If Senator Al Franken won’t run for President in 2020, perhaps he’d temper fans’ disappointment with a repeat of his early 80’s turn as Mick Jagger, above.
The performance took place at Stockton State, a public university conveniently located in New Jersey–what the late Tom Davis, Franken’s long time Saturday Night Live writing partner and Keith Richards to his Jagger called “the Blair Witch scrub forests twenty-five miles north of Atlantic City.”
Franken’s performance is an immersive triumph, especially for those who remember his best known SNL character, the lispingly upbeat Stuart Smalley.
His Jagger is the opposite of Stuart–butch, preening, athletic … a less than sober student fan in the Stockton State crowd might have drunkenly wondered if he or she had accidentally bought tickets to the Tattoo You tour. Those lips are pretty convincing.
The costuming is dead on too, and Franken did not take the route Chris Farley would later take, lampooning the male strippers of Chippendales. He may not be Jagger-rangy, but he’s certainly fit in an outfit that leaves no room to hide.
As we started “Under My Thumb,” Franken came running out as Mick Jagger, wearing yellow football pants and Capezios and was so good, it was scary. Unfortunately, Franken and Davis at Stockton State never sold very well… maybe it would be re-released if one of us became president, or shot a president.
Knowing that Davis, who died five years ago, would likely never have predicted the outcome of the recent election, and that Senator Franken, outspoken as he is, is in no position to joke about the second option, we suggest truffling up a used copy, if you’d like to see more.
And for comparison’s sake, here are the originals performing to an arena-sized crowd in Arizona in 1981:
Apart from whatever political nightmare du jour we’re living in, it can be easy to dislike Washington, DC. I say this as someone who grew up outside the city, called it home for many years, and generally found its public face of monuments, tourists, politicos, and waves of lobbyists and bureaucrats pretty alienating. The “real” DC was elsewhere, in the city’s historic Black neighborhoods, many now heavily gentrified, which hosted legendary jazz clubs and gave birth to the genius of go-go. And even in the privileged, middle class neighborhoods and DMV suburbs. Among the skate punks and disaffected military brats who created the DC punk scene, a seething, furiously productive punk economy centered around Dischord Records. The small label has been as hugely influential in the past few decades as Seattle’s Sub Pop or Long Beach’s SST.
Formed in 1980 by Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye and his bandmate Jeff Nelson, Dischord is 6 years older than Sub Pop and in several ways it inspired a template for the West Coast. Dave Grohl came from the DC Punk scene, as did Black Flag’s Henry Rollins. Rollins and MacKaye were childhood friends and DC natives, and MacKaye went on to form Fugazi, virtually a DC institution for well over a decade.
MacKaye’s brother Alec was a member of Dischord band Faith—one of Kurt Cobain’s admitted influences—and of Ignition with Gray Matter’s Dante Ferrando, who went on, with investments from Dave Grohl, to found the club Black Cat, a central hub of punk and indie rock in DC for 27 years. The more you dig into the musical families of Dischord, the more you see how embedded they are not only in their home city, but in the weft of modern American rock.
The common features of its lineup—political urgency, earnestness, melodic experimentation, unpretentiousness—stand out. Dischord bands could be math‑y and technical, straight edge, vegan, Buddhist, Hare Krishna, fiercely feminist, anti-capitalist, and anti-war.… These may not sound like the makings of a great party scene, but they made for a committed cadre of hard working musicians and a wide circle of dedicated fans around the country who have kept the label thriving in its way.
What distinguishes Dischord from its more famous peers is the fact that it only releases bands from the DC area. Why? “Because this is the city where we live, work, and have the most understanding,” they write on their site. Still, given the label’s heightened profile in recent years, it’s surprising that so much of its music remains unknown outside of a specific audience. Fugazi is the best-known band on the roster, and for all their major critical importance, they have kept a fairly low profile. But this is the spirit of the label, whose founders wanted to make music, not make stars. Bands like Shudder to Think and Jawbox may have eventually moved to bigger labels, but they did their best work with Dischord.
Dag Nasty, Embrace, Government Issue, Make-Up, Q and Not U, Rites of Spring, Soulside, Void, Untouchables, Slant 6, the Nation of Ulysses.… these are bands, if you don’t know them, you should hear, and already have, in some way, through their enormous influence on so many others: not only Nirvana, but also a contingent of derivative emo bands some of us might prefer to forget. Still the label’s history should not be taken as the gospel canon of DC punk. One of the most influential of DC punk bands, Bad Brains, came out of the jazz scene, invented a blistering mashup of punk and reggae, and get credit for creating hardcore and inspiring Rollins, MacKaye, and their friends. But Bad Brains was “Banned in DC” in 1979, shut out of the clubs. They moved to New York and eventually signed with SST.
Other parts of the scene scorned the clean-living moralism of Dischord, and the label’s sober founders later found themselves “alienated by the violent, suburban, teenage machismo they now saw at their shows,” writes Jillian Mapes at Flavorwire. Dischord became known for championing causes on the left, a legacy that is inseparable from its legend. Not everyone loved their politics, as you might imagine in a city with as many conservative activists and political aspirants as DC. “Great political punk bands—like Priests—still exist in DC,” writes Mapes—and Dischord continues to release great records—“but the ‘80s scene retains its place in history as the pinnacle of political American hardcore music.” And Dischord remains a sometimes unacknowledged legislator of American punk rock in the ‘80s and ’90s. Stream their whole catalog at Bandcamp. You can also download tracks for a fee.
When Leonard Cohen released You Want it Darker in late 2016, some suspected that it would be his last album. When the 82-year-old singer-songwriter died nineteen days later, it felt like a reprise of David Bowie’s passage from this mortal coil at the beginning of that year in which we lost so many important musicians: just two days after the release of his album Blackstar, Bowie shocked the world by dying of an illness he’d chosen not to make public. Both Cohen and Bowie’s fans immediately doubled down their scrutiny of what turned out to be their final works, finding in both of them artistic interpretations of the confrontation with death.
The title track of You Want It Darker, says the narrator of the Polyphonic video essay above, “is not just any song, but the culmination of many meditations on Cohen’s own mortality. The result is a hauntingly accusatory song towards his own god.”
This analysis focuses on lines, delivered by Cohen’s gravelier-than-ever singing voice, like “If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game / If you are the healer, that means I’m broken and lame” and “If thine is the glory, then mine must be the shame / You want it darker, we kill the flame.” Cohen also uses phrases taken from a Jewish mourner’s prayer as a way of “facing up to his god and submitting.”
The non-religious Bowie took a different tack. “Just take a look at Bowie’s costume,” says the essay’s narrator. “He’s bandaged, frail, and maniacal in the ‘Blackstar’ video. While the bandage serves to represent wounds, it can also be taken as a blindfold,” historically “worn by those condemned to execution.” Using Christian imagery, Bowie frames his song “in the post-paradise world of mortal life,” in a sense referencing what Cohen once described as “our blood myth,” the crucifixion. And so Bowie’s song “is using our cultural vocabulary to explore our relationship with death.” And yet, “in the midst of this dark song, Bowie offers optimism” in the form of the titular Blackstar, a “newly inspired being” that emerges from death.
“While mankind can’t cheat death, we can still find immortality in the way people remember us, the legacy that they carry on.” And despite recognizing their basic humanity, many of us carriers of the legacy still struggle to process the deaths of high-profile, sui generis performing artists. Maybe it has to do with their status as icons, and icons, strictly speaking, can’t die — but nor can they live. Leonard Cohen and David Bowie, the men, may have finished their days, and what days they were, but Leonard Cohen and David Bowie, the cultural phenomena, will surely outlast us all.
You can listen to Cohen and Bowie’s final albums above. If you need Spotify’s free software, get it here.
The Summer of Love was not just a season of great music and the zenith of the flower child, but the culmination of a movement that started back on a chillier Bay Area day, on January 14, 1967. That was the month of the Human Be-In, and what must have looked like a full on invasion of the counterculture into Golden Gate Park. The backdrop of this outpouring of good vibrations was anything but loving: Vietnam, inner city riots, Civil Rights, and a huge generation gap. The crowd size was estimated at 100,000, and everybody there suddenly realized they weren’t alone. They were a force.
Joel Selvin, interviewed by Michael Krasny for this KQED segment on the Summer of Love (listen here), says that the real Summer of Love for San Franciscans at least, happened in 1966, when it was a local secret. One year later, the hippie movement had become mainstream. And that’s when every band on both sides of the Atlantic had turned on to the zeitgeist, and the gates of psychedelic music opened up.
Today, we have a playlist of 89 songs to commemorate the 50th anniversary of that historic summer. (Download Spotify’s free software here, if you need it.) If you are coming to this as a music fan, but not somebody who lived through that era, you might think you know all the songs from that period, having had them hammered into your brain over the years from the ubiquitous hits of classic rock radio, and nostalgic movies.
There are of course the stone cold classics from 1967, with not one but two Beatles releases, including the iconic Sgt. Pepper album; the best two songs from Jefferson Airplane; Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale”; the Who’s best psychedelic song “I Can See for Miles”; Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced?” and “Hey Joe”; the Rolling Stones’ move into chamber pop with “Ruby Tuesday” and their own trippy “She’s a Rainbow” and “We Love You”—the last time they ever felt lovey dovey about anything; and the first releases by the Doors.
Soul and R’n’B was also at the height of its mid-60s power, with Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” James Brown’s “Cold Sweat,” Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”, and Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man” infecting the charts.
“We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave,” is how Hunter S. Thompson famously put it in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and this playlist might just convince you of that considering how music seemed to fracture so soon after—even the Beatles would be delivering that strange and sometimes frightening trip of a White Album a year later. Vietnam would continue to drag on, and the decade’s metaphorical end at Altamont was looming on the horizon, not that many could see it. (By the way, Joel Selvin just wrote a very good book on that dark, decade-ending concert.)
Enjoy the playlist and argue over what’s missing in the comments. (No “Waterloo Sunset”? “I Second That Emotion”? “Gloria”? Hmmph!)
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Note: The first poem and others contain some offensive language.
In the context of the radical socio-political change of 1975, Patti Smith announced herself to the world with Horses, “the first real full-length hint of the artistic ferment taking place in the mid-‘70s at the juncture of Bowery and Bleecker,” writes Mac Randall. Though born in an insular downtown milieu, Smith’s view was vast, conducting the poetry of the past—of Rimbaud, the Beats, and rock and roll—into an uncertain future, through the nascent medium of punk rock. The album is “closely associated with the beginning of something,” and yet is “so concerned with endings”: the loss of Jimi Hendrix (at whose studio Smith recorded), and of “other departed counterculture heroes like Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Brian Jones.”
In a way, Smith’s voice defines the pivotal moment in which it arrived: anticipating an anxious age of austerity and women’s liberation; mourning the loss of 60s idealism and the promise of racial equity. She was a female artist fully unconstrained by patriarchal expectations, with complete authority over her vision. “My people were trying to forge a new bridge between the people we had lost and learned from and the future,” she recently remarked.
In her “fabulously grand” way, she told The Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone in 2013, “I felt in the center, not quite the old generation, not quite the new generation. I felt like the human bridge.” Smith was no naïf when she made Horses, but a confident artist who, at 29, had worked in theater with her lately-departed friend Sam Shepard, become her famous lover Robert Mapplethorpe’s favorite subject, joined the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and published two collections of verse.
She thought of herself as a poet who “got sidetracked” by music. “When I was young,” Smith says, “all I wanted was to write books and be an artist.” But poetry was always central to her work; Horses, she says, “evolved organically” from her first poetry reading, four years earlier, at St. Mark’s Church, alongside Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and other luminaries. Above, you can hear her discuss that attention-grabbing first reading, and at the top of the post, listen to Smith at Columbia University in 1975, reading the poems that developed that year into the songs on Horses, including her 1971 “Oath,” which begins with a variation on Horses’ opening sneer, “Christ died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”
Be warned the first poem she reads contains offensive language, as do many others. No one should be shocked by this. But some who only know Smith as a singer may be surprised by her masterful literary voice and wicked sense of humor. She has always been an elegist, mourning her cultural heroes, most of whom died young, as well as a tragic string of personal losses. “When I started working with the material that became Horses,” she remembers, “a lot of our great voices had died.” But her intent went beyond elegy, beyond a maudlin appropriation of fading 60s heroes. Smith had a “mission,” she says, of “forming a cultural voice through rock’n’roll that incorporated sex and art and poetry and performance and revolution.” It sounds grandiose, but it’s a mission she’s largely fulfilled. At the center of her project is poetry as performance, as a means of entertaining, shocking, and seducing an audience. The reading at the top is an especially faithful record of her fearless onstage persona.
Both communities of color and communities of artists have had to take care of each other in the U.S., creating systems of support where the dominant culture fosters neglect and deprivation. In the early twentieth century, at the nexus of these two often overlapping communities, we meet Langston Hughes and the artists, poets, and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes’ brilliantly compressed 1951 poem “Harlem” speaks of the simmering frustration among a weary people. But while its startling final line hints grimly at social unrest, it also looks back to the explosion of creativity in the storied New York City neighborhood during the Great Depression.
Hughes had grown reflective in the 50s, returning to the origins of jazz and blues and the history of Harlem in Montage of a Dream Deferred. The strained hopes and hardships he had eloquently documented in the 20s and 30s remained largely the same post-World War II, and one of the key features of Depression-era Harlem had returned; Rent parties, the wild shindigs held in private apartments to help their residents avoid eviction, were back in fashion, Hughes wrote in the Chicago Defender in 1957.
“Maybe it is inflation today and the high cost of living that is causing the return of the pay-at-the-door and buy-your-own-refreshments parties,” he said. He also noted that the new parties weren’t as much fun.
But how could they be? Depression-era rent parties were legendary. They “impacted the growth of Swing and Blues dancing,” writes dance teacher Jered Morin, “like few other periods.” As Hughes commented, “the Saturday night rent parties that I attended were often more amusing than any night club, in small apartments where God-knows-who lived.” Famous artists met and rubbed elbows, musicians formed impromptu jams and invented new styles, working class people who couldn’t afford a night out got to put on their best clothes and cut loose to the latest music. Hughes was fascinated, and as a writer, he was also quite taken by the quirky cards used to advertise the parties. “When I first came to Harlem,” he said, “as a poet I was intrigued by the little rhymes at the top of most House Rent Party cards, so I saved them. Now I have quite a collection.”
The cards you see here come from Hughes’ personal collection, held with his papers at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Many of these date from the 40s and 50s, but they all draw their inspiration from the Harlem Renaissance period, when the phenomenon of jazz-infused rent parties exploded. “Sandra L. West points out that black tenants in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s faced discriminatory rental rates,” notes Rebecca Onion at Slate. “That, along with the generally lower salaries for black workers, created a situation in which many people were short of rent money. These parties were originally meant to bridge that gap.” A 1938 Federal Writers Project account put it plainly: Harlem “was a typical slum and tenement area little different from many others in New York except for the fact that in Harlem rents were higher; always have been, in fact, since the great war-time migratory influx of colored labor.”
Tenants took it in stride, drawing on two longstanding community traditions to make ends meet: the church fundraiser and the Saturday night fish fry. But rent parties could be raucous affairs. Guests typically paid a few cents to enter, and extra for food cooked by the host. Apartments filled far beyond capacity, and alcohol—illegal from 1919 to 1933—flowed freely. Gambling and prostitution frequently made an appearance. And the competition could be fierce. The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance writes that in their heyday, “as many as twelve parties in a single block and five in an apartment building, simultaneously, were not uncommon.” Rent parties “essentially amounted to a kind of grassroots social welfare,” though the atmosphere could be “far more sordid than the average neighborhood block party.” Many upright citizens who disapproved of jazz, gambling, and booze turned up their noses and tried to ignore the parties.
In order to entice party-goers and distinguish themselves, writes Onion, “the cards name the kind of musical entertainment attendees could expect using lyrics from popular songs or made-up rhyming verse as slogans.” They also “used euphemisms to name the parties’ purpose,” calling them “Social Whist Party” or “Social Party,” while also slyly hinting at rowdier entertainments. The new rent parties may not have lived up to Hughes’ memories of jazz-age shindigs, perhaps because, in some cases, live musicians had been replaced by record players. But the new cards, he wrote “are just as amusing as the old ones.”
A tongue-in-cheek essay in McSweeney’s, Michael Fowler’s “How to Play a John Bonham Drum Solo,” contains some of the finest descriptions I’ve read of Bonham’s thunderous playing. It all begins with the triplet, the “thump-pe-da, thump-pe-da, thump-pe-da” rhythm the Led Zeppelin drummer plays on every piece of the kit. Should you learn to play drums like Bonham, you’ll be able to start this “up like a motor,” on any drum, “with either hand or foot, and perform all over the drums, without throwing a stick or becoming entangled in your own limbs, except to be funny.” After Bonham “made the important discovery that all drumming is just triplets, or should be,” he then proceeded to play them while “flying around the kit with blinding speed, hitting every drum and cymbal in those negligible spaces” between the triplets, “jamming like hell inside those brief spaces” then “plunging the whole kit into dead silence.”
We begin with those trademark triplets, then learn of another Bonham signature. While more straightforward drummers like The Stones’ Charlie Watts played strict 4/4 beats with metronomic precision, Bonham was often so far behind the beat it was as if he played his drum parts in an echo chamber, with a syncopated swing he took from funk.
But the heart of Bonham’s distinctive drumming has to do with the unusual dynamic he had with Jimmy Page. Normally, a drummer will lock in with the bass player, providing a solid foundation for the guitars and vocals to stand on. But “the essence… of the whole Zeppelin thing,” says engineer Ron Nevison, “was John Bonham following the guitar. He would take the riff and he would make that his drum part.” We hear several driving examples of this, most notably “Immigrant Song,” above, where Page and Bonham follow each other, while John Paul Jones thunders below them. The result, and one crucial reason Bonham’s hands almost never stop flying around the kit, is that, like Page, he’s playing both rhythm and lead parts, sometimes both at once.
Bonham sets out the scaffolding for Page’s complex phrasing, sometimes creating a push-pull effect that heightens a song’s tension at its core. We hear this in “Kashmir,” where Bonham plays a standard 4/4 beat while Page and the string section play in 3/4 time. These asynchronous passages can prove daunting for accomplished drummers. Bonham frequently pulled them off with the same kind of looseness and panache he brought to all of his playing, with no shortage of triplets and Gene Krupa-like fills thrown in for good measure.
We could argue all day about whether punk started in the US or UK (it’s the US), but why bother? Why not spend our time doing more interesting things—like digging up rare historical artifacts from the earliest days of punk rock in London, New York and, yes, Detroit. Punk may have devolved into a prêt-à-porter signifier, but its golden age was dominated by bespoke personalities the size of Texas. And no origin story (except maybe this one) better exemplifies punk’s founding ethos than that of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ first gig in London in 1976, which you can hear in all of its definition-of-lo-fi glory in two parts above and below.
Siouxsie Sioux (Susan Janet Dallion) already stood out as one of the Sex Pistols’ dedicated followers, her Egypt-inspired eye makeup and black lipstick staking out the Goth territory she would conquer in just a few short years. She was a born performer, but up until this first appearance at 19, had never been on stage before or fronted a band.
The “band” itself didn’t exist until the last minute, when Siouxsie and bassist Steve Severin (then “Steve Spunker”) decided they should take the place of a group that pulled out of the 100 Club Punk Festival, a showcase for the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned, and a handful of other unsigned (at the time) bands.
“Suzie and the Banshees,” as they were billed, consisted of the magnificently shrill Siouxsie, Severin, future Adam Ant guitarist Marco Pirroni, and the most infamous non-musician in punk, Sid Vicious, on drums, before he pretended to play bass in the Sex Pistols. They hadn’t written any songs, and so they smashed through a 20-minute medley of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” “Twist and Shout,” and the Lord’s Prayer. Show promoter Ron Watts called it “performance art,” and not in a good way.
Summing up the eternal interplay between punk bands and club owners, Watts remembered their debut as “weak, it was weedy. You couldn’t say it was a gig…. It was just people, getting up and trying to do something. I let them do it, you know.” The supremely confident Siouxsie didn’t care. In an interview a couple of months later (above) she admits, “it got a bit boring in some parts, but it picked up.” So did the band, picking up actually very good drummer Kenny Morris and cycling through a few guitarists, including The Cure’s Robert Smith for a spell. A couple of the other bands at that notorious show made good as well. (One even got their own credit card.) Hear The Clash’s set from the night here, here, and here, and see a photo set of Siouxsie and friends from 1976 here.
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