Amos Poe's the Foreigner: More Bad Film from the Punk Era

As a disclaimer, Amos Poe’s The Foreigner must have been shot and soldered together with some of the cheapest and most easily acquired equipment in New York City. It was the seventies, though. So, there’s that.

But what really interests me about film are the stories that are able to be related through the form. I’d really like to tell you about The Foreigner’s plot, but I can’t. Beyond a foreigner showing up in the States, dressed in white and running around the city, there’s not too much going on.

Surely, the film’s director had some sort of plot outlined in his head. The fact that its winds up being meaningless – or at least un-relatble to the viewer – is a problem. After all, the point of a film, apart from being entertainment, is to relate some narrative. Of course, those two concepts dovetailing is usually a good deal. But that doesn’t happen here.

Instead The Foreigner is made up of a series of really brief vignettes, unrelated if not sitting next to the director and getting a play by play synopsis.

Coming out of the punk scene – Debbie Harry makes a brief appearance, bums a cigarette and sings a song – Amos Poe’s work here is really not too much else than an art school film obsessed with its own culture. That doesn’t mean its all bad, just for a specific time and place, which might make it totally irrelevant outside of that scope.

Punk fans, though, are going to be most engaged by a scene that finds our foreigner sitting around his room at the Chelsea – a pretty clean one at that – and just watching some television. Somehow, though, his crap tv set picks up some interesting stuff. And this particular evening’s viewing has to do with Mark Perry and Alternative Television.

Referencing your own culture isn’t a problem considering such a narrow audience. It’s just a surprise that Poe’s earliest effort still has some sort of fan base. There’s no real reason to search this one out apart from a distinct obsession with punk historicity in multiple disciplines.

Even contrasting this with Jim Jarmusch’s earliest work doesn’t do much for The Foreigner – not that Jarmusch turned in a gem with Permanent Vacation. But this all just leads to the conclusion that film might have been the one medium early punkers weren’t able to inject with the same sort of energy as the associated music. Bummer, huh?

The Makers Makin' it Through Another Decade

The state of Washington means a bunch of different things when examined from a distance – any other destination in the States perceives a difference between Seattle, Olympia and Spokane. Of course, malleable views of each basically result in singular visions of that part of the country.

Seattle’s really not as big as people think it is. Olympia is probably more and less than what people expect and by the time one makes it to Spokane, all bets are off. It’s not that outside of Seattle, the rest of Washington is on open space. And that’s certainly not the case with Spokane. But a huge portion of the state – and this goes for most states in the States – counts as rural. Some of its deathly beautiful, but it’s all removed from modern metropolises.

So that’s why the Makers are a weird animal. Kicking around since the earliest moments of the nineties, the garage styled group has been on the two major imprints with Washington addresses – both K Records and Sub Pop. At the same time, though, the band doesn’t exactly jive with the general bent of either label. Being in the game for almost twenty years, though, affords a group some deference.

Before even touching on the group’s music, the fact that the crew looks like folks auditioning for a New York Dolls biopic is a bit confusing. Does Spokane warrant such attire? The music being tied to a conception of garage gleaned from a distance beyond any huge city makes it somewhat curios. Almost as curios as the cultivated image of trash and tossed off carelessness.

Beginning with a few singles and a ten inch, the Makers set up a web of constrictive sound that didn’t move too far past ’78 or the DMZ era in Boston. That’s not a problem, but trucking in the same sounds for such a long time is.

Issuing Hip-Notic in 1993 via Sympathy for the Record Industry was an auspicious moment for the Makers. Covering “Social End Product” wasn’t a bad move either. But by the time the group arrives at Rock Star God in 2000, any development beyond raising up a glam influence over that of the garage doesn’t do too much for staying power.

That album didn’t propel the Makers to new heights. But if persisting through another decade without falling apart is the hallmark of a good band, then this is it.

Christian Death: Why Rozz Williams Sounds British

Spawning whatever constitutes death rock isn’t exactly a career maker. Nor was it, most likely, the point of forming Christian Death. Either way, though, Rozz Williams is often credited with defining a genre that has a foot in goth, straddles punk and winks at metal. So basically, it’s just hard rock.

Forming in 1979 after a few other attempts to start bands, Williams and his cohort, which at the time counted former Adolescents guitarist Rikk Agnew, went in on a single and eventually a full length album, both released by 1982.

The first batch of songs, which can basically be figured as demo since some wound up on the full length, got sussed out during a time when Jill Emery was playing bass. And while that name isn’t going to register for too many folks, Emery would go on to perform on Hole’s first album as well as being a part of Mazzy Star.

Hole’s first album, Pretty on the Inside (1991), might not be the best landmark to reference while trying to define Christian Deaths influence. But the proclivity for noise on that disc is easily heard on 1982’s Theater of Pain. The credit for that, though, needs to be given to Agnew, who was at once capable of making sounds that might not count as chords while still being able to express a somehow sensible melody.

As the disc begins with “Cavity (First Communion),” Agnew is basically engaged with his own echo as he drives a few chords into the ground, repeating ethereal breaths of guitar. Forming the base for Williams to drool out some lyrics, the rhythm section finds itself allowed to move from fast to slow and back again all while Agnew spits out his down-strokes.

But why does Williams sound like a recent evacuee from London?

Well, seeing as the entire punk underground was at this point concerned with dressing the part, it should be easily figured that any offshoot from the genre would conceive of itself in the same way. If there’s a music, then there surely must be an visual aesthetic that goes along with it. But since it’s all clearly a contrived circus, why not toss in some affected vocals. And as Williams spins out the blood for what seems like twenty minutes, the fact that it’s all a ghoulish hoax winds up being alright. The dancey stuff that follows is more confusing.

Nick Tosches: An Annotated Bibliography (Part One)

Watching – or in this case reading – a creative type’s maturation lends insight for not just understanding a single body of work, but of the process that person’s engaged with. Nick Tosches isn’t the Dean of Rock Criticism. But most likely, he doesn’t want to be. What follows, though, might put him up for that title if Robert Christgau kicks the bucket.

Paranoid: Black Sabbath. 1970.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/reviews/album/2747/21208

(accessed September 18, 2010).

Hinting at Tosches’ future as a writer of fiction, the majority of this review is focused on relating an imagined and pretty disturbing scenario summoned by the music heard on Paranoid. Since two-thirds of the review is given over to descriptions of impaled babies and smoking hookahs, it’s impossible to realize Tosches isn’t even writing about Sabbath. He apparently mistook the first album by Black Widow, entitled Return to the Sabbat and released a year before Sabbath recorded or issued any material, for Ozzy’s group.

Most amusing, though, is that if Tosches never mentioned Kip Treavor’s name, no one would have known the difference. Music isn’t discussed so much as distilled by the purposefully disturbing images. And while it makes for a good read, the review was clearly a tossed off work, pointing to the drastic shifting in editorial voice Rolling Stone would undergo over the years.

 

Transformer: Lou Reed. 1973.

http://www.superseventies.com/spreedlou.html

(accessed September 18, 2010).

A tremendous number of words work to set Reed’s second solo album in an historical context. And for those unfamiliar with the singer/song-writer’s work, that’s a useful thing. At the time this review ran in Rolling Stone, though, it’d be safe to guess Reed was a relatively well known commodity. Even with that, though, Tosches railing against Bowie’s co-opting Reed’s sexuality, or lack there of, is as amusing as any of his other short reviews.

Luckily, though, this write up actually gets into music after a good bit of mocking the homosexuality of all involved, including the laughable image accompanying Transformer which depicts some guy in pants too tight to properly understand wearing them.

Surprisingly, Tosches doesn’t find too much of the disc worth listening to. He mentions a few tracks of note – one being a left over from the Velvet Underground days, which the writer either ignores or simply chooses to ignore. More than music or the people involved with the disc, though, Tosches choose to comment on how the endeavor’s basically just “homo stuff” even as he desires it to be a “lunar assfuck.”

Destroy All Monsters: A Detroit Rock Legacy

More often than not, Destroy All Monsters are couched in terms of its members. And while it’s notable that Ron Asheton (formerly of the Stooges) and Michael Davis (an MC5 player) did time in the group, neither figured into the band’s initial conception. Of course, my mentioning that as entrance into a brief write up on the band does the same thing as figuring each of those men as indispensible in the group’s trajectory. Worse things have happened.

Out of the urban/suburban stasis continuing to mount in the Midwest, despite the Stooges and the 5 working to throw it over, Detroit and Ann Arbor remained relatively boring in a music sense. There was no lack of garage cum psych bands. And even the free jazz players of the era were kicking around. In all of this musical expression, there was still a state of scaffolding. Free improv, to an extent, was still burdened by finding the tonic and having everyone play some theme in order to end a composition.

Destroy All Monsters when the group counted Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Niagara and Cary Loren as its principals weren’t restrained by ideas pertaining to order. Their music had more to do with the moment of experience and how to express it.

The resulting, unwieldy and at times, difficult to hear early recordings from DAM and some latter day work was assembled in the form of 74-76 a few years back and issued through Ecstatic Peace (Thurston Moore) and Yod Records (Byron Coley) in a joint venture.

The three disc set intersperses some of the more song oriented fair, which finds Niagra attempting to carry a tune in tones somewhere between Nancy Sinatra and Nico, and the noisier works, completely detached from any concept of Western song structure.

“Wahs,” from the collection’s second disc, includes tape loops and a few supplemental sound effects that weren’t really in practice during the mid seventies within rock-related acts. The fact that a pair of Roger Millers’ (Mission of Burma) brothers did time in DAM shouldn’t be a tremendous shock even as the eldest’s career centered on Boston and not the Midwest.

With such an open view of what could or should go into making music, taking on Asheton and Davis eventually moved DAM through to the punk world, which was establishing itself concurrent to this ensemble’s evolution. And as time wore on, DAM’s artsier contingent either checked out, were kicked out or simply became disillusioned enough to stop caring. There’s still some good ‘music’ to wade through, though.

Cabaret Voltaire:The History of Art through the History of Music

There’s this thing called punk. And for whatever reason, over the last thirty some odd years, it’s worked to incorporate any and every creative pursuit into its broad umbrella. When this combination of punk and otherness does in-fact occur, it very frequently winds up becoming something beyond the foundational genre. So, things like post-punk, synth-punk and art-punk among innumerable other iterations aren’t punk (whatever that is), but an extension of it.

Of course, commoditization of the genre and Warped Tour styled nonsense detract from a broad and popular view of this music. But at it’s essence, punk is and should be all inclusive.

For that reason, over time, any number of art practices, both theoretical and aural, have been pushed through the music and resulted in a number of odd outcomes.

So a group being named Cabaret Voltaire after the venerable – and somehow still standing -performance space in Zürich shouldn’t be the greatest surprise of a life time. And while the Sheffield, UK based group appreciated the idea of Dada and the ridiculous in a broad and all inclusive manner, its music might be thought to eschew those concepts.

Most folks are going to be familiar with Marcel Duchamp’s toilet. He displayed it as art, shocked the world and has been famous for about a hundred years at this point. To a modern viewer, the move probably seems playful, at the time it probably didn’t.

It’s in this cultural space that Cabaret Voltaire, the band, and its music come into play.

To new listeners, the group and it’s first two albums – Mix Up (1979) and The Voice Of America (1980) – are going to be difficult to wade through. There’re enough malevolent electronic noises to put off almost any straight listener. And while that was most likely part of the point, there was still a joke aspect to the entire thing accounting for “This is Entertainment,” a pretty simple electronic construction with the song’s title repeated endlessly in the background.

Equally amusing is what Cabaret Voltaire does to the Seeds’ garage classic “No Escape” on its first album. Coming in as the second track should clue everyone in that this group intends to dismantle what came before it and display the results – just like the aforementioned toilet as art. At this early stage in the group’s recordings, though, the garage source material is still apparent. For just that reason, there’re more than a few folks who find CV’s subsequent recordings to warranting greater merit.

The Snivelling Shits: Rock Journos as Musical Satirists

It’d be difficult to count the number of writers and commentators who have eventually turned to music in order to realize some obtuse fantasy. Of course, making a career of writing about people who stand on-stage in front of a crowd for some sort of weird self aggrandizing greed is usually the impetus for that writerly impulse. We all want some one to pay attention. And really, the written word isn’t the best way to get that. Instead, turning an ability most exercised on paper into a performance of one kind or another becomes a tremendous driving force.

Richard Meltzer did it. Lester Bangs did it. Cameron Crowe made a few million dollars off of it. The Snivelling Shits (sic) and its front-man Giovanni Dadomo are basically the same as those aforementioned folks, minus any sort of renown, in any arena.

But the one time Sounds music writer cobbled together a punk act in ’77, which included another scribe named Dave Fudger on guitar, that trucked in snide retellings of old songs as well as working up a few originals. Before delving into specifics, it’s easiest to just say that the time and place (London) should pretty easily provide ample explanation of what this sounds like. If not, though, it’s somewhere between the Sex Pistols and Mark P’s more sing/speak moments with Alternative Television.

During the group’s proper lifespan, it only released a total of four tracks over two singles. “Crossroads” is just another Velvet Underground appropriation, replacing the New Yawk cool with an auld world depression. “Only Thirteen,” its b-side, is what it looks like.

The “Terminal Stupid” b/w “I Can’t Come” disc, though, comes off as a more clever statement on life, if not original in its construction or how the message is conveyed. That second track has nothing to do with showing up at a party. It’s about sex. The best part, though, is the list of folks who Dadomo figures can’t cum – including Sigmund Freud. Sounding no different than whatever other singles were out a the time didn’t do much to make the Snivelling Shits stars. It’s name most likely disallowed that.

Being left with the leftovers on I Can’t Come, in addition to the band’s singles output, doesn’t reveal all that much. These guys were just another clutch of players, eking out a living typing during the day and wanted attention at night. Hopefully, they got enough.

Chicago's Gentrification: Art Folks Caught in Being Clever (Part One)

Accidentally or not, artists camping out in low rent areas eventually result in some sort of migration. Gentrification is frowned upon by displaced populations – of course – but land owners and developers are usually pretty pleased. Even if a clutch of minorities are eventually pushed out of a neighborhood, folks running the city generally don’t mind too much. And there’s definitely no outrage when rents become too exorbitant for those artsy denizens eventually being shuffled through the area either.

The West Loop’s somewhere in the middle of it’s complete and total transformation into an upper class Mecca replete with clothing stores hosted by rail thin, would-be models and trafficked by upper class ladies whose pocket books are weighted down by the income of their husbands. Of course, everyone’s glad when a few more coffee shops pop up.

Walking past a slew of overpriced restaurants, which for lunch seem to be frequented by bald business men who’ve parked their BMW utility vehicles out front, most would get the general impression that Randolph Ave. and its surrounding environs aren’t too much more than a destination to blow a few dollars.

That might not be completely incorrect.

Maintaining an economically prosperous neighborhood, predicated on any collection of businesses and its clientele, shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, especially in an economic climate leaving most folks with the flu. But at the same time, how inviting a neighborhood is to a wide variety of people is an important aspect of sustaining an atmosphere of continued success.

Among the buildings dating to the earliest moments of the twentieth century, all brick and charm, a few razed plots are scattered around this quarter of Chicago begging for development. Within viewing distance are usually a couple new, resplendent condos ostensibly functioning to make the rest of the neighborhood look older than it actually is. The contrast is interesting, but disquieting and sometimes confusing as turning a corner transports those walking down the street to another place. It’s just as likely to see a Tucker Carlson look-alike parking a Volkswagen as it is to hear someone shouting “cullo” into a cell phone just up the block.

But that’s what loft dwellers like: the promise of excitement. The previously mentioned women screaming in Spanish might eventually accost a renter for some reason, making one’s monthly lodging costs for a space uneconomical to heat in any conventional manner during the winter worth while. And then there’d be cool story to tell about rubbing up against the lower classes.

It’s interesting to wonder, though, if you have enough money to live in this particular neighborhood, why would you? Oprah and her Harpo Studios being down the road certainly have nothing to do with it. That cultural icon finding the area a befitting place to plunk down her business, as horrific as it is to look at, says something about the shifting nature of the neighborhood. Maybe it’s already changed, explaining why the local Salvation Army displays some weighty price tags.

Ron House: TJ Slave Apartments, Great Plains and Other Works You Haven't Heard Yet (Part One)

“There's just too much music being made. The desperate, the dedicated and the crazy are still going to make good music though.” Ron House, Perfect Sound Forever Interview

It’s weird to think that a huge clutch of crazy people House is referring to in that quote reside in Columbus. There’re almost too many folks to even run down. A portion of them, though, were connected to the Mike Rep crew – not that he functioned as a sort of leader. Far from it. Instead, Rep might just be looked at as a jack of all trades, contributing to a number of different ensembles. And even while there were a few groups to garner national attention, no matter how fleeting it was, Rep remained ensconced in his Columbus mystic.

None of these figures ever got overwhelmingly famous. But Ron House, whose kicked around as much as any one else, found himself attached to Rick Rubin’s American Recordings during the time that Seattle made it acceptable to be a weirdo. Of course, House had been recording for well over a decade by that point. His discography, though, is more difficult to suss out than his music, which could be figured as an extension of the Cleveland stuff working its way into America’s subculture during the late seventies.

Whatever the case, he hasn’t been anthologized properly, even if a few attempts have been made. That’s how much music there is. And it’s probably better than most of what you’ve been listening to.

This is by no means a comprehensive run down,  just a few notes on work House has had played a part in.

Twisted Shouts: As a part of Blind Boy In The Backseat, a release attempting to solder together various groups House was involved with during the late seventies and early eighties, a few efforts crop up from this group. An argument could be made that the Twisted Shouts efforts on this Columbus Discount disc comprise the most intriguing moments. Leading off with “Chuck Berry’s Orphan” (which is also a part of New Wave as the Next Guy release), it should become clear that the entirety of the album is going to grant listeners entrance into a unique combo of garage, almost inept rock and a smattering of punk inflected singing or warbling. Whichever seems more appropriate given the song.

Along with Twisted Shouts work here are a few collabos with Rep and some works from groups that don’t, to my knowledge, have its music currently issued elsewhere. Some of it moves into Great Plains territory, which was undoubtedly a concurrent project, but again points to how many ideas House must have idea pertaining to music and writing.

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