Stop the world I want to get off (and melt with you)

My friend Kammy gets free VIP tickets to the Mountain Winery in Saratoga through her work, and she recently asked me what I’d like to go see there for my birthday. I took one look at the list of upcoming acts and said, “Whatever is most convenient for you, Kammy.” That’s how I wound up at the top of that mountain at the “Lost 1980s” gig  on the hottest day ever recorded in the Bay Area, with Kammy, her husband, her father, her 11 year old and her 11 year old’s ASL teacher.

The music of the 1980s means a lot to me; it’s probably my most important era, but to the Mountain Winery, the”Lost” 80s doesn’t mean Dumptruck, the ‘mats and Mission of Burma, it means British synth pop and American New Wave. In the course of several hours at the top of that mountain, we saw the Flirts, the Motels, Naked Eyes, Wang Chung, Berlin and Missing Persons – in short, it was like we got jammed inside a radio set to KROQ circa 1983. In my memory, that kind of music – synth pop – didn’t get played all that much on the radio, but maybe I am mis-remembering, since a lot people in that audience acted like Wang Chung was Bob Dylan.

The guy in wang chung. Forget his name. Note dumb guitar.

As for me – I used to be a rock critic and I was completely unable to recognize any of the bands when they came on stage. 1980s new wave seems to be where my memory is going fastest.

Wang Chung was especially puzzling. What songs did they do again? I had to look them up on Wikipedia, and it said it was named for the phrase “yellow bell” in Chinese.

“It says here that Wang Chung means ‘yellow bell’ in Chinese,” I told Kammy, who is Chinese. She and her family consulted with one another for a while. No it doesn’t, was the consensus. 

So much for Wikipedia.

Those bands aren’t exactly worthy of a ton of sentient thought, but the show did give me a chance to reflect on two aspects of the 1980s I hadn’t thought about in a long time, namely, changing music technologies and the wretched “women in  rock” narrative that first reared its ugly head at that time.

Regarding the technology, suffice it to say that the evening was awash with synthesizers, saxophone, and those funnily shaped guitars, and boy do they sound old fashioned now! Sonically, they gave off the same whiff of moth balls that the men’s black peg leg pants and red tennis shows, skinny ties and – in one case – a slender silk scarf did.

Second, women. It was an era when a lot of that kind of music was made by men and sung by women.  Both Dale Bozzio, of Missing Persons, and Martha Davis, of the Motels, are in their mid 60s, and what I learned from watching them was that, as an aging woman in rock, you are supposed to wear a really large coat over your aging lady body, even if you’re a former Playboy Bunny, like Bozzio.

Dale bozzio. Big jacket

Come to think of it, I recall feeling infuriated at Bozzio’s bunny status, this being pre-3^rd wave feminism (!); the sight of her prancing around in a see through raincoat on MTV used to bother me, especially when male critics would justify it by saying, “but she used to sing with Zappa!”

The thing is, thanks to 3^rd Wave Feminism, I am no longer angry at her over that, because I no longer consider it to be her own fault. I still hate Berlin’s song “Sex. I’m a…” (“I’m a slut! I’m a geisha! I'm a little girl!” etc. etc.) but I can at least acknowledge that both Bozzio and Nunn were pretty good singers, indeed, last week they were far superior performers to the men in Wang Chung and Naked Eyes.

Still. Let’s face it, Dale Bozzio and Terri Nunn DID have a dampening effect on women’s role on MTV and subsequently in music – before them, you could be Christie Hynde, Patti Smith, a B-52; after, you had to boob it up all over the place. Honestly, the history of MTV and TV in general never ceases to remind me of that book “Super Sad True Love Story” by Gary Shteyngart, in which kids in kindergarten are made to watch pornos and teenage girls wear jeans with cut outs over their crotches. Remember Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke? It feels that directional.

After Berlin, my friends and I decided to leave. It was a long way down the mountain and Cutting Crew and Spandau Ballet were not a good exchange for the giant traffic jam that was about to occur. But then, I was never going to wang chung, not that night, or any other. Later I posted a lot of nutty stuff about the night in twitter, and  people on social media suggested to me that they didn't actually like the music of the 1980s, that it was 'the worst time' for music. But I don't know about that. Sometime around New Year’s Eve of 1989, I was asked to appear on channel 2 news to comment on the music of the 1980s. For me, the 1980s meant REM, the Replacements and rap, but to the news station it meant Madonna, Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson. Neither of us were exactly right, or rather, both of us were.

That night back in 1989, I remember, in honor of the decade changing into the 90s, Isabelle and I put on new romantic blouses and teased our hair up like Robert Smith of the Cure in memoriam of that style. We had, at that moment, already heard Nirvana’s “Bleach” – as well as De La Soul’s “3 Feet High and Rising” --  and we were about to plunge, like human knives, into the heart of grunge and rap. The 80s were indeed long since lost to us at that moment. I would be happy as hell to recover them, but I have a very different playlist going in my head, and I bet you do too. What would be your idea of a great 'lost 1980s' bill?

Play that old cliche

My daughter and I were struggling to build a giant piece of IKEA furniture and it took way longer than we thought, so I got a late start for the Todd Rundgren show the other night. But I paid good money for that ticket, the Chapel is my favorite venue to see things in San Francisco, and Todd Rundgren is, well, Todd Rundgren, so I leapt in the car and began booking it up 280.

 It’s been 105 degrees this week in the valley, which meant the summer fog was pouring down the mountains, and the ipod shuffle came up with a song from a record I forgot that I had downloaded: Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoff’s “Under The Covers Vol. 3,” the third record in their series of recordings of other people’s songs. Volume 1, which was songs from the 1960slike “Different Drum” “Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere” and “It’s Alright BabyBlue” was sublime. This one – the 1980s – was equally killer.

It was, in short, a beautiful drive, probably, I conjectured gloomily, better than the show could be. What could Todd do that would be superior to Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoff’s shimmering version of “Shaking Through,” or “How Soon Is Now?” I was once a Todd-head, with the songs of Runt and Hermit and Something/Anything burnt into my brain, but I lost interest in about 1981, and I could no longer remember why. What was good about him again? Well, I was about to find out.

Up in SF’s Mission district, my usual go to parking lot on Valencia and 21^st was full, god damn it, which meant I had to drive up and down the hills on the hunt for the elusive space…and when I found it I was later than ever. Todd’s voice was pouring out of the club by the time I got there, but they sure as hell weren’t carding anyone at the door: as soon as I shouldered my way in I had the glad realization that I was literally the youngest person in the room.

Of course, in part this feeling was heightened by the fact that I immediately went up to the balcony, where the people who can’t face standing for two hours were, but there is no doubt that many of  Todd’s fans are Todd’s age, i.e. in their 60s. (He’s 69). I was a spring chicken by comparison and may well have been the only person there who could name the writer and band of the song he was singing when I arrived: “When The Walls Came Down” by the Call.

That’s a weird choice, I thought. Did he produce them? Todd  Rundgren has produced a diverse lot of bands over the years – Bad Company, the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Meatloaf, the Psychedelic Furs, to name just a few --  but the Call seemed not quite in his wheelhouse. The Call haven’t been around in ages, but that turned out to be one of the newer songs Todd was going to sing this evening: most of the repertoire was from the 1950s or early 60s. And not to put too fine a point on it: it blew.

I’m sorry, but it DID! It was awful. I mean, I love a wacky cover as much as the next person – that Matthew Sweet/Susanna Hoff record is my favorite thing I’ve heard all year; finding Easter eggs in Afghan Whigs sets is my life’s work, and I was bitterly disappointed at a show the evening before when the Filthy Friends didn’t play a Bowie cover – but this was insane.

 I mean, the Call are mediocre band at best, but he followed that up with this terrible song called “Little Dove and Running Bear,” by Johnny Preston, which is sung by the Big Bopper. I try not to be too doctrinaire about PC stuff in music but honestly, he might as well have been singing in a fake sing-song Asian accent, or been white-rapping about his riches. Anyway, nothing says “OLD PERSON WHO HAS NEVER HEARD OF WHITE MALE PRIVILEGE” more than singing a rude song about Native Americans because, you know, ‘it’s hilarious.’ NOT. Honestly. How hard is it not to be publicly racist these days?

what's wrong with this picture?

Todd seemed to think he was doing some riff on the Wild West, which made me have this sudden, ecstatic thought: “What if he plays “TheRange War?'” If he had played "The Range War," everything might  have been forgiven, but NO, he did not. Instead, it went downhill from there. I am not sure what I hated worse, his covers of “Fire” by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown,”  the Proclaimers’ “Five Hundred Miles” complete with super fake Scottish accent, the endless blues-to-show-he-could shit show, the Frank Sinatra song, or “Hash Pipe” by Weezer. And that’s just scratching the surface.

It was fucking bananas. To make matters worse, about midway in it he suddenly played two of his own  songs, “Cliché” and “Love of the Common Man” and they were both so absolutely sublime they nailed me to my chair. I spent the whole rest of the time texting quips to my brother in North Carolina, as I breathlessly awaited “Hello It’s Me” or “Just One Victory” (or, said my brother wistfully, “Piss Aaron”) but no. The only other Todd song he sang was “One World” at the end, and I don’t care for that song.

It was so incredibly mean of him. But at least it was over early. When I got home, I flounced into my daughter’s room, sat down on her floor, and tried to explain how terrible it was.

“Imagine if, twenty years from now, you go see Damon Albarn solo and all he does is play songs by Taio Cruz and LMFAO.”

Her: “Did he play “Sexy and I know It?"”

“No, but the 1950-70s equivalents.”

I told her their names and she played them on YouTube, commenting, Beavis-like. Hence:

 “In the Year 2525.” C: “This sounds like the theme song  a really bad sci fi movie where a man falls in love with a robot and at the end the robot kills him.”

“Patches.” “Is this like old people’s idea of rapping?”

“Incense and Peppermints.” “No. Just…no.”

“I’m A Gun.” (Lorne Greene.) “You realize this is written infirst person from the point of view of the gun?”  

“I’m a Gun” IS a hilarious song, although I didn’t want to hear Todd Rundgren sing it: at its end, the singer/gun proposes to destroy itself, because it’s a murderer. When we finished listening, my daughter ill-advisedly started reading the YouTube comments, many of which were from NRA people objecting to this ridiculous song’s content (not its premise: its content). One read: “Owning a gun makes one as much of a murderer as the extremist feminists who say that being a guy essentially makes you a rapist

Another read, “The kind of people who like this song probably think abortion is OK, too.”

C: “Oh my god – self burn! It’s like they think they made a good point, and they DID – but it’s not the point they think they made!!”

I think the same can be said about Todd Rundgren’s show, somehow. I am not exactly sure what point he thinks he’s making, though I believe it has something to do with the showing off of his incredible talent. Because he IS so so talented, no question, and, more importantly, his own work is still so outstanding that he only needs to do a few lines of one song – “I Saw The Light,” for example, which he played early in the set, before it degenerated into toilet-ville – for one to go into rock shock. Indeed, after our trash-fest, I forced my daughter to listen to one Todd Rundgren song, and after the first five notes she sat up like a chipmunk and went, “Oh my GOD, I LOVE This song.” (It was “Hello It’s Me.”)

Is it false humility, to not play your great songs and play shitty ones instead? Or is it the height of arrogance? I think in this case it was the latter: to have that kind of power within you and withhold it from a paying audience. As he played all this stuff, I was reminded of the Replacements. They used, on occasion, to put in sets in which they would spin out into horrible covers – “Heartbeat It’s a Lovebeat,” “I Get Around,” “Roundabout” by Yes (Todd Rundgren has been touring with Yes, by the way, a circumstance about which I wish to know nothing about).  I always used to like those sets – though of course I preferred a set where they were ‘on’ and played their own stuff brilliantly. But I think the ‘mats reason for doing it was different. When they did those sets, they would occasionally start, and then stop, one of their own songs, and I think they stopped because they were so drunk they were about to butcher it, and they preferred butchering other people’s songs.

Or at least, that’s what they said. By contrast, Todd seems to be doing this just because he can. I can certainly see that it’s probably more fun for him to play silly music that makes him laugh than his own music, which he’s maybe sick of. But still! After one song, I forget which, he said, “that was like spending an hour on the toilet,” and indeed it was.

On my way home from the club, I put on “Under The Covers” again and thought about why it was OK for those 2 artists to cover other people’s work, but not for Todd, and it came down to one single factor: song choice. I downloaded “Under the Covers” without even looking to see what songs were on it, and when the song would change to the Bongos “Bulrushes” or  XTC’s “Towers Of London” I  practically shed tears of joy to hear them again, and to hear them done with this amount of love and care, and, in some cases, to hear new things in them that I had not heard before. In my car, under my own cover, I literally  shouted along with the words to “How Soon Is Now.”When I was young, Isabelle and I used to make fun it, we would say, in a fake “elephant man” accent, “I am not an animal! I am human being and I need to be loved!” But hearing it on this record, I was just slain.

It goes without saying that didn’t happen at Todd’s show, with “2525” or “I’m A Gun” or “Hash Pipe” (which was done, incidentally, exactly like Weezer do it themselves.) But it would have, if he’d played “Range War” or “Piss Aaron,” or “Real Man.”Self burn, Todd. Self burn.

The Stories We Could Tell

On the evening of my birthday, I went to see Tom Petty. It was a 45 minute drive up Highway 880 and through the Oakland Hills, the sky turning deep purple throughout, but the good news was, the car seemed to drive itself. It was like being in a Waymo or one of those new self driving ones. Instead of concentrating on the road, I was able to just space out and think about my life as my vehicle homed toward UC Berkeley.

Much has changed since I attended that school in the mid-ate 1980s but not the names of the freeway exits or the route from my hometown. Up the east bay I sped, 880-237-580-13, then down Claremont Avenue to Belrose and Waring and finally, Piedmont Avenue. As I passed the Clark Kerr campus I thought, 'if I see a parking spot after crossing Dwight, I’ll take it, if not, I’ll pay for parking.' But there was a spot, right on the corner of Dwight, across the street from where Bill Wyman’s old apartment, so I took it and started walking to the Greek. I was desperately in search of a scalper.

See, I didn’t have a ticket. I could have bought one, on Stubhub, for $70, but I don’t really like using that service and anyway, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go until about two minutes before I left for the concert. The gig had been rescheduled, which usually means lots of extra tickets, but I was getting pretty close to the venue without being solicited so it didn’t seem like that was going to be the case. Meanwhile, I walked past all the fraternities, which seemed to be in mid-party mode, and as I walked, and the shouts of the undergrads and the smell of beer and the familiarity of the sights around me mounted, I began to feel a little weird.

rush night. Alas.

So many memories, you see. Berkeley is the fount of it all, the place I learned to be a writer and a critic, the place I saw the most shows of all, the place where I was young. And, did I mention it was my birthday, and I was turning old? So…maybe not the wisest place to be.

On the other hand, I really love the Greek Theater, it is a magical venue. But as I closed in on it, what I noted wasn’t all good. For example, that new stadium. It wasn’t there when I was here, and it is…big. There’s a parking lot next to it and it said on it, “Show parking, $30.” THIRTY DOLLARS? That’s like…Levi Stadium bullshit. On the corner by the stadium, there’s this life sized statue of a bear that looks like it’s going to eat you. I couldn’t decide if I loved or hated that piece of art. On the one hand, it made me laugh. On the other, it was a bit like a commemoration of something extinct, like calling The Pruneyard in Campbell after the orchard it decimated, when the whole thing is one big cement jungle. No bears here now, that’s for sure.

scary golden bear

The bear stands at the corner of Gayley Avenue where you turn up to Strawberry Canyon.  We used to have morning practice there, and many a bad thing happened to me in that pool. It’s a little bit like my Abu Ghraib. So there’s that.

Also, across from the stadium, there was a building you could see into, and in the room that was lit up, there was a class in session. It reminded me of work. The students were staring at a giant smart board with a page from Canvas on it, just like my students will be doing tomorrow. When I attended UC Berkeley we didn’t have smart boards or Canvas, we just listened to lectures and took notes I guess. When I attended UC Berkeley I wouldn’t have dreamed of becoming a professor – nor am I one, really, not like the ones here, I am just a lame imitation of one, just like I am a lame imitation of a rock critic at this point. A simulacrum.

Presently I got to the Greek, and there were truly no scalpers around, and not only that, but a great shout went up and I could tell Tom Petty was going on stage. This surprised me, because I thought the show began at 8 and he’d go on at 9, but I guess I got it wrong and the show started at 7. It was 8:15 when he began, and I was outside the gates, considering my options. Stubhub had increased to $110, and the one ticket guy I saw told me he’d sell me a ducat for a hundred even.

“Nah, I think I’ll go home,” I said to my Man.

He seemed genuinely upset for me. “But you came all the way here!” Then he said, “C’mon, I’ll give it to you for less – what do you want to pay?”

But I was done. Instead, I sat on the curb for a bit and played on my phone, listening to Tom Petty from outside. He played “(I Dig) Rockin’ Around With You,” “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” and "You Don't Know How It Feels" while I sat there, and the scalper, still looking wistfully at me, let his ticket go for $60. “There’s still Wednesday,” he said to me, and I just laughed. I have a lot of other uses for $60 right now. Anyway, Tom Petty’s music actually sounded good out there, really good: the Rickenbacker chiming to the top of its bent. It was thrilling, that sound – a real rock critic would call it Byrdsian, but to me it sounds like REM and Robyn Hitchcock and all the other bands I heard just after I abandoned Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen and the few other mainstream acts whom I worshiped in my youth. It’s churchy, at least to me. Indeed, just the other day I was IN a church – Szent Itzvan Basilica in Budapest – listening to a bunch of classical music played on their massive organ, and it wasn’t nearly as churchy as this.

saint stephens basilica, circa last week

When I was a youngster and attended UC Berkeley, you could go watch the shows from what’s now the lawn area for free. Now they sell those seats for upwards of $50. That seems to me to be a metaphor for the last thirty years. But the memory reminded me that there is something acoustically special about that particular block of Piedmont; and up I got and walked around. Across the street the sound turned to mud, but I criss crossed a little and sure enough, there was a spot on the steps of the stadium parking lot, 500 yards away, where the sound quality of the show was absolutely pristine. You could hear as well as if you were in the arena, no joke.

So I sat down and listened. He played a song called “Forgotten Man,” from his latest album (whatever that was, I haven’t been paying attention – I’m just quoting him); “I Won’t Back Down,” “Into the Great Wide Open,” and “Free Falling.” In short the hits kept coming, and they were so mainstream that you could have floated a boat down them, but at the same time, they kind of gave ‘mainstream’ a good name. I think it was that mainstream-y ness that made it so I could listen quietly to them, not even being in the arena, and enjoy them: there was nothing to see there, nothing Tom and his band and his many backup singers (whom I just had to picture in my head) could do to make the experience better; it was sonically just fine how it was.

“Don’t Come Around Here Any More.” “It’s Good To Be King.” “Crawling Back to You.” “Learning To Fly.” Some other songs I don’t quite recognize. And then I left, just before “Refugee” and “American Girl,” two of my favorites, but I didn’t need to hear them; I was satiated. Overall, though, you have to admit. His songs are just good, you know? The chords are so major. As I listened, I remembered a thing about him: I can play all these songs on guitar. There’s a song in particular that he used to sing that I learned when I was young—it’s actually by the Everley Brothers, but I associate it with Tom Petty.

And oh, the stories we could tell

and if we all blow up and go to hell

I can still see us sitting on the bed in some motel

singing all the stories we could tell..

All of sudden I was overcome with weltschmertz, I think it’s called, or some purely American variation thereof. Weltschmertz is a sadness for the distance between an ideal world and the shitty reality of it, and what I felt was like that only more tinged with nostalgia. That bed is just so very real to me. I sat on it so many times (allegorically)… At Bill’s house, for instance, down the street, and elsewhere in the vicinity. So I sat on the steps of the stadium parking lot, and I thought about that for a long long time, as the music of Tom Petty chimed out all around me; and then I got up and walked back up Gayley to my car. The frat parties were still raging, as they do, and to all intents and purposes, my birthday was over.  

Bill and I. road critics. Lollapalooza 92