RECENTLY I've been corresponding with Dave Allen, bassist for the British post-punk group Gang of Four. His ideas on digital culture -- mostly strongly opposed to those of David Lowery and David Byrne -- are as forceful as his bass playing on Entertainment!
I'll point out that I disagree with Mr. Allen on much of what he says; I'm less optimistic that the new system will work out for musicians (and I have seen from quite a close perspective how it works out for most journalists.)
For example, he argues that there has been no golden age for musicians, that making a living has always been hard, and so on. Well, of course, that's all literally true, but just because a system was not perfect does not mean it has not gotten substantially worse.
I could argue to anyone who tells me, say, that Congress has run aground that we've always had conflicts in Washington, going back to the 18th century, and that Ted Cruz is just a latter-day version of whoever... Same with arguments about income inequality, or anything that matters. This argument does not help clarify where we are at present: You do not have to acknowledge the existence of a golden age to want things to be better or to resist and criticize the way they have gone.
But Allen's an extremely sharp guy, a lively writer, and he deserves to be heard. Here's our Salon conversation.
THESE days I am digging Queens of
Noise, the new book by Evelyn McDonnell, onetime Village Voice rock critic now
settled in Los Angeles. The book, subtitled The Real Story of the Runaways,
looks at the ‘70s LA punk/hard-rock band best remembered, probably, for a teenaged Joan Jett, the
song "Cherry Bomb," and some pretty amazing feathered hair.
I’ve admired McDonnell’s work for two
decades now, and have since gotten to know her a bit, and for a year taught
more-or-less alongside her at Loyola Marymount University, where she is a professor
of journalism.
Here’s my conversation with McDonnell
about Queens of Noise, which she will discuss at Book Soup on Wednesday.
What drew you to the story of the
Runaways?
It's a great rock'n'roll story that
had only been told in parts, and seemed well past due for a complete treatment.
I also saw it as a narrative that's bigger than music: It's a coming of
age story about young women crossing boundaries and expressing themselves —
their sexuality, their anger, their rebellion, their fears — in ways that
hadn't really been done before. There were girl bands before the Runaways, but
none of them had the kind of exposure (so to speak) and global experiences that
these musicians did, at a pretty young age. It's also a peek into a
fascinating, rich time and place: Southern California in the mid-'70s. There
are all the elements of a great story, period, in Queens: tragedy, comedy,
mystery, drama, sex, drugs, crime, etc. With an awesome, under-appreciated
soundtrack. As a woman just a few years younger than the Runaways, with
my own California roots, and a deep love of music, I also personally related to
their saga.
You describe the band members as
creatures of the Sprawl. Give us a sense of what early-70s Southern California
– the world that made the Runaways – was like.
This was a period when the
California dream epitomized by the Beach Boys was wearing thin — fault lines
were rupturing. Decades of incredible population and economic growth had slowed
precipitously; there was Watts, Manson, smog, overspeculation, etc. The members
of the Runaways lived miles apart from each other in this car-dependent
Exopolis. They were suburban girls, from the Valley, Orange County, Long Beach.
But LA also had Hollywood, which was not just a place of Tinseltown fantasies:
it was a bohemian mecca for all the outcasts and weirdos, for the queer kids
and the runaways (small and big R). It was a place for experimentation (with
drugs and sex), for hedonism, for liberation and libidos, and for exploitation.
It was a place to escape those suburbs, and it's where the Runaways came
together.
How much access did you get to the
musicians and to band manager Kim Fowley? Did all the major characters speak to
you?
Kim Fowley, Jackie Fox, and Vicki
Blue gave me quite a bit of time explicitly for the book. I also interviewed
Joan and Lita, once each, for the book. Cherie would not do an interview for
the book, but I had interviewed her a couple of times for the Sandy West
thesis/article that was the root of the book. I never interviewed Sandy before
she died but I talked to her family. I also had interviewed Joan and Lita for
other articles over the years, and I was able to draw on that material, some of
it never published before. Plus all the other interviews listed in the back.
Within the first few chapters of the
book, you write about the debate between architecture scholar Reyner Banham and
art critic Peter Plagens on the nature of LA, and get into the work of Joan
Didion, William Gibson, and others. What’s the right amount of context in a
book like this?
As I said, I saw this as more than
just the story of one band: I also saw it as an important, emblematic piece of
cultural, social and feminist history. Those contextual pages are a tiny sliver
of the book. I think they give the book a bigger, broader meaning and
perspective, but some critics seem to feel you can't take a band like the
Runaways that seriously. It's an anti-intellectualism that seems strange to me
as a fan of Greil Marcus, Ellen Willis, and Jon Savage, but is rampant in
rock-critic criticism.
How do the Runaways fit into the
history of women in rock?
They were clearly pioneers, in terms
of the scope of their accomplishments at their age and in a relatively short
period of time: five albums, multiple national and international tours,
magazine covers and hit records (in some countries). Obviously, there were girl
vocal groups that preceded and outsold them. And there were other bands where
women played instruments — some great ones, like Fanny and Isis. But the Runaways
achieved a level of at least notoriety, and also genuine success, that had
eluded other bands. Obviously, some of that was based on the fact that they
were not shy in their sexual presentation, and in that sense, their legacy is
mixed.
Looking back, almost four decades
later, what is the band's long-term influence or legacy?
Because of Joan's and Lita's
subsequent success, the Runaways have been taken more seriously in retrospect
than they were during their brief career. Whereas some of the early female
punks repudiated them, later generations — from Riot Grrrls to the Donnas to
Miley Cyrus — have been more sympathetic to the barriers they faced and how
they faced them. They were a key transitional figure in the evolution of both
punk and hair metal, particularly in Los Angeles. They were friends with and
peers of the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. But although those bands were clearly
just as Svengali-driven and gimmicky, they always get taken more seriously. I
think the Runaways' legacy is up there with those bands, and deserves to be
acknowledged.
TODAY I have a story in Salon looking at the golden age of cable TV post-Sopranos, and contrasting this with the economic/technological forces in the culture right now.
And I ask: If HBO, or AMC, can find a profitable quality niche -- and stay in business -- can a jazz club? A book publisher? Theater company? I also look at the world of indie rock labels.
I speak to the authors of two new books, Brett Martin, of television chronicle Difficult Men, and producer Lynda Obst, of Sleepless in Hollywood.
WHY is it that so many of the band we like here at the Misread City -- a site dedicated to West Coast culture -- come from Glasgow, a city whose cold/rainy weather and Victorian/industrial cityscape is about as far from sunny coastal California as we could imagine?
It may be because so many of these bands seem influenced by '60s West Coast pop -- Pet Sounds, the Mamas and the Papas, the Byrds, Love. Or it just might be that for all our regional chauvinism, we are willing to recognize musical quality, especially when it comes in the shape of great melodies and songcraft.
One of our favorite Scottish bands, Camera Obscura, has a new album, Desire Lines, which comes out next week. (The snappy single "Do It Again" is getting a lot of play on KCRW.) We've loved this band since we heard their early song "Suspended From Class," and dig the new record heavily. Try this video for this somewhat gloomy song I really love, Fifth in Line
HERE is our interview with the group's lead singer, which took place when My Maudlin Career, the last Camera Obscura record, came out.
They're at the Wiltern on June 18. A much more assertive live band than you'd guess from all the wistfulness. See you there.
YOU would have to look long
and hard to find someone who felt less warmly about the movement known as
progressive rock as your humble blogger. (If the genre was bad in its original
appearance, it seemed doubly awful in its ‘80s AOR rebirth.) I expect a lot of
us who came of age in the years after punk feel the same way, and preferred the
concision of college radio or “modern rock” acts like R.E.M. and Elvis Costello
to endless prog symphonies. (Of course, I will make an exception here for the bizarre genius of Robert Fripp.)
Why, then, can’t I put down
this new book, Yes is the Answer, a
collection of writers on prog? I’m still not sure, but I love its combination
of humor and critical seriousness. The book is edited by longtime LA writer Marc Weingarten – an old friend whose music journalism I read in the '90s -- and Tyson Cornell, who once booked
authors at Book Soup and now runs Rare Bird Lit.
The years between Sgt. Pepper’s and those first Clash and
Pistols singles were a strange disorienting time for rock music. Glam found one
way out of that puzzle, and prog took another road. Was all that heavy,
high-pitched silliness worth it?
In any case, Yes is the Answer includes writer/producer
Seth Greenland on The Nice, novelist Matthew Specktor on Yes, Wesley Stace
(John Wesley Harding) on the prog scene of Canterbury, UK, Rick Moody on
Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Jim DeRogatis on Genesis, music writer Margaret
Wappler on getting laid to King Crimson, New York Times food writer Jeff
Gordinier on how failed sex is a lot like a Styx concert, writer/bassist Jim
Greer on Guided by Voices' debt to prog, and many other sharp, counter-intuitive pieces. Overall, it's way more fun than it has any business being. Keep your eyes peeled for
events around town. For now, here is my conversation with Weingarten.
Why did this seem like the right time
for a book on this once-mighty musical form? Is there a prog revival going on,
like when Yes returned with “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” and Rush and Asia were
rockin’ the suburbs?
I think there are a lot of bands out
there who secretly love prog but don't want to admit it - they have no cultural
cover, so to speak, because this is the last rock subgenre that hasn't been
reclaimed by hipsters. So, we thought it was a good a time as any to
point out that there's a lot of great music here, made at a time of pretty
outrageous and often overreaching experimentation. Which is also part of the
charm of prog - how crazily ambitious it was. I love the idea of bands
writing hour-long suites and traveling with orchestras - it speaks to a kind of
silly grandeur that I think is lacking in indie rock - you see it in
contemporary metal, I suppose.
Most of your contributors are -- like
you and me -- Xers who came of age with post-punk or alt-rock. We’re a
generation, then, for whom prog became a punch line or a bad memory. What
undercut prog’s world domination back then?
Because Prog was almost exclusively a
British phenomenon, it was completely stomped by Punk Rock, because Punk in
England was really a tsunami. It was time for Prog to go, anyway - it had
gotten really overblown and quite awful. I don't think any of our
contributors would argue that Relayer is better than London's Calling, but we
all have a soft spot for Prog.
How did you and your co-editor come
up with your contributors? There are a few well-known rock critics like Jim
DeRogatis, but mostly this is literary folk.
We didnt want this to be a wonky,
"Robert Fripp created Frippertronics in 1979," facts-and-figures book.
We didn't see the point of that, especially with a genre like Prog, which is so
rooted in adolescence, and cherished memories of early drug experiences, arena
shows and gatefold album analysis. It seemed like a good idea to have
non-music writers have a fresh go at it.
I count two women among all the
contributors, and suspect this is NOT the fault of the editors. Could it be
that prog has traditionally been a guy thing, and as some of your essayists
suggest, a pre-adolescent guy thing?
Totally young dude thing. One hundred
percent!
Do you have a favorite prog band or
album? Anything involving Phil Collins?
Well, Phil Collins is an incredible
drummer - and I do love all the Gabriel-era Genesis stuff. I guess King
Crimson's Red is my favorite album - a noisy, dark and disturbing record. So
unlike most Prog, in other words!
THE other day I spoke to Joe Boyd, the Britfolk impresario, because of his new tribute record, Way to Blue. The album is in honor of Nick Drake, who Boyd helped discover way back in the late '60s, and whose career was delicate, melancholy and all too short.
Today, Drake is revered not only be neo-folkies but by the leading jazz musician of my generation, pianist Brad Mehldau.
Boyd, of course, also had a role in Newport '65, the birth of Pink Floyd, Richard Thompson and Fairport Convention, AND produced what may be our favorite R.E.M. record, the enigmatic third album Fables of the Reconstruction.
Boyd got his start as a preppie New Jersey teenager who helped coax blues and jazz great Lonnie Johnson out of retirement.
Here is my conversation with Boyd, whose memoir of the musical '60s, White Bicycles, I cannot recommend highly enough.
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.
EVERY once in a while, something – a book, a short New York
Times story, an n+1 essay – appears by a mysterious character named Benjamin
Nugent, and damn if every time it isn't funny, smart and insightful.
Now Nugent – who I’ve interviewed over the years on Elliott Smith,
songcraft, and the history of nerd-dom – has a new novel called Good Kids. All I
can tell you so far is that its opening chapters have some of the best, most
well-observed writing I’ve seen on the blurry mystery of teenage-dom: I expect
the publisher and reviewers will compare the novel to Noah Baumbach’s movie The Squid
and the Whale, and not just for its kid's eye view of marital discord.
Nugent lived from time to time in Los Angeles during the oughts, which
included, I think, a hipster/celebrity brush with greatness I will not get into
here. Now back in his native New England, where he lives in Somerville and
teaches at Southern New Hampshire University, Nugent happily walked down memory
lane a bit for us here at the Misread City. He’s at Vroman’s in Pasadena on
Thursday night.
So what years did you live in
LA, and how did that time shape or influence your book?
I
bounced back and forth between LA and New York from 2003 to 2009. LA
was a dominating influence on Good Kids. I grew up in Amherst,
Massachusetts, a college town with an insular culture that followed its own
peculiar codes. And it looked like a place that lived by its own closed system
of rules. It valued decreptitude and liberalism and Jungian self-scrutiny.
But
LA fascinated me because it was this anarchic miasma of a place, a massive
spill of broken glass glimpsed from a plane. And yet the little world of people
I knew in TV and music was an insular brother/sisterhood, just like Amherst,
with its own initially inscrutable codes. There's a scene in Good
Kids at Disney Concert Hall downtown where everybody runs into each other
watching Joanna Newsom play with the Philharmonic, and I loved writing it. I
was intrigued by this tribe that drew together accidentally from time to time,
despite being dispersed across a thirty-mile zone.
Now that you are relocated
back to New England, what do you miss most from our shores?
The
smell of the hills in Silver Lake; it's like really strong weed mixed with
really healthy cat pee.
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