Tough Love Records » Old Money

Thursday 21st April 2011
OLD MONEY 6: GG ALLIN & THE JABBERS – “BORED TO DEATH” (1979)

“When Brecht, on the way from his home to the theatre in July 1953, passed the column of Soviet tanks rolling towards the Stallinaee to crush the worker’s rebellion, he waved to them and wrote in his diary later that day that, at that moment, he (never a party member) was tempted for the first time in his life to join the Communist Party. It was not that Brecht tolerated the cruelty of the struggle in the hope that it would bring a prosperous future; the harshness of the violence as such was perceived and endorsed as a sign of authenticity.” – Zizek, 2001.

You can’t make excuses for him. GG Allin was not a likable human being. And on the surface, it appeared that neither did he want to be. In fact, it was precisely his commitment to misanthropy that constituted his appeal for knuckleheads gawping in on his theatre of cruelty. And yet, for all his apparent lack of regard for others, this was a man who sought attention, who courted and reveled and rolled in it with every heinous act of self-immolation.

While GG Allin hated the human race, he also seemingly demanded its love; a love for his hate, perhaps to validate it, turn it transcendental. Or just to satisfy a crippling ego that tore at the edges of respectability and common-sense and human decency. From the offset, GG was pure in his intentions. With debut single “Bored To Death” he was from the start at the apex of his ever present paradox, where his hatred of humanity is borne of frustration at its rejection of him. This, afterall, was a man named after the son of God, as his father believed him to be the reincarnation of Jesus. With expectations that high, failure on those terms was guaranteed. Life for GG would not be normal from the start.

Difficult it may be to make a permissible argument in favour of GG’s behaviour, one thing hard to contest was his commitment to persona. And perhaps persona is the wrong word, because GG Allin never felt like an act. It may be mental illness or it could be the logical, ultimate embodiment of the rock and roll myth: to rebel to death. And that he did, in a pathetic Weekend At Bernie‘s style demise, fans posing with his blued corpse thinking he’d simply passed out from another exercise in over-indulgence. A fittingly depressing end.

Whether idiot savant or sheer brutalist, “Bored To Death” still stands as the awful authentic act, crushing the worker’s rebellion with its vile rejection of humanity. Belief need not always be rendered positive to convince.

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GG Allin and the Jabbers -”Bored To Death”

(Photo: It Wont Be Okay)

Friday 15th April 2011
OLD MONEY 5: CRIME – “PISS ON YOUR DOG” (UNRELEASED UNTIL 2004)

Alongside not paying, another thing that Crime didn’t do is tolerate hippies. 70′s San Francisco had been 8 miles in the sky for so long it couldn’t remember why it got high in the first place. Whilst New York’s Bowery was buzzing once again, crusty San Fran had chilled so hard it was frozen. Someone had to defrost that pooch and what better way to do it then shower it in warm piss?

Over on the Eastside, Richard Hell was fantasizing, “Hey man lets dress up like cops, just think of what we could do?”, but Crime were one step ahead of Television’s daydreaming, having already taken to wearing police uniforms on stage. It was a decision that seemed indebted to their life in SF. The city had long been the perennial home of the 1970′s car chase, and stood in the shadow of Alcatraz and a flagrantly lawless counter-culture the band despised. To mark themselves out as something different to the alternative, they went straight for the jugular and dressed as the enemy. Somewhat contrarily, at the same time this would also irritate the establishment. Crime were outlaws to all.

Essentially a punk band, Crime embodied the values of that music to such an extent they couldn’t accept the tag ‘punk’, instead priding themselves on being “San Francisco’s first and only rock’n'roll band”. Again, not so much a swipe at the Woodstock generation, as a full on kick in its emasculated balls. The first of the West coast insurrectionists to release a record with the “Hotwire My Heart” 7″ in 1976, they pre-dated the better known Germs, Flipper, and Black Flag. Yet unlike their peers, Crime never got round to releasing an official album. What did emerge in 2004 was a compilation, San Francisco’s Still Doomed, that collected the songs recorded in their practice space, leaving only the embers of their fuzzed-out rockabilly punk rock.

“Piss On Your Dog” stands as a precursor to all subsequent loud-mouthed, sludged-up grotesque punk. It’ s an obese, knuckle-dragging ogre, ripping up trees to use as a tooth pick and spitting a tropical storm worth of mucus all over the loved out sunshine streets of Haight and Ashbury. No more than a maximum volume repetition of a 3 chord riff, it constantly revolves back into itself over a pounding incessant beat with call and response vocals echoing the classic detective partnerships. Although a massively loud distorted proto-punk rock song isn’t perhaps the most unique thing you’ll ever hear (even at the time The Stooges had all ready blown a thousand eardrums), the allure of “Piss On Your Dog” lies in how ugly it is – ugly, but smart and efficient.

This ugliness can still be witnessed in what stands as one of the most absurd and surreal performances ever – Crime playing in San Quentin, the infamous holiday home for murderers and rapists, whilst dressed as the same guards that walked the corridors.

(GUEST WRITER: Maltese Falcon)

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Crime – “Piss on Your Dog”

(Photo: Cosmic Parachute)

Friday 8th April 2011
OLD MONEY 4: THE LAPSE – “THE THREAT” (1998)

Look out of your window. Does it feel like the world is ending? Look inside. Does it feel the same? It’s a certain kind of narcissism that allows us to believe that we are the first to have these particular feelings of loneliness, isolation, alienation and apocalypse. Yet these are the prevailing themes of humanity; alienation and hopelessness remain a timeless commonality. Does it make you feel better to know internal desperation is an eternal, everlasting struggle for all?

And yet it remains difficult to shake that feeling of impending doom. Perhaps it’s our vain belief that our moment in history is the only moment in history, because we are in it? That the value of experience is always shaped by one’s own subjectivity? “The Threat” seems to be concerned with this very dilemma.

Led by the brother of the more widely known Ted Leo, Chris Leo’s The Lapse existed for a brief period of two albums in the late nineties, before shaping into some other bands also unfairly destined for obscurity (Enon being particularly notable). The reference to the more famous (all things being relative) sibling is not simply a way of ascribing some form of familiarity to The Lapse: there’s the same themes of political discomfort that concern Chris as with Ted, even if the form chosen to communicate them is slightly different.

Whereas Ted’s Pharmacists lean on first wave punk and hardcore for inspiration, The Lapse were slightly more in tune with the NYC underground. Very much of their time, they took cues from the artful noise of Sonic Youth and Blonde Redhead, but were melodically guided by Leo’s stream of conscious diatribes that seemed to run an A-Z through contemporary political philosophy. Obviously left leaning, Leo was nonetheless never overtly stating allegiance with one side or another, simply pointing to the hypocrisy and vanity that drives power in whatever form. On “The Threat”, those concerns seemed to coalesce into a kind of historical subjectivity, whereby Leo’s own malaise was positioned in the context of the general desperation of humanity – “be it 17 more years or 700, who cares?”. As he sees it, this particular Threat has always been with us, now there are just new ways of talking about it and communicating it on a mass scale to the world. As such, our desperation just grows louder and more widely diffused.

Lots of people talk about the end of the world, but nobody talks about The Lapse. Since they dissolved, the blogosphere has emerged as a space in which obsolescence isn’t so much planned, as it is a necessity. And yet “The Threat” is about an enduring problem: the good times, like the bad, are constantly slipping away. The fear, though, is always with us. As the sinewy energy of “The Threat” suggests, it doesn’t paralyse us. On the contrary, we wouldn’t do – or be – anything without it.

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The Lapse – “The Threat”

(Photo: Marina Sloutsky)

Friday 1st April 2011
OLD MONEY 3: SILVER JEWS – “SELF-IGNITION” (1998)

Despite those career high out-of-exile live shows halfway through the last decade, how Silver Jews are ultimately remembered is still a moot point. Initially regarded as a Pavement side-project, the band’s 1998 album American Water is generally regarded as their finest moment, primarily because it featured a heavy contribution from Steve Malkmus at a point in time when fans were aching for a new Pavement record. And while it’s true that it remains one of the best records Malkmus worked on, that doesn’t by default make it Silver Jews creative apotheosis (that award should perhaps go to the previous record, Natural Bridge).

For anyone who knows the value of David Berman, it’s an infuriating – not to mention insulting – assumption that Silver Jews were validated by Malkmus’ contribution. Even if Malkmus can play the guitar like an upside down Tom Verlaine, he never got anywhere the poetic insight of Berman when at his most uniquely astute. Which, incidentally, is all of the time. More so, there are songs around that same period that seem to have been swept away by American Water‘s tide.

“Self Ignition” is one of two B sides featured on the “Send In The Clouds” single taken from that much-celebrated album. With chiming guitar lines that spider to to the rhythm of Berman’s abstract insights, “Self-Ignition” is certainly typical of the music the band were making around this period, its structure suggesting an off-cut from the AW sessions. But to simply see it as a discarded afterthought vastly underplays its distinctive embodying of what makes the Silver Jews so valuable a voice.

If Malkmus played the guitar upside down, Berman always seemed concerned with describing the world in the same way. Instead of coming off smart-arsed and sly as Malkmus often did to his many detractors, Berman does what all great writers do: he recasts a familiar world in a unfamiliar light, while revealing some unexposed truism that felt like it’s been standing on our toes the whole time. Berman has always felt more grounded in literature than music.

You sense that for Berman life is one long challenge, whether literally or conceptually (as evidenced in his reported suicide attempts and poetry anthology Actual Air, respectively). Elsewhere in the Silver Jews ouevre, he’s asked “What if life is just saw hard equation?”. The key to that line is in the imagining – the ‘what if’. There, Berman was daydreaming on a quantitative solution for life’s ineffable vicissitudes. On “Self Ignition”, he’s resolved to dealing with the awareness that there is only daydreaming, there is no definitive answer. It’s fitting that such an epiphany remains hidden in an obscure song that forms a slight part of an obscure career that’s shadowed by the other career of a bit part member (digest that). More than anything, there’s an elegance here, even if Berman himself is elegantly wasted mostly.

“I have to remember that you’re not wanting me doesn’t make me any less here”: just because you’ve never heard a B side, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t make a sound. And the sound that “Self-Ignition” makes is an eternal one, because it’s questions have echoed for an age.

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Silver Jews – “Self-Ignition”

(Photo: Cosmic Parachute)

Friday 25th March 2011
OLD MONEY 2: VIC GODARD & THE SUBWAY SECT – “MAKE ME SAD” (1980)

Tracing the story of punk usually runs down paths littered with references to anarchy, nihilism, three chords and the truth. I can accept a few of those things, but the truth? I find that hard to stomach. For all their disheveled allure, the poster boys of punk mainly smacked of posture and artifice. Punk in its populist form was theatre in a way that its canonised status as a rebellious subculture doesn’t always acknowledge. Since ideology often lags behind reality, it’s not that surprising, but if punk’s ideal were to be truly realised, I often think that Vic Godard would represent the quintessential embodiment of what its UK derivation promised.

“Make Me Sad”, recorded by a newly assembled Subway Sect line-up in 1980, is a few steps removed from the accepted punk form, but it reeks of its singularity, feels unruly in its cutting ramshackle charm. Tenderly poised, unlike so much of punk’s scrawl, it’s built around the autodidactic charm of its author, who recalls a down-home Lou Reed sans the louche king’s reptilian demeanour. Despite the similarities, Godard never comes off as anything other than himself. I believe that’s what all postcard punks futilely dreamed of.

The transgressive qualities of “Make Me Sad” lay not so much in Godard’s speak-sing delivery or the jangle of those proto-indiepop guitars, but in its distinctive poetry. Godard understood language expertly enough to reach through conventional form and pull out that rarest of things: a hidden truth. And it’s in the oblique phrasing of “Make Me Sad” that he signals the real failure of punk, acting as an allegory for failing love: “you need a change from chasing this chimera of content”.

By 1980, punk was long dead and gone, and Britain was about to get a whole lot worse. Godard told us why, while pointing towards a fractured and wobbly future coming out of the rubble. Yes, there was a future, even if it was way more fucked than anyone saw coming. And doesn’t that feel highly relevant right now?

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Vic Godard and the Subway Sect – “Make Me Sad”

(Photo: Super Bomba)

Friday 18th March 2011
OLD MONEY: THE VERLAINES – “ANGELA” (1982)

I cannot keep up with the past, let alone the future. From now on, every Friday I intend to provide evidence of this ever-growing lack.

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At the age of perhaps ten or eleven, a friend and I sneaked into my parents’ garage with a box of Ship Household matches, a plastic bin and some duplicate Panini stickers. Hidden in the back behind the partly assembled M.G. my dad had never got around to fully restoring, we began setting fire to the footballers’ heads and watched their faces distort into nothingness. We first placed them in the bin, but when that started to melt, we burned them between our fingers, dropping them to the floor only when they became too hot to hold. We did this secretly and for no reason other than to explore the limits of what we already knew. I can’t help but think of Flying Nun in the same way.

I don’t know if the internet makes the world smaller or bigger, or both, but secrets don’t last long anymore. Secrets almost don’t exist. In the 80s, things were different. In Matthew Bannister’s book about indiepop music, he speaks of his experiences fronting Flying Nun band Sneaky Feelings, noting the wait involved in getting hold of new music not from New Zealand. Copies of the NME took months to reach Auckland; Joy Division and Stooges albums took longer. The consequence is that music could exist in isolation and independent of whatever else was going on in the world. More excitingly still, these remote scenes also belied a common psychic network that transcended borders. How did people miles apart and with no knowledge of the other come up with the same idea simultaneously? There was something in the cosmic ether.

Based in Dunedin and a central component of Flying Nun, The Verlaines channelled the same wound-up tight power pop The Feelies were forging about the same time in New Jersey. Did they even know about each other? Maybe. Maybe not. Whereas the latter were seemingly gripped by the same Cold War concerns as fellow countrymen Devo and Talking head, The Verlaines looked inside. Hyper-literate, they name checked Edvard Munch paintings, Rimbaud and, of course, the fin de siècle poet from whom they took their name. There are perhaps more well known songs in The Verlaines modest canon, not least “Death and The Maiden”, recently covered by antipodean fetishist, Steve Malkmus. “Angela” though, taken from the watershed Dunedin Double EP, is an idea ossifying, something on its way to becoming something else. They hadn’t quite found their feet with “Angela”, but those tentative first steps left big imprints.

While Flying Nun has received more recognition in recent years, it’s still likely the case that more people claim to like The Chills, The Clean and The Bats than actually listen to them. The Verlaines perhaps fair even worse. As such, “Angela” still sounds like lighting matches in a garage.

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The Verlaines – “Angela”

(Photo: Christine Karlsson)