitarist/writer/bellower/force of nature D. Boon was snuffed out in an accident on the highway. Ain’t nobody picked up the baton that was left rolling across the pavement. If not now--when?
Do what you have to do to keep the spirit of these bands alive, not only in your memory and ear, but in active reality. I truly believe it’s one way out of a bind that’s really not much more than a big, wet paper bag. Nostalgia? Not hardly.
Just a history lesson we’ve been skipping out on.
Selected Discography for the Impossibly Benighted
Husker Du
Everything Falls Apart (Reflex EP)
Metal Circus (SST EP)
Zen Arcade (SST)*
“Eight Miles High” (SST 45)
New Day Rising (SST)
Candy Apply Grey (Warner Brothers)
The Living End (Warner Brothers)
*”Like a Rolling Stone,” fleshed out into a concept album!
Replacements
Sorry Ma Forgot to Take Out the Trash (Twin/Tone)
The Replacements Stink (Twin/Tone EP)
Let It Be (Twin/Tone)
Tim (Sire)
Pleased to Meet Me (Sire)
Minutemen
Post-Mersch, Volumes 1 and 2 (SST)
Double Nickels on the Dime (SST)
Three-Way Tie (for Last) (SST)
#3: Elvis Lessons
Ahhh, it’s the holiday season once again, and, if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool rock and roller, you can’t think of Capitalistmas without also thinking of The King. Of course, I ain’t talking about The Savior (if he did come back, and particularly right now, as the Max Von Sydow character in Hannah and Her Sisters puts it, “he’d never stop throwing up”). I’m talking about The Elvis. This is the First Church of Rock and Roll, after all. And since everybody’s either deaf to or bored with ol’ JC’s message anyway, it’s time we took a brief but hard look at Presley’s Word.
First of all, the man who unchained white America’s libido and helped pull the corncobs out of at least half its collective asses was po’. Bare-footed, overall-wearin’, lard sandwich-eatin’ po’. He was born in a two-room shotgun shack, and lived in the PJs when he moved to Memphis. Because the world was a little more open, because a guy could just walk into a record company studio and make a recording that the company head would actually listen to, because regional music still existed, because democracy (the limited pre-civil rights movement version, true) was still a valued and practiced concept, the po’ boy changed the world. Were Elvis born as impoverished today as he was in ‘35, he’d be doomed. Don’t believe me? Name a REAL poor kid who’s grown up to REALLY fuck with our program lately. I’m waiting. There’s a war on the poor, has been for damn near a quarter century, and it’s a been a rout thus far.
Secondly, Elvis was a true American ‘cause he dug it all. Dean Martin. Bill Monroe. Mario Lanza. Roy Hamilton. Bob Wills. Big Boy Crudup. The Statesmen. Jackie Wilson. Chuck Berry. Sex. Piety. Irreverence. Humility. Rebellion. Tradition. Dug it all, embraced it all, drank it all up, and exhaled it in a titanic, omniverous roar. And I’m not just talking about cultural acceptance; we’re talking love here. That love created music that, maybe better than anyone else’s, still shows us what we could be if we really gave a shit about anyone else, if the American Dream of the Commonwealth really mattered to us.
The closer you look at EP, the more metaphors for American possibility leap out and bite you in the ass. Unfortunately, darker metaphors are just as prevalent and unavoidable. What happened to him? Scared and half-believing in his own power, he surrounded himself with sycophantic homeboys to keep him comfortable (they say the man read constantly, but he shoulda consulted Miss Emily Dickinson: “In Insecurity to lie/Is Joy’s ensuring quality”). What they actually kept him was infantile, disconnected from everything that originally gave him power, sheltered from seriously constructive criticism, discouraged from establishing new paradigms, and, more importantly, protected from several much-needed kicks in the ass. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? What happened to him is happening to us. We avidly brick up our own lives (allowing entry only to the immediately familiar), avoid introspection like the plague, kid ourselves that we have nothing left to learn once we hit 25 or so, and deny the fact that we have to constantly earn our freedom from dread. Meanwhile, what we think is freedom mutates into a very pernicious dread of its own.
What of the Colonel? This is way too simplistic, perhaps, but if Elvis ‘54-’56 still represents what we could be (if you’re thinking I’m too pessimistic, notice I’m not in the subjunctive mood), then Parker the Carny Barker represents those forces that tap that potential for baser short-term goals: in short, filthy lucre, expressly not for being distributed equally, or with an eye towards aesthetic growth and the health of posterity. The Memphis Mafia? The fans that packed ‘em in even when Presley was splittin’ his drawers on stage and slurring his words? That’s us, Daddy-O, apparently unconcerned that, by demanding that something stay right where it is, it ends up nowhere. Is that really where we want to be?
Do me a favor. Sometime this holiday season, hit the local video store and rent Elvis’ ‘68 Comeback Special (there’s an alternate version, with no cheesy set-pieces--I kinda like those, tho’--called Elvis: One Night With You). Before your very eyes, The King will mount his last stand before a slowwwwwwwww death, in a driven performance that must have convinced even hardcore doubters that he was back from the dead for good--that he was Forever. With sweat pouring down his obscenely beautiful face, his black leather shining, his (electric!) guitar drawing blood, his socially conscious (and utterly believable) finale awakening feelings you may have forgotten, and his shattering, tearing vocals setting you free 32 years after the fact, he is absolutely unbeatable.
He is us...if we want it.
#4: The Boogie Man
Is Eminem good for your child?
Hell, lady, right now America isn’t good for your child. Ain’t no place you or they can turn, either. Priest has his hand in the till or his cock hidden in a minor’s cave, and God’s away on business (like your dad used to be). Public schools can’t find anyone decent to teach, so they hire anybody; including termite teams of “Christian” moles, to release poison into its intellectual bloodstreams. Athletes may exemplify grace and beauty under pressure and make truckloads of dough, but goddam are they null ‘n’ dull outside the arena. Movies stunt your growth, even most of the indies. Literature? Fuck that when you’ve got Dreamcast, and if you don’t, you ain’t gonna understand it anyway. Political leaders? Take a good long look at and listen to who’s gonna be running things, excuse me, allowing Moloch to run things, and if you don’t puke immediately afterwards, sorry, you’re a pod, a borg, a humanoid. Other people? Are you kidding?
Which brings us to music. After lounging around watching yards and yards of butt in my face, Jennifer Lopez’s striptease act (puts Pariah Scarey to shame, and that harlot’s stone fucking shameless, folks), “big pimpin’” (that verb was making me wince when Too Short was a player--as opposed to played), and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ obnoxious minstrelsy (boneheads never have copped to the secret of funk--Satchmo knew it, invented it, maybe...in the Roaring Twenties--which is relaxation in the midst of “that mess,” but what do I know: they’re rock gods), I concluded that, if I had a crumbsnatcher myself, the last thing I would do is turn her loose in a music store.
Then I came face to face with Big Em’s “Stan,” and, despite the unintentionally comic Shangri-Las ending, thought twice. Nothing like some intelligence to wake you out of a nap in the seductively rocking hammock of the Matrix. On heavy rotation, the song cuts to the heart of star-fan and (the silent part) star-critic relationships, comments on American youth’s desperate search for a REAL voice, and answers all the bullshit being slung his way. In fact, the whole CD is the boldest answer record in the history of rawk ‘n’ roll, loud enough, mean enough, funny enough, witty enough, angry enough to take on the whole wide world.
Misogynist? Maybe, but he has precisely two specific targets, his ma and his mate, who couldn’t exactly be posited as Womankind. There’s other women in the grooves of both records who get different treatment. And the chicks I know dig him anyway. Homophobic? That one can’t be argued away, though nobody gave a shit about hip-hop queer bashing until a white guy was the perp (don’t know what that means, really, or maybe I don’t want to think about it). The boy’s still a boy, hanging around with a lot of other boys while performing in a very macho genre (where white acolytes have often been equated with “faggotry”) in front of a lot of curious people. Not that it makes me feel any better, but it does make some sense, and more screwed-up souls than he have grown out of it (even the now-saintly Beastie Boys referred to wiffle-bat sodomy and executing AIDs victims on Licensed to Ill). And it is provoking discussion.
The thing is, anybody unclear about whether Eminem’s art is social platform or scabrous, tight-ass-baiting comedy hasn’t listened to the stuff. If they don’t think kiddos know he’s kidding, they may be kidding themselves about what kiddos know/sense these days. Test scores might have been better in the ‘50s--might have been--but today’s tests can’t begin to test students’ intelligence about substantial stuff that just doesn’t get dealt with by Mr. Hand. They’re leagues more sophisticated about the world (and not just their world) than kids were even twenty years ago, and lots of ‘em are more sophisticated than their own parents.
Eminem is their clown prince, waving a complete arsenal of red flags in front of the bulls out to stomp anything that’s alive and unwilling to deny what we all know is the truth: that the real criminals, the real reprobates, even the real murderers are fully ensconced in the temple. His completely uncensored outpourings--vile though some of it is, and much of that is mitigated by his persistent copping to being fucked up--are the antithesis of the current American paradigm established by the powers that be: the Damn Liar. His manic verbal wit and persona-play remind me of a young Dylan, whose own younger fans also understood him a helluva lot better than the guardians of culture. As far as the intolerance goes, here’s hoping next time around that, instead of just vaguely admitting his own confusion, he dares to specifically satirize his own neuroses. Like maybe the homophobia is rooted in a night of wildin’ where, in the midst of a three-way, his pecker touched another b-boy’s, and...it wasn’t unpleasant.
Good for your child? Really not for most pre-pubes and younger, folks, but as for the rest...it beats Barbie and the Kens.
#5: Me 'n' Bascom Down by the Schoolyard
Disconsolate at the nation/world's state of affairs, I go where I always go: to the sacred well of undefeatable music, in this case, the old tune "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground." Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a North Carolinian teacher, salesman, musician, and folklorist, picked this song up at the turn of the century. Blind Willie Johnson also did one helluva job on it.
"I wish I was a mole in the ground...."
...I'd fucking root up this shit that just won't move: the money boys, the so-called Christians, the nostalgia crew, the sycophants. It's too damn big, it's just blatantly having its way with anything that's got any soul, hoisting it up and sucking out its essence and shitting it out (an oily, nonbiodegradable, foul shit), never to be born again.
"Like a mole in the ground, I'd root that mountain down..."
...every temple ensconced with thieves, every church sheltering bigots, liars, hypocrites, hate-mongers, materialists, isolationists, know-nothings, every school promoting anti-history, anti-art, anti-democracy, anti-science, anti-math--shuddering at their foundations. I'd shake 'em out like dust off a rug. If I was a mole in the ground....
"A railroad man/He'll kill you if he can/And drink up your blood like wine..."
...We keep putting them in power: how long must we watch them twist this Freedomland into a plutocracy? Pluto...god of death. Pluto...farthest planet from the sun. You want signs? Those are signs! First to get their veins opened: the poor, the crippled, the ignorant, women, children, foreigners. These are Stealth-Nazis, who'd settle for complete powerlessness instead of complete obliteration. We clap and bleed, bleed all over our own walls. Without resistance, ultimate evil evolves.
"I wish I was a lizard in the spring...."
Damn hungry for rebirth, for sun, for a clean breeze, for explosions of color, for fresh ideas, for community, for ACTIVITY. Crawling out of the mere cold, though, into an ice storm. Opportunities closed off, energy withheld, tainted air, the only hues grey (stone, steel, "God"'s beard, old white men's hair) and green (MONEY!), thought simply dead, neighbors paranoid and divided, everyone sitting on their asses watching their own disempowerment. In the words of Peggy Lee and Los Lobos, is this all there is? I THINK NOT!
"I wish I was a mole in the ground...."
Fuck wishing. Wishing won't make it so. Time to take Polystyrene's hand...let's submerge! Undermine everything. Because "It" is becoming everything. It is time to fight, dirty if necessary, with guts and heart and soul and brains at all times.
GOD DON'T KNOW HOW LUCKY HE IS...
#6: Say a Prayer for the Geek
Even if this is a church and I am the reverend, I ain’t much for prayin’. I like to think of myself being in more of the “doin’” category, and when I need sustenance, instead of kneeling, I look inside (where God occasionally lurks). Lately, though, there’s lots of strange things happening that’re making my heart and knees weak, many of them things which I can’t DO anything about. One of them is the news that Joey Ramone is dead.
Joey extended the basic belief--almost forgotten now, it seems--that anybody can be a rock and roll hero. Tall and gangly, pale and misshapen, with glasses, fucked-up choppers, and a Queens-speak that sounded like someone gargling a bag of goldfish, he grabbed the microphone like he was caught in a cyclone and ruled the stage. Sometimes hard to follow conversationally, when he sang--and of course in true demotic rock fashion he really “couldn’t sing”--he communicated to his particular audience as clearly as any front man ever has. “Gabba gabba/We accept you, we accept you/ONE OF US!” or “I’m just a guy who likes to dress punk” or “My soul/Has been psychedicized” or “She had to get away!” or “Now I guess I’ll have to tell ‘em/That I got no cerebellum” or “I wish that time would go by fast/But somehow they manage to make it last”: Joey sang from behind the squinting, straining eyes of the geek who didn’t see anything but the promise of rock and roll worth believing in, or that seemed to believe in him.
It wasn’t the blue-collar factory rat, or the switchblade-wielding hood, or the squeaky-clean teen, or the privileged and clever middle-class white boy, or the boy from the wrong side of the tracks who wanted to be black that he sung to or about--it was the quirky little dweeb that was constantly getting the shit kicked out of him, but who, if you quit breaking his ribs, would reveal to you all kindsa funny and arcane info and viewpoints. Plenty of those geeks are out there now--probably more since Reagan started cornholing the underclass in ‘80s, maybe you’re one of ‘em--but I’m not sure who’s singing to them. Eminem? Kid Rock? But you see what I mean. There’s something to be said for charity, and I don’t mean the financial kind.
Only a geek (and his buddies) would postulate a punk rock that included not only the Beach Boys but Herman’s Hermits and the 1910 Fruitgum Company. Only a geek would equate triumph in both love and music to fascism--that’s what kind of fantasies ass-kickings lead to. Only a geek would sing “Teenage Lobotomy,” “I Wanna Be Sedated,” and “I Wanna Be Well” as if they were anthems of self-actualization. Only a geek would threaten that he would “in a moment of passion/Get the glory like Charles Manson.” And they thought it was a joke. The folks at Columbine wouldn’t get it.
And just as geeks have the most fucked-up and funny ideas--What have they to lose? Another front tooth?--they also are often the ones to say what needs to be said but what everyone else is barely brave enough to think. Remember the explosion of Too Tough To Die and “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg”? The geek had won a hard-fought recognition, only to be trapped by his persona (“Oh...another Ramones album.”), and is suddenly reborn as the kid standing up to a tank. Who else called Reagan on his reverent visit to the Nazi cemetery? Or on much of anything else (Minutemen excluded)?
I know what you’re saying: “You’re talking about Dee Dee and Johnny and Tommy as much as Joey.” Yeah, well, Joey made me believe it. Joey was the lightning rod. The guy in front is the one takes the anti-geek heat. Dee Dee or Johnny or Tommy could never have put across those lines quoted above with anything other than a generic rebel yell. It was that frightened give in Joey’s voice that said “I’m with you” to the geek in all of us.
So tonight, even if you’re the most hardened atheist alive, totally convinced that the rockaroll world (and the bigger one it’s banging around in like a pinball) is God-forsaken...say a prayer for the geek. The Rev’ll be joining you on his knees, that’s for sure.
#7: Yellow Brick Road Trips
Supposedly, it's the journey, not the destination, that truly matters in life's grand design. For the most part, I've found that to be true. I've seen many comrades contract the Elvis Virus, where you shake and hustle and holler and shift into fifth just to catch up to that Gatsbian green light, then shit twice and die when you see, feel, and taste what you thought you wanted. But, while in pursuit of my degree in rock and roll road scholarship in and after college, I never failed to find the sweetest nectar at the end of the road, not while the wheels were turning. The actual trips were plenty memorable, and I'm sure any visitor to this site will recognize the details: endless cheap beers and butts, drugs (hell, we'd crush up Vivarin and snort it), rock and roll blasting from the speakers, jokes, tall tales, and arguments. However, these treasures could never compare to what happened when we got where we were going, or, on occasion, when we got back. Here's a short, fond history of two rockin' road trips I have known.
Part 1: Pine Bluff, Arkansas, '81--"The Law Won, but So What?"
The first road trip I ever took was a warm-up for a lip-synch contest two of the writers for this page and I had entered. We figured that a five-hour drunken dash through the night to a shit-kicking interface with Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Paycheck in one of the worst hell-holes in the Arkansas landscape was perfect Method-acting preparation for a sure triumph at noon the next day (we were doing the Clash doing "I Fought the Law").
The trip started inauspiciously, with Manthon emitting some of the foulest shrimp gas ever smelt by human nostrils before we even got out of Fayetteville, a blast that lingered for hours in Kenny's Monte Carlo. However, spilt beer and clouds of smoke soon overwhelmed that stench, and before we knew it, we were shoulder to shoulder with other hellraisers we were too stupid to realize would have loved to kick our asses. We were also too stupid to realize Johnny Paycheck was worth our attention--don't remember shit and wish I did--and stagehands had to help "The Killer" to and from the pianner. Dressed in a white leisure suit, he underwhelmed; we didn't know he'd just gotten out of a hospital where one doctor pronounced him a certain corpse and another warned him to stay off the road for two years at least.
On the way back, I was an asshole and not only refused to drive--me had a headache--but couldn't find decent music to keep the other two awake (the Heads' Remain in Light??). Finally, Johnny Rotten scandalizing "Johnny B. Goode" powered us home, and at 3 in the morning, even a typical collegiate fool would have hit the sack. Not us. With some Schaefer's still in the lil' frig, we set about composing as many songs as we could think of combining the Bo Diddley "shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits" riff with oral sexcapades. None of us could play at the time, but Manthon bloodied his knuckles playing a tennis racket with a nickel, and Kenny and I just yelled! Sounds like dicking around, I know, but it felt like we were a room away from the Grail.
By the time we'd exhausted the rhyming possibilities for the line "sucking on a ding-dong" (yes, we'd listened to White Light/White Heat way too much), it was 11 o'clock, and the victory for which the Pine Bluff trip and its coda had prepared us was imminent. We crushed up a few more Vivarins, shotgunned a couple of Schaefer's apiece, boarded the recently deflowered Monte Carlo, and gunned it for White Dog Records, where the showdown was to take place.
Drunk, sweaty, smelly, and glowering in that moon-walking sleepless zone, we scraped ourselves out of the car, knifed through the "crowd" with j.d. attitude, and got ready to rock. We were the Clash (what we thought they were, anyway), and the competition were the Beach Boys (???), AC/Delco (an AC/DC "tribute"????), and the Go-Gos (we dug the chicks, liked the music, but they had to pay). How could we lose?
We did, despite delivering as intense a performance as a lip synch can be while blasting an actual Applause-O-Meter off the scale. To the fucking Beach Boys. But, from that road-trip-born point onwards, we were brother rebels and born-to-losing winners, and--guess what?--here we fucking are in cyberspace almost twenty years later, still faking it with passion 'cause we can't really "do it" for real, still getting our asses recreased by the likes of Addicted to Noise and Perfect Sound Forever on the internet "hit" parade, but still living it more fully than those pencil-necks can imagine. I know a couple of those claims sound contradictory, but they wouldn't be rock and roll if they didn't, and besides, it's all about being able to re-invent yourself, even in your late thirties. And that can keep you from becoming a ‘borg.
Part 2: Shreveport, Louisiana--The Louisiana Joy Ride
If the Pine Bluff road-trip applied the cement that held us together as rock-lifers, Shreveport '87 tested the strength of the bond, and, most importantly, left us with the confidence of faith. On that occasion, Manthon and I loaded down my rod with a case of beer and two boxes of tapes, and cut a swath from southern Missouri down through the Boston Mountains of northern and mid-Arkansas to Ruston, Louisiana, home to then-retail king Kenny. We found him glad to see us, but suffering from a pernicious case of the K-Mart blues.
Several hours, four boxes of Popeye's Chicken, a couple of six packs, one bottle of whiskey, two fine ladies of KMart persuasion (fraternizing with fellow employees--for shame!), a shitload of loud rock and roll, a strange homoerotic Mekons video, a bizarre Harry Shearer impression of Laurie Anderson hawking tampons, and a bag of Zapps Cajun Craw Tators later, the blues were running for shelter, and I was wailing Sonny Boy Williamson riffs on Kenny's harmonica though I'd never played before (and would never "play" again). I myself wondered later whether it was just inebriation playing tricks on my ears, but to this day, Manthon and Kenny swear I made Mick's harp on "Stop Breaking Down" sound like John's on "Love Me Do." We didn't actually ever hit the hay; we just passed out in action: Kenny awakened clutching the empty chip bag, orange Craw Tator dust encrusting his lips and the corners of his mouth; Mark in a chair with the guitar and the empty whiskey bottle in his lap; I on my stomach on the floor, head resting on a beer-soaked throw pillow, with the Hoehner still in my fist. The Girls of Retail had apparently fled, undoubtedly spooked by the rampaging spirit of road-ready rock and roll camaraderie, their soft charms no match for our version Dee Dee's "1,2,3,4...," David Jo's "C'mon, boys," and Rob Tyner's "Kick out the jams, muthafuckahs!" all spit-sealed together. And this was only the wake-up for the second leg of our trip.
After a big fucking Coke, a cigarette, and a couple of aspirin apiece, we were heading to the home of The Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport, where we were hoping to see something little break wide open and big. Instead of the Elvis, Hank, or George Jones of yore, the musicians in question were the then-unknown (damn near now, too) Flat Duo Jets, BBQ Killers, and Killkenny Kats, on a postpunk package tour straight outta Athens, Georgia. They were playing a punk club downtown, and we were sure we were gonna see the future of rock and roll unfold before our bloodshot eyes.
We should have known some Rock and Roll Ghost had us hanging from its callused fingertips from the minute we walked into a Shreveport pizza joint to get some fuel: Yoko Ono's "Kiss Kiss Kiss" was blasting from the jukebox. Since this was a fucking Godfather's, we were severely rattled, but figured somebody had accidentally played the b-side to "Just Like Starting Over," and we settled down to order some pitchers and pizza ... but the hits from that hectoring Hecate kept right on coming. None of us were card-carrying Yokophobes--the gifts she had bestowed upon the B-52s and XRay Spex (not to mention John) exalted her in our hearts and minds, actually. However, it quickly became apparent that we were the only diners in the restaurant and the employees on hand appeared intensely loyal to the Flock of 100 Haircuts, and, combined with the dislocation caused by lingering hangovers, liberal doses of hair of the dog, and being in a strange city, these realizations began to jangle our nerves: whose dimes set this wailing in motion? Or were we receiving warning transmissions from the Devils soul?
Show time. Smoky downtown club. Kenny and Mark still hoisting beer. I feel like a rhinoceros on Wild Kingdom, shot in the ass by Stan and one of his damned darts as Marlin Perkins cheers him on from the copter: Slow, slower, then face pressed against the bar top. The only things that keep me awake are the need to, as the South Park kids say, "drop some kids off at the pool," and my two comrades' derisive laughter. I rise. Trudge to the head. A line of 5 people. My turn comes. Confronting a sight that would have made G. G. Allin puke, I turn away in disgust, walk through the bar, past my comrades, past Killkenny Kats playing shit I could tell even in my pickled state I didn't want to hear anyway, out the door, down the street ... looking for any dark place to do my business.
Fully on auto-pilot, I shuffle into a multi-level parking garage. No nook or cranny looks dark enough for my foul deed. I am approaching Def Con 2. I come upon the open-air final level, walk to the edge, see the darkened building next door, a story below and about a across. It calls my name, gentle as Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia.
I jump.
Standing on the next-door roof, the jump having sobered me miraculously, I realize to my dismay there will be no jumping back up. Getting my priorities straight, I divest myself of excess waste and walk to a ladder leading to the next story of the split-level building. Reaching the lower roof and walking to the back of the building, I can see that a jump of over 25 feet to the alley below is my only way back to the bar.
Not being Jackie Chan, I wheel in growing panic, and notice a door in the back of the top level, just to the right of the ladder I'd just descended. I race to it and turn the knob, without an ounce of real hope. A click, and the door opens. I step into a hallway. A whooping sound from within welcomes me. I am now fully sober. I dart outside. A whooping sound from without welcomes me back. I consider the options: 1) wait for the cops to come and get me down and explain to them that I'd just gotten on to the roof to take a shit, or 2) jump.
Back on the edge--which I should mention lacks anything serious from which to hang and drop--I hear Yoko's voice again: "Jump, Magnum, jump!" (Maybe I wasn't completely sober after all). I hurtle off into nothingness, and actually hit the alley in a roll. On my feet without any apparent injuries, I thank Elvis that I hadn't insulted Yoko back at Godfather's, and head out of the alley.
I hear the police sirens as I exit the alley. I see three cherry-tops screech around the corner... as I casually slip back into the bar.
Feeling like D. B. Fucking Cooper, I combed the bar looking for Mark and Kenny, the BBQ Killers blasting some skronky noise behind me. I found them in roughly the same condition I was in when I'd left them. Fuck! I had a story to end all stories to pour in their ears and they were comatose! I spent the next hour or so pogoing my adrenaline away to the Killers and Flat Duo Jets, drinking beer like it was ambrosia, and sweating it right back out. It wasn't the rock and roll future, but it was more than good enough for the present.
Out in the cool air after the show, rejoined by my grog-sodden brothers, we sparred with the Killers' punky bitch of a lead singer (really, the only talent of the evening that registered with me...don't think she ever went anywhere, though) over the Replacements, who, she muttered, were "fucking sell-outs"(sacrilege in our church), and the aforementioned and since-departed G. G. Allin, who, according to her, was "better than Iggy" (very serious sacrilege--like matricide) because he shat on her on stage once. She was the sell-out in this case, I pointed out, because she was securely tucked away inside of plastic bag--that ghost-muse Yoko fucking Ono again!--at point of impact, and I informed her I did my shitting off bank rooftops, which stopped conversation for a second. It's in moments like these when anybodies like us realize we can be somebodies in the rockaroll world. It's wide open to any dim-witted smart-ass with something interesting to spew.
We covered the first half of our drive back to Ruston in satisfied, stunned silence, absorbing even more skronk from the stereo. That hunger can't be stilled, can it? Suddenly, Kenny blurted, "Hey, Phil--where the fuck did you disappear to?"
"You're not gonna believe this, but...."
Since the lessons learned from the Ruston/Shreveport journey, the three of us have always believed that anytime we (or any two of us) get together, some magic rock and roll strangeness is promised us, and that that belief--and especially the music, from whatever source (a car stereo, an incomprehensible harmonica, a tennis racket and a nickel, a haunted jukebox)--is all the power needed to coax deliverance. And we hope we can deliver some promises of our own here at The First Church.
Sermon #8: A Word for Our Father
Any time is a good time to break out some Chuck Berry (The Great 28 is handy, dandy, and cheap). And, by God, he’s the Daddy if anybody is. Seems to me that his loud, ringing, back-talking, gauntlet-dropping guitar, his furious beat, and his goddam crystal clear vision of a changing America mark the point at which rhythm and blues, rockabilly, blues, and country all become other things. Think about it: you can call Elvis by a couple of those names, Little Richard one and Bo Diddley maybe two--but you can’t call Chuck ANY of ‘em. He is rock and roll. Plain and simple. The guitar and the beat and the rhythm of the words rocked, and Johnnie Johnson (who’s suing the boss as I wrote) or Lafayette Leake laid a rolling sea of keys beneath it all.
That guitar. Like I said, loud. Still. Has there ever been a six-string intro more eye-opening than the barely-harnessed explosion of “Maybelline”? It’s so fat and sprawling it almost doesn’t sound like a guitar. Then there’s the metallic scat-line which leads off “Johnny B. Goode.” Supposedly Chuck transposed it from one of Johnnie J’s favorite licks, but Johnnie stole it from a horn riff Mary Lou Williams wrote for Andy Kirk’s 12 Clouds of Joy big band in the late ‘30s, so who gives a shit? Rock and roll--and pretty much any great creative achievement--is inspired thievery anyhow. He got other licks from Carl Hogan in Louis Jordan’s Tympani 5 and from T-Bone Walker, so let’s just say Chuck has genius taste and leave it at that. Beyond the irresistible intros, there’s the solos (the one on “Too Much Monkey Business” is almost punk rock: a spark shower), the rhythm (“Memphis,” “Around and Around,” and “Carol” are Tungsten-tough architectural blue prints for 75% of future rock and roll songs), and, best of all, the fills, in call-and-response tandem with his vocals, like a buddy backing him up in a knife fight. Even if he does play like shit damn near every night in the present, he had command of the whole vocabulary of guit-noise. Can you name an axe-slinger today who’s a quadruple threat: lead-in, rhythm, solo, and fills? I’m waiting.
Then there’s the lyrics, always delivered with a hustler’s cool, a shaman’s confidence, and a priest’s compassion. As has been said before, they’ve seldom, if ever, been topped. He was equally confortable with futuristic fantasy (the exquisite Airmobile of “You Can’t Catch Me,” destined, I am sure, to one day be reality), explicit protest (“Too Much Monkey Business”), subtle protest (“Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”), cultural prophecy (“Roll Over, Beethoven”), explicit lust (“Little Queenie”), subtle lust (“Nadine,” or “Reelin’ and Rockin’”), state-of-the music pronunciamentos (“Rock and Roll Music”), patriotic anthems (“Back in the U.S.A.”), vehicular celebration--a speciality, of course--(“Maybelline,” “No Money Down,” “Jaguar and Thunderbird,” the underrated “Dear Dad), or simple, popular rock and roll songs (“Carol”).
But his meat and potatoes was writing about the everyday lives of the kids who were buying his records. It was coldly calculated; he boasts in his autobiography that he deliberately composed with the popular (and predominantly white) market in mind, a sin for which he’d be castigated by the Sentinels of True Rawk today. If he hadn’t aimed thataway, though, we’d have been deprived of the ultimate rock and roll lexicon, dipped into by everybody from Dylan to Thunders since. From his audience’s innate wisdom (“Almost Grown,” “You Never Can Tell”), desire for rebellion (“School Days”), potentially--hell, literally--liberating hero-worship (“Sweet Little Sixteen”), upward-and-onward conquest of boredom (“No Particular Place to Go”) and dreams of having it all (“Johnny B. Goode”), he fucking nailed it. Motivated to observe the youthful new crowd closely by a yen for big bucks, he succeeded in exhilarating fashion.
And, amazingly, the works he created weren’t just temporal in nature. “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” may be more true today than it was then; I think of that song every time a white 6th grader raves to me about Ja Rule or the Wu or D’Angelo. The key line of “Johnny B. Goode” still defines pop dreams: “Maybe some day your name will be in lights,” with its hint of improbable success. And though Mad Cow Disease has put a damper on many an American’s beef jones, we’re still the place “where hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day”--and damned proud of it. “Too Much Monkey Business” is itching for an iconoclastic traditionalist’s revision; Chuck saw the deluge of trivia coming, but he didn’t realize how deep we’d be swimming in the shit of minutiae some 40 years later. OK, we ain’t got no Airmobile yet--but there’s still time.
This summer’s been doing a number on the Old Reverend so far. Haven’t heard a new thing with much vision, verve, or vivacity for months. So maybe it’s time to go to the wellspring. Mark Twain once wrote something to the effect that, hey, when I was fourteen, I thought my dad was the stupidest man on the planet, but when I turned 21, I couldn’t believe how much he’d learned in seven years. We’re way past that point, you know? So you could do worse tonight than to commune with the magic songs of Daddy Rolling Stone.
After all, he da man. The rest of us are just visiting.
Sermon #9: What The Church Is, and Why
It may have struck those of you who’ve visited the Church that a) we’ve got a loose definition of rock and roll, and b) we put a pretty strong emphasis on the past versus the present. Why IS that?
Well, first of all, we’re of the belief that the spirit of rock and roll predated Elvis, Wynonie Harris, Bob Wills, even Louis Armstrong. We think it’s an impulse toward freedom that’s in the country’s soil. It sure ain’t (nor has rarely ever been) perpetuated by this country’s leadership; hell, the majority of our founding fathers were pro-slavery and anti-democracy (their take: running the zoo from the monkey cage--which is what it’s turned out to be anyhoo). It emanated from people robbed of their culture and forced to invent a new one; from people sick of spiritual, intellectual, and physical regulation; from people who caught the fever of an open land and had to sing it; from people who wished Europe would go to hell; from people who had to find some way to extricate themselves from ankle-deep muck with some serious downward suck, if only in their minds; even from people who didn’t quite get it, but could sure-as-shootin’ feel it (I’m thinking of minstrels here--the granddaddies of rock and roll and every other kind of great music if there are granddaddies to speak of). So, really, we’re about music which either sets out to or unintentionally manages to file away at the chains that bind our hearts to a dying animal (was it Dylan Thomas who scribbled that?). If that friction comes from a Mississippi Sheik fiddle or a White Stripe guitar, it makes less than no difference. If, after drinking in those sounds that couldn’t have been produced anywhere but on our turf, you’ve felt those chains fall away, we feel our Church is your Church, Buster Brown. If that doesn’t sell you, well, in this world of hip enclaves, which are half about being knee-knockin’ scared of the diversity of the unwashed masses, we are foursquare FOR interconnectivity. Face it, we’re goin nowhere with our heads in the sand. At the risk of sounding like Walt Whitman trying to be and love everything, we hear sympathetic frequencies in everything from bluegrass gospel to hip-hop nihilism, and that makes us feel like citizens of the planet, not refugees from the planet. And that’s the way we wanna feel. We hope there’s a germ of that desire in our readers, too.
Secondly, life in America ain’t a goddam rose garden, and one of its worst recent developments (though its axioms have, ironically, produced some eternal works) is that its art products are disposable: “The Replacements are old hat, Daddy-O!” Too often, the result of this epidemic thinking is great treasure troves of liberation songs (if you will) vaporizing and wafting into the Great Unknown. A little musical education would prevent some of this, but kiddos ain’t gonna learn about Dramarama, the Minutemen, Gary Stewart, Howard Tate, Glenn Barber, Roy Brown, Bob Dunn, or Emmett Miller in school. Thus...the First Church. We are dedicated to keeping those giants and their sounds growing before the eyes and twisting through the ears of our readers, even if we draw only one per day. Who gives a shit about the Royal Crescent Mob, or Vernon Oxford, or Percy Mayfield? We do, and we felt a reason to when we punched their numbers on the Church jukebox. We’re just hoping a phrase or a description posted on this site might send you on a quest that’ll result in that beautiful, euphoric feeling of freedom that hollers, “No--this ISN’T all there is. There’s something worth being alive for! Keep your eyes peeled, your ears and heart open, ‘cause it’s a goddam secret cornucopia!” If it gets you one more step forward down the road, then we’ve done our duty.
And, hell, I’ll be frank: it’s a vehicle for yours truly to blab, since it’s damned hard to find anybody in my immediate orbit to split a sixer, crank up some good tunage, bob my head, theorize, exalt, and argue with. I know I’m not alone in that particular kind of bereftness. So...come on in, and let us know what’s rocking you and what’s not. But don’t forget to launch of prayer of gratitude to whomever or whatever’s responsible for the inexhaustible variety of spirited music that’s come out of this dirt. Don’t be proud; drop to your knees if you have to. That’s where I’m headed right now.
Sermon #10: Older Guys
"The older guys really got it all worked out!"
Gram Parsons
Maybe it's just because I'm getting to be an older guy, but with a few notable exceptions, I just don't hear too many young rock and rollers gushing forth smart words. The more I listen, the more they seem to be either lemmings scurrying head down over the cliff after the latest fashion, ostriches with their heads in some traditional sand, or moths flitting heedlessly around a hypnotic chemical flame.
OK, so rock and roll isn't necessarily about wisdom. Some would say sarcastically that "Awopbopaloobopawopbamboom" or "Googa googa googa googa" represent the pinnacle of the trustworthy guidance our music's had to offer; I'd agree, without the sarcasm. When the final account is due, will Iggy or the Clash pass through the gate first? Dylan, or Elvis? The Minutemen, or the Oblivians? George Clinton, or James Brown? Of such things are parlor games made, but your typical dyed-in-the-wool sort tends to opt for the latter in each case. Brutal, instinctual, physical catharsis, dancing rather than thinking one's shackles off, they feel, is the semen-reekin' essence of The Noise.
Well, fuck it, I like some fresh, green grey matter mixed in with the other viscera. There've always seemed to be young sharpsters at work in the biz, from Chuck to Lou to the MC5 to Johnny Rotter to Mike Watt to Boots Riley...well, you get the picture. But look around. It's as if Cobain's suicide warned every greenhorn off significant brow-furrowing. Jeez Louise, even between D. Boon's broken neck and Kurt offing himself, the whole of indie was a big mix-and-match musical Trivial Pursuit game, admittedly with occasional fireworks, but little to add to the store of human sagacity. Like Jason Rockhill of Unitas says, maybe the public schools have failed; but with Rockhill, maybe is an important word. And elsewhere on Unitas' record, he cries out for a young voice, a "Great Communicator" (who decidedly ain't Ronald Reagan), to be his hero and "unite us."
Aside from Rockhill and, uh, uh, hmmmmm, Scott Lucas (?), and maybe two-three guys I'm too insulated to know about, they just aren't out there. In times like these, we do need a hero, not to ape, but to draw forth from us the courage to do what's right, to encourage us that, yeah, we just might be smart enough to untangle this mess. Like Agamemmnon to Nestor, or Oedipus to Tiresius, lately I can only turn to those hoary old souls who've thrown themselves into the line of fire (hope I listen better than those guys did, though). American music's supposed to be a young man's racket, but damned if any whippersnapper's outjuking Dylan or Merle Haggard or George Clinton (you mean you didn't check out '97's Dope Dogs?) or Jon Langford or Boots Riley (surely he's pushing 35 by now) or Von Freeman or Willie. Time and time again lately, their experience has led to music and words of penetrating import the likes of which used to only be deliverable by an 18- to 21-year-old. Maybe it was all a ruse: maybe it was only a young man's music, in the sense that it could shake up your life, while the music itself was young. Maybe a poison has seeped in, via computers, the boob tube, millions of shitty records, seductive advertisements galore, and killed it, and that's why we gotta lean on these oldsters to guide us through, and back.
That's why the sheer mastery of Dylan's sly old SOB act on Love and Theft, in which he either feints and dodges around modern flotsam and jetsam that'd kill most men his age and younger or lets it hit him and laughs at the hole in his chest, sometimes make me sad. He changed a lot of lives in '65 and '66; changed mine in '77, but only 'cause I was burrowing backwards. Never thought in 2001 he'd be out in front--old, and alone.
So I'll leave off with some of Rockhill's words from "The Young Idea vs. Fuzzy Math," because he says it a hell of lot better than I can (and have been): ""Let's hear it from the product of public schools....We need an idea, we need a young one....There's gotta be a tell it like it is crowd/I want to go to that meeting tonight....Cheers to the young idea." And let's hope there's more than just older guys delivering them.
