Radar Bros and Overseas at the Satellite

Still buzzing from some recent cultural highs -- Keith Jarrett's Standards Trio at UCLA Royce Hall, the Glass/Wilson Einstein on the Beach at Los Angeles Opera -- we're looking forward to a smaller but no less welcome event in town this week. That's LA's own Radar Bros -- who we've written about several times -- with Overseas, the new collaboration between Matt Kadane (Bedhead, The New Year) with Daniel Bazan of Pedro the Lion. They'll be at the Satellite on Wednesday.

The Radar Bros, on Merge Records, are well known to Angeleno indie fans, tho still probably not celebrated enough. With roots in the '90s "slowcore" scene that's also included Spain and Acetone, they've become tougher and a bit harder. (The joke used to be that they were the only band in history that played slower when they performed live.)

Here's a video from a song on their latest album, Eight.

Overseas is making its first trip to the West Coast, with a self-titled recording.

The Kadanes (Matt and his bro Bubba, proud Texans) are on a very small lists of musicians: We (I think) everything they're recorded. The new band extends their old work -- Bedhead and The New Year had the mix of aching melody and mellow instrumental chaos that makes the best indie rock. They appeal to the side of us that wish The Feelies or Luna had made a dozen more albums apiece.

Here's a video for one of their new songs:

We'd love to tell you more about how much we love these groups, though since we're completing Creative Destruction, a book about the evisceration of the creative class, we must keep moving.

Hope to see you at Spaceland, er, the Satellite. Both bands are in San Diego on Thursday.

British History and Texas Music

A SHORT, insightful new book about the making of the modern world – told in microcosm – has just come from the pen of a noted indie rocker.

Here at The Misread City, we’ve been impressed with the melancholy genius of Matt Kadane since the first record, What Fun Life Was, from his old band, Dallas slowcore quartet Bedhead. Like the group that followed, The New Year, Bedhead was defined by melodic songwriting and intricate, understated guitar playing – VU’s hushed third record, with a bit of Sonic Youth and New Order, a hint of Texas twang, and almost no effects. (I wrote about The New Year for the LA Times in 2008, and the video for their song "Disease" appears near the end of this post.)

Turns out Kadane (who led both groups with his bearded brother Bubba) spent much of his musical career getting a doctorate at Brown; these days he teaches history at Hobart and William Smith College in upstate New York.

In any case, Kadane’s new book is The Watchful Clothier: The Life of an Eighteenth-Century Protestant Capitalist. This is the kind of history we like – lucid, free of jargon and with a clear narrative and analytical direction. (Full disclosure: The Watchful Clothier appears on Yale University Press, the house on which I will publish my own work on the perils of the creative class, sometime next year.) It takes off from some ideas of one of our favorite historians, Christopher Hill. whose book on English radicalism, The World Turned Upside Down, inspired song sung by Billy Bragg song. (The Watchful Clothier, for what it's worth, includes an endorsement from the important historian Joyce Appleby, though it awaits its treatment by a British pop artist.)

What follows is my Q and A, conducted by email, with the historian and indie rocker. I ask Kadane about both sides of his amphibious identity.

Protestantism and the market economy are two of the key forces in the modern West, and have been specially joined at least since Max Weber and maybe since the Puritans. How did your "watchful clothier" seem like the right lens though which to gaze at these big issues?

The clothier, Joseph Ryder, lived in eighteenth-century Leeds where he ran a small business.  Leeds was one of the great cities of the industrial revolution and was undergoing big changes during Ryder's life, which ended in 1768, right around the time that industrialization was noticeably beginning.  But already while he was in his active years, the population was growing at an unprecedented rate, more and more people were becoming wage laborers, the cloth that the town produced was heading to markets further and further afield, and all these things played a major role in laying the framework for modern capitalism.  Ryder was, at the same time, a deeply pious and traditional Protestant and wrote a two and a half million word diary to document his religious life.  So he lived at the intersection of these big religious and material forces, and he's an ideal case study for seeing how they interacted.

Today, Protestantism and capitalism seem pretty comfortable with each other -- in many parts of the American South and Midwest, for instance, they both stand triumphant, with arms joined. But in the 18th century you chronicle, they seem to be in some serious tension with each other, don't they?

I agree that they now they seem designed for each other.  Mega-churches meet all the basic definitions of big business.  There are also, to be fair, subplots that complicate the story, more selfless social activists within the various denominations, and so on.  But the way things largely stand today is pretty different from how they were envisioned in the centuries closer to the Reformation.   Sermons back then railed against acquisitiveness, successful parishioners wrung their hands even when they balked at the idea of maximizing profits.  What complicates this image is that the Puritan ethos was also partly responsible for a new more relentless mode of striving in the world.  For reasons that I think Max Weber was basically the first to see, and however much the argument may need to be modified, Protestantism at its most scrupulous, at its most unguided by external authority, and in the right economic setting could encourage secular ambition as a way to overcome anxiety about salvation.

The nature of Christianity changed during this period, as Newton took hold and the Enlightenment reinforced the prestige science and rationalism. "A watchful God had become a watchmaker," you write. What happened and how was it felt at the time?

Christianity in the eighteenth century is hard to describe without qualification.  This is, after all, the age of the first great awakening.  But if traditional Christianity in western Europe was reasserting itself, this was in large part because it was also changing in the hands of rationalists, who may have been a minority of the population but who for that very reason were also radically vocal.  In the eyes of these anti-traditionalists, Jesus was often seen as a mere man, God was conceptualized as a sort of mathematician who designed a universe according to such sublime laws that it could run itself without Providential intervention, and the notion that humans are fundamentally depraved no longer seemed tenable.  Religious figures who were coming to think this way were also especially successful by the later eighteenth century in getting their message across to the emerging industrialists.  Churches throughout the north of England that had more or less been Calvinist at the beginning of the century were actively looking for religious radicals, particularly Unitarians, to start leading the flock.  Historians have more or less known that this was happening, but what has been missing from the story is the sort of parishioner's first hand account that Ryder offers.

Ryder recorded in his diary something like 5,000 sermons that he heard preached throughout Yorkshire, and what this record shows are two really interesting things.  One is that the new religious outlook, with its emphasis on the dignity of humans and the humanity of Jesus, had a natural affinity with emerging commercial self-interest.  Puritanism could also encourage economic striving to overcome anxiety about salvation, but it had a much stricter definition of what counted as economic excess.  And it's much easier to be fully self-interested if, for example, you actually believe that you're worthwhile rather than utterly depraved as Puritans thought.    So to accommodate the remarkable wealth that industrialists were generating, the religion of so many of these people had to soften on certain points.  A more rationalist religion was more compatible with more materially rational expectations.  But then the other thing that Ryder shows is that this religious and cultural shift could unsettle more conservative parishioners, who nevertheless stuck it out with some of the chapels that were basically turning the old Puritan ethos upside down.  Ryder went to his grave feeling like the ministers who were telling him to love himself a little more were actually getting Christianity wrong.  So I think you have to see religious change in the Enlightenment for the incredibly complicated process that it was.  But once you do see that, then the reason that the cultural effort to decriminalize self-interest was so concerted becomes intelligible--and this really was a decades long effort on the part of opinion makers like David Hume, Adam Smith, and others.  It was hard to convince people, the very sorts of industrious people who Smith theorized could make the nation unprecedentedly rich, that the traditional Christian take on wealth was exactly wrong.  Trying to transform self-interest from a vice into a virtue was such a massive cultural project for people like Adam Smith because people like Ryder, however poised they were to bolster the wealth of the nation by virtue of their industry and enterprise, were committed to a sort of morality that Smith and others saw as antithetical to capitalism.

What surprised you the most in your research as you dove into Ryder's life and times?

That he was actually interesting.  I recognized right away that his diary was an incredible source, and I knew I had to try to do something with it, but I was put off by his perspective.  I had originally been much more interested in the radicals.  But I didn't just grow to like him, which is in any case not a necessary condition for writing about someone.  I grew interested in how torn he was.  He equivocates about everything, not just commerce.  He could come across rioters and feel for them, but only if they were rioting from need and in reaction to unfair laws.  He had a deep sense of social propriety but could still feel sympathy for a maligned woman who showed up at his house drunk one night looking for spiritual advice.  He dressed down his household workers who helped him make cloth and afterwards confided to his diary that he was just as undisciplined in his youth and should think twice before feeling superior.  Those same workers were often orphans who he seems to have been attached to in at least of couple of cases, in no small part because he and his wife tried but failed to have children of their own.  And then that wife, a woman he never actually names in his diary, was an object of serious ambivalence.  When they married just a few months after the woman he was really in love with got away, he found her less exciting than his diary.  A few years into the marriage they had grown emotionally attached, and he was devastated when she died before her fortieth birthday and he had to go on alone for another decade and a half.  By all accounts people also liked him.  Maybe not surprisingly.  Ambivalent people see things from at least two angles, and that can make them much more empathetic beings than the dogmatists.

Which historical school or method are you most indebted to, and why is is important to you?

When I was an undergraduate I had a picture of Foucault on the wall beside my desk, still such a great picture from the interview he did in Vanity Fair in '83, not long before he died.  I don't see him in the same exalted way, but one thing I took from him I still believe:  doing history can usefully denature the present.  You get the same insight in Marx, another big influence.  Nietzsche too.  But Foucault also made me think that a key part of the story was the early modern past, especially in western Europe.  In graduate school I fell more under the influence of people like Weber, Pierre Bourdieu and others who more or less assert the importance of culture as a motive force even while staying tuned in to the material.  And when trying to describe culture I've learned not just from Clifford Geertz but from the major figures in semiotics who I avidly read as an undergraduate, from practitioners of microhistory like Carlo Ginzburg, from the British Marxists historians, especially Thompson, Hill, and Hobsbawm, that last of whom, despite his flaws, was particularly inspiring as one of my own teachers in graduate school.  A number of historians have also directly taught me the importance of archival research.  Margaret Jacob stands at the top of that list.  Her energy and curiosity in the archives are legendary, and she has had major insights about the enlightenment and the causes of industrialization because of her willingness to undertake some pretty unromantic labor.  I could say the same about my undergraduate mentor William Taylor, one of the great colonial Latin Americanists, whose footnotes will make you tremble.  Really I could say the same about two other guys who I worked with in graduate school, Tim Harris and Phil Benedict.  When you approach history as a philosophy student, as I did when I first began graduate school, there's a real temptation to be theoretical at the expense of contemporaries' experience.  I'm grateful to the theorists who can so clearly lay out the big questions.  But if I hadn't been encouraged by these historians I've just named, and they're not the only ones, then I don't think I'd have anything remotely useful to say about what happened in the past.

For a musician or music fan, there must be a double resonance to studying northern English industrial cities like Leeds or Manchester. Not only did they experience what you call "the birth pangs of modern capitalism" more acutely than anywhere else, these cities have produced more than their share of great rock music -- Gang of Four, Mekons, Joy Division, Smiths, Stone Roses, many more. Do you see any relation between those early-modern social forces and the culture that emerged much later?

I guess I don't see much of a relationship when it comes to religion.  In the centuries that separate these bands from the people I look at in the book there's a good case to be made that Christianity has almost died in Britain.  With the economy there may be more of a connection.  These bands are to de-industrialization what Ryder was to pre-industrialization.  And without the industrial revolution, Manchester and Leeds would still likely be small towns with little of the context--gritty urban decay, university life, radical class politics, and so on--that helped define those bands and their sound, especially when their music was recorded by Martin Hannett.  It's a great question, and I wish I had a better answer.

Congratulations to Matt Kadane the historian -- what is next for Matt Kadane the indie rock star?

The New Year is two-thirds finished with a new record.  The basic tracks are done and in the case of a few songs we're further along.  My brother and I also have a new band with David Bazan and Will Johnson called Overseas.  We just finished mastering the first record, which is set to come out at the beginning of June, followed by some shows in August on the east coast, west coast, and in Texas.  I'm excited to play music again.

In Search of Ryan Adams

EVERY few years, Ryan Adams surprises me. He'll put out a song or album that reminds me what a goddam genius the self-destructive lad can be. 

He's someone I'm always on the verge of writing off as a  narcissistic showboat, or a pastiche artist, but he comes through with some of the most poignant and alive work in the entire alt-country tradition. It's a bit low-key for me, but last year's Ashes and Fire LP was one of those reminders, and some days I play the nine great songs on Cold Roses and just marvel at what a singer and songwriter the North Carolina native -- now long settled in Los Angles -- can be. 

I don't have nearly the same kind of roller-coaster relationship with the work of David Menconi, the longtime Raleigh News and Observer music critic, and frequent contributor to No Depression magazine. (Since I met him at South by Southwest, years ago, I've respected him for his knowledge of the tradition and his gift for clipped, distilled phrase-making.)

Menconi was among the first journos to notice Adams, and stayed on him during his early years with Whiskeytown and then as a solo artist in North Carolina. 

Those years, and the ones that came after, are the basis of Ryan Adams: Losering, A Story of Whiskeytown, Menconi's new book. It's the kind of short, well-reported musician's bio I wish we had more of. And it's the second in the American Music Series that Menconi is editing for the University of Texas Press.

Here is our recent Q&A on Ryan Adams.

You open the book with a night where you saw Ryan play at what was practically an open-mic in 1995. What struck you about his musicianship and performing style that first night?

Even in that informal a setting, Ryan’s raw talent was obvious. Precocious, too; he looked like a little kid, but his playing, singing and songwriting already seemed fully developed. And he was also remarkably mature in terms of expressing emotion. Every song, it really did sound like he put a little slice of his heart out there. He was remarkable.

The Ryan you met that night was already conscious of being a star. It seemed important to him from an early age, didn’t it?

Absolutely. His love for the music was also obvious, and he already conveyed a sense of swagger. He wanted to be big, larger than life, to matter. Plus he was just so enthusiastic about most everything, it was impossible not to be charmed. I thought so, anyway.

“He especially liked the rock clichés,” one musician and journalist said of him. How has that worked out over his career?

Way back when, that would manifest itself in Ryan adopting what one of his peers derisively called “rocker constumes” – dressing the rock-star part and carrying himself with a kind of Keith Richards vibe. During his solo era, he has spent entire albums aping his idols; “Gold” was Ryan doing a classic-rock playlist, “Rock N Roll” was him paying tribute to his new-wave favorites and so on. The results have been mixed, but he’s just so danged talented that pretty much everything he does is at least worth listening to.

How has Ryan seemed to have developed as an artist since, say, the first Whiskeytown recordings, or the beginning of his solo career with Heartbreaker?

My perspective, which I’m quite certain Ryan himself wouldn’t agree with, is that he has done his best work when he had something to say and peers to answer to. I don’t think it’s coincidental that his best record, Whiskeytown’s “Stranger’s Almanac,” was produced by a demanding taskmaster (Jim Scott) who kicked Ryan’s butt. I’m sure that was an unpleasant process, but the results were great. Ryan has done some fine work since then, but also a lot that sounds self-indulgent and unfocused. Last year’s “Ashes & Fire” was his best in years, so maybe he’s getting that focus back.

After covering him incessantly for years, you and Ryan had an odd falling out in 2001, and he’s not spoken to you since. How did that make the book harder, and how did you make up for that?

Ryan’s non-cooperation turned out to be less of an obstacle than I feared it might be. I felt like the most interesting part of his career was the Whiskeytown era, and I had voluminous archival material that I’d hung onto over the years (sometimes it pays to be a packrat). So his non-cooperation naturally moved the focus toward that period; and in some ways, I felt like it was a better book without the present-day Ryan in it. He changes his mind a lot and says numerous contradictory things, and I’m told his memories of that time aren’t terribly sharp. Anything he would have told me about those days probably would have been steeped in revisionist history.

For years it seemed like Ryan was going to either end up dead on the floor of a bar, or become bigger-than-Wilco huge. He seems less naturally suited to the middle ground, or to a hip, culty following of the kind Alejandro Escovedo or Gillian Welch have. Or is it just me?

Well, there is kind of an unrequited vibe about his career. Implosions of the band’s lineup and then the industry (the 1999 Universal/PolyGram merger) scuttled Whiskeytown’s chances; and then the record that was supposed to make him huge, 2001’s “Gold”…well, didn’t. At the same time, however, Ryan has a career that would be the envy of almost anyone. He can put out albums and sell into six figures, and play live as much as he wants while selling out 3,000-seat halls. In 2012, that’s about as good as it gets.

Tell us a bit about this American Music series you’re helming with Peter Blackstock of No Depression.

Glad you asked that! It’s being put out by University of Texas Press; and the rough thumbnail description is that if you can imagine a No Depression magazine feature about someone, then they might be a subject. Over time, we hope to broaden the subjects beyond Americana and alternative country and to have a wide array of authors. Peter and I are co-editors, and I’d liken our roles to record-company A&R people. We cast the nets among writers and artists, and bring suggested projects back to UT Press. They get final say since it’s their money, but we get a voice and a vote.

Don McLeese’s Dwight Yoakam bio was the first in the series, and Ryan is the second. Up next will be Merle Haggard by David Cantwell, and more are at various stages, including Los Lobos and the supergroup Flatlanders. I’m most excited about Kristin Hersh of Throwing Muses writing about the late great Vic Chesnutt.

What do you expect is next for Ryan Adams?

Well, “Ashes & Fire” was a good step back in the right direction, and it made me hope he was back. Since then he’s spent time doing a lot of different stuff – producing his wife (singer/actress Mandy Moore), producing/playing drums in the Lemonheads, recording with deadmau5, producing D-Generation. I’m sure he’s having the time of his life, and good for him. But…I think the cause of civilization and rock ’n’ roll would be better-served by Ryan bearing down and making his own record. Maybe he will. I hope so. Despite it all, I’m still a fan.

Two New Cop Shows

THE new television season is starting, and there are a lot of new cop shows. So far the best I've seen is the mellow, low-key Terriers, which I reviewed for The Hollywood Reporter last week. Two new shows try a lot harder but achieve less. 


Here's my review of the Hawaii Five-0 reboot, which begins: 


By the time the shooting begins in earnest on "Hawaii Five-0," about halfway through the pilot, the action comes across well-directed, the camerawork crisp, the pace just right. But it took half an hour to get to this, and it just wasn't worth it.


And here's Chase, and its lead:


"Chase" begins with a fit blonde in tight jeans and a sharp leather jacket chasing a criminal through the streets of an unnamed city, brow furrowed in concentration. Pretty soon they're in a stockyard -- this turns out to be Fort Worth -- then a rodeo. We're all over Texas in this hourlong drama from NBC, and by show's end we'll be everywhere from Houston's skyline to a cowboy bar in San Antonio to a border crossing into Mexico.


In short, Chase seemed to me formulaic, but it has potential and the lead is quite good. Hawaii Five-0 -- which has some serious talent behind it -- only shines during the action scenes. The original is much smarter and cooler. Maybe they'll both get better. 


I'm sure some people will like both shows, and many critics like Five-0 quite a bit. But here's the thing: We are supposedly in a golden age of television, and shows like Deadwood, The Wire, Sopranos, The Office, etc., have shown how good TV can be. Does every new show have to be as good as those? Of course now. But they've gotta be better than this. 

California Vs. The Great Plains

The writer and urbanist Joel Kotkin has a fascinating piece in a recent Newsweek called "The Great Great Plains," which looks at the way cities like Fargo and Bismarck -- as well as most of Texas -- are booming while much of the rest of the country languishes in a dead economy.

It got us here at the Misread City wondering: What are Omaha and Dallas doing right that Los Angeles and other West Coast cities are doing wrong? And why can't the great state of California keep up with... North Dakota?

I'm a longtime admirer of the work of Kotkin, whose latest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. I spoke to him for a New York Times piece about bohemia and the recession, and while I suspect his politics and mine are not always congruent, he's a formidable thinker and reporter. We're happy to have him in a Misread City Q+A.

So in brief, why do the cities of the plains seem to be doing so well?

Basically these cities benefit from being in the heart of the commodity economy that benefits from growing demand from China and India, which are currently the engines of the U.S. economy. They also have good schools, are affordable and reasonably pro business.

Meanwhile, West Coast cities, especially LA, remain in the toilet economically. Given all the dynamism here, Why?

California is committing suicide, at least economically. The extreme 'green' policies are just the latest blow after a series of tax and regulatory burdens that are forcing business to expand elsewhere. We still have some key headquarters - more in north than south - and amazing skills, but the flow is almost all the wrong way. In LA specifically there seems to have been little economic strategy except the notion of green jobs, which is largely hype and every other community is going after. So we end up with solar plants in Arizona manufactured outside the state so we can pay for ever more expensive energy...

The key is that the city council in particular, along with the Mayor, have no notion of how economies work, although they may be writing the book (unconsciously of course) on how to make one not work.

This is not just a tax and regulatory issue. Other places with similar burdens - Boston, NY, Seattle - are not booming but doing better. If it wasn't for Detroit we'd be the big city basket case in the country

How much do California’s woes have to do with the tax-revolt measure Prop. 13?

Prop 13 had several bad effects. First, it centralized decision-making in Sacramento, never a good idea, since it took away property tax revenues. Second, it shifted taxes too much to income, which hurt entrepreneurs, the middle class and investors. It also made the state more liable to wild swings in stock and housing markets. Third, it became an excuse for people, largely on the left, to ignore the larger problems of over-regulation and hostility to business.

Prop 13 went too far and should have been restricted only to residences, with a cap at some level. But as someone who covered it at the time, the establishment (that's including most business) did not have the will to reform a system that was driving people out of their homes.

In other words, lots of blame to go around.

How much longer do you expect West Coast cities will be ailing, and what will it do to our urbanism, our neighborhoods and sense of civic connection?

 

I am not sure you can put all the western cities in one context. Seattle and Portland have much smaller working class, minority populations and more access to clean energy (hydro mostly). They should transition a bit earlier given their own anti-business instincts.

The Bay Area has a leg up with Silicon Valley and has a more affluent population. San Diego and Orange also have problems but also not as many poor people or workers in distressed industries as LA or the Inland Empire. They will lag US but not as much as LA.

LA has the most diverse economy but needs to keep its traditional linchpins (manufacturing, trade and entertainment) going. Right now hard to see how this happens until there is a major political change.