James Chance (1953 – 2024)

 

What pearl of wisdom, what prescient counsel, could possibly be more apropos of this moment than the ecstatic exhortation, “Contort yourself!”? As we meekly accept our sorting-hat reality, happy to enter whatever pen the algorithmic herding dogs designate, can we still cock a recalcitrant ear? Can we hear the distant voice compelling us to twist and wrench ourselves against the compliancy demanded of capital and “decent” democracy? It calls from the past and, as of this past Tuesday, from the great beyond, which is suddenly a little greater.

 

James Chance has wriggled out of his too-tight earthly container. He squeals now, amid the vibrations of the evermore.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

James Chance, undated.
(Photographer unknown.)

 

With Lydia Lunch in Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and with the Contortions, James Chance invented the sub- sub- genre known as “Skronk.” Rumor has it that the name came from the pen of rock scribe, Robert Christgau, who, for his troubles was tackled or body checked or pummeled by Chance at Artists Space in 1978. That’s what you get for trying to tell James Chance what he’s doing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Christgau (black t-shirt) receiving a hip check
from James Chance (directly in front of Christgau),
Artists Space, NYC, 1978. (Photo: Julia Gorton.)

 

 

Late 70s New York needed Chance too. I suppose we always do, wherever, whenever. Contort yourself! Back then punk rock had painted itself into a White corner. Bands in the mold of the Sex Pistols had stripped rock down to a set of rudiments, eliding the stale aroma of Claptonian blues fealty and the temptations of the dance floor. Most of them were innocent of overt racial cleansing. But the overall effect was to cut off a nose to spite a face. (Never mind that the very fundaments to which the punks “returned” were set in place to begin with by Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, and Little Richard. History is irrational. Culture, quite fully mad.) So along comes Chance. (He knew what he was doing.) He busted a move, or two or three or four. Borrowing – with utter transparency – the transcendence of “the One” from James Brown, Chance stitched together funk and punk. He was an accomplished saxophonist (emphasis on the first “o” please.) His ear tilted toward the outer edges of his instrument: Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton. Thus “The Twitch,” ostensibly a song promoting a style of dance – alá “The Twist,” “The Pony,” “The Watusi” – also descends / ascends into wild passages of atonal, barking sax and slide guitar. Note: “The Twist” this ain’t. Contort yourself! Chance had different, more desperate motivations. He recognized being alive as a temporary coffin, preceding the more permanent one. And he clawed and clamored against its confines like a cat in a well.

 

The Contortions who appear on the epochal No New York and on the debut LP, Buy, drew the blueprint. Pat Place and Jody Harris deliver assassinative dissonance and rhythm.  But later versions of the Contortions, and of James Black and the Whites, pursued the initial design with appropriately demonic devotion. Soul Exorcism Redux, on which “The Twitch” appears, is a live document of an audience being dragged, kicking and screaming, from their appointed lanes and out into the open air of true acceptance of their inevitable fate. You can feel the absurd atmosphere of punching the air for the mere pleasure of it. The air doesn’t stand a chance. Chance sucks it all into his lungs and expels it with futile fury through the bell of his horn and against the tissue of his cords. We’re all going to hell in a handbasket. Might as well dance the descent.

 

Solace is a con. As one of the slinky-funk tracks on Buy would have it “I Don’t Want to Be Happy.” Against a mechanical yet groovy bassline and piston-like hi-hat drive, Place slithers across the guitar strings and Chance flutters his signature sax skronks before he comes in with his declaration of impedence. “I said I like living a lie.” Shake your ass, your mind will follow, proclaimed George Clinton. He never said to where. Implciitly, James Chance provides the answer: nowhere, that's where. “I Don’t Want to Be Happy” goes out on the line, “I prefer the ridiculous to the sublime.” They should inscribe that on his tombstone. Or maybe just "Contort yourself!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steve Albini (1962 - 2024) 

 

So this isn't so much a eulogy as a long-delayed response to something Steve Albini wrote three decades ago. Truth is, I don’t have a lot to say about Steve Albini, personally. I’ve lived in the same town as him, circulated in the same social environment, for most of my adult life. Yet, I knew of him more than I knew him. It’s impossible, if you’ve lived a life like mine, not to know of him. His projects and opinions are legion. Many of them, possibly most, chafe against convention. Sure he kicked against the pricks. But he also pricked our kicks, piercing the inflations of our delight like a scorpion in a bouncy house. Take for example, his oft-cited 1993 article for The Baffler about the music industry. It wore the title, “The Problem with Music,” but I also saw it somewhere else bearing the title, “Some of Your Friends are Already This Fucked.” Albini provides a line item accounting of a typical band’s deal with a label, detailing what the band will be advanced against all the costs of recording, producing, and promoting a record.

 

Of course, Albini is right when he says that the game is rigged. A.) The record company is chock full of people who went to business school and who know how to read a spreadsheet. Bands are chock full of people who learned how to play instruments and write songs in order to avoid reading spreadsheets. B.) The record companies have what’s known as “institutional memory.” The company’s practices are passed down from one CFO, one lawyer, one A&R dude, one promotions intern, to the next. While every band reinvents the wheel. There’s no passing down of knowledge, no guild or union. Every band is a newborn baby locked in mortal combat with a team of professional alligator wrestlers.

 

But he’s not totally right. Because to concede that it is folly to try to make music and share it with listeners is to capitulate to the logic of the spreadsheet readers. There is more than one way to measure how fucked you are.

 

In which spreadsheet column do you enter the satisfaction of playing for people who appreciate your music? What about the accomplishment of realizing you’ve grown as a songwriter, singer, or musician?  And what currency do we use to quantify the camaraderie of living, eating, breathing, and striving with one’s bandmates over the course of a seven week tour, sleeping on floors, eating crappy meals, driving five hundred miles a day, hauling gear in and out of clubs in the freezing cold middle of the night and middle of nowhere? What do the spreadsheeters know about the mesmerism of locking in with other human beings and making a song do something that it’s never, in its hundreds of performances, done before?

 

And even on the ledger sheet there are other ways this can play out. My band, Number One Cup, had some minor success on the UK charts and had a song placed in a movie (to a pretty cool Bill Plympton animation). As a result of this and a few other factors, the small, struggling label to which we were signed was enticed into a distribution deal with Richard “Space Boy” Branson and his new (at that time) company, V2 Records. Suddenly we found ourselves with a lavish recording budget, an advance that allowed us to quit our day jobs and buy a new van. We even put our foot down and demanded that the label figure out a way to get us on their company health insurance plan. How did that work out? Literally days after the first premium of our insurance was paid, I broke my third and fourth cervical vertebrae, leaving me temporarily quadriplegic. I very nearly died and went through a series of dicey surgeries and a long period of rehab. The out-of-pocket cost of this treatment would have been in the neighborhood of $300,000. Thanks to our record deal, I paid not a dime.

 

What’s more, the band decided to call it quits during the ensuing tour in support of our third album, People People Why Are We Fighting? Since we had received our cut of the Branson-windfall only a few months prior, we were able to walk away from our recoupable depts to the record company. So when Albini outlines costs like these:

New fancy professional drum kit: $5,000
New fancy professional guitars (2): $3,000
New fancy professional guitar amp rigs (2): $4,000
New fancy potato-shaped bass guitar: $1,000
New fancy rack of lights bass amp: $1,000
Rehearsal space rental: $500
Big blowout party for their friends: $500
Tour expense (5 weeks): $50,875
Bus: $25,000
Crew (3): $7,500
Food and per diems: $7,875
Fuel: $3,000
Consumable supplies: $3,500
Wardrobe: $1,000
Promotion: $3,000

he's ignoring a few important factors. For instance, not every band goes out and buys “fancy” drums, guitars, and amps. (We were still using our Sears Silvertone amplifiers – back when they were had for $250 a pop.) I don’t even know what a potato-shaped bass is. We threw no $500 parties. We spent $0 on “wardrobe.” So his accounting here is predicated on a number of purely optional expenditures indulged by precisely zero of the bands that I knew.

 

But most importantly, he’s leaving out the fact that individual members are not personally on the hook for these debts. It’s a band debt and if the band no longer exists, neither do the debts. So when Number One Cup broke up, we “owed” the label well over $200,000. But we walked away from those debts scot-free. The label was making an investment in the band and knew full-well that they might never get that investment back. That seems like a fair enough trade so long as the parties act in good faith. In our case and many (but not all) others in the indie scene of the 1990s, that good faith was maintained.

 

Allow me to ease the minds of those who knew us in those halcyon days: Your friends, Number One Cup, were not so fucked.

 

Who knows if the current situation resembles any of this anymore. I'm out of the game, so for all I know, things could be very different. Probably are. But one thing that is undoubtedly still true - because it always is in the "culture industries" - is that to adopt the bottom line worldview of the record company accounting departments is to pack it in before you even reach the woods. Most of us didn’t start making music to get rich. We didn’t even imagine a day when we could quit our day jobs. We did it because music had done something to us – something profound – and we wanted to pass that profound thing on to the next listener. We wanted to participate in the millennia-old tradition of receiving and bestowing cultural gifts. Music was generosity to us. It was joy. It was love. Somewhere, at some point, Steve Albini must have known that.

 

Sixty-one is too fucking soon. I hope he died a happy man.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Monorchid: Who Put Out The Fire?

Touch & Go (1998)

 

There are spiders in the left channel! Flying spiders! With teeth and bristled legs. They’re wearing Muddy Waters t-shirts (with eight sleeves, of course) torn and held together with Richard Hell-brand safety pins that Tom Verlaine left for the spiders on the steps of their East Village walk-up. They’re joined after a second by vampire rats in the right channel and the song they’re wringing from their single-coils pings and pongs until 20 seconds later, the right channel rats veer off into a skidding ditch and the left channel spiders climb Phil Glass’s ladder into the window of a Catholic Home for Boys and the singer cries out, “too much static!” before surveying the landscape and observing that “X Marks the Spot: Something Dull Happened Here.”  

 

It was 1998. I was laid up in a hospital bed with fractured third and fourth cervical vertebrae (pictured, rear). The doctors were not sure I’d make it, but they didn’t tell me that. So I was just trying to get through the three days of quadriplegia and the two weeks of slowly-returning mobility. I had fifteen pounds attached to my skull with a c-clamp, the weight dangling off the head of the bed in what seemed a 19^th century attempt to decompress my spine by gradually pulling my head away from my body. Reading was out. I couldn’t hold a book. Nor could I watch the tv affixed to the ceiling. The angle from my bed was all wrong. So I asked my family to bring me a discman, a bunch of CDs, to place the headphones, halo-like, on my besotted head and to let me dance my bestilled dance to the rhythms of the morphine and the music. Two of the CDs became indispensable and heavily-rotated during those dark, semi-conscious days. The first was PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire? I may return to write about this magnificent record at a later date. It’s the best of her long career. The second, and the topic of this philippic, was Who Put Out The Fire? by Washington D.C.’s The Monorchid.

 

Since the earliest days of punk, arguments have raged about the intent and meaning of the movement. Overthrow, sure. But which parts? and to what end? Case in point, Mark Perry, who produced one of the first punk zines, Sniffin’ Glue, always argued for punk’s expansiveness. While those of the “purist” camp, contended that punk was about a return to rock’s rudiments: fast, basic, loud, obnoxious. Sides were picked. Betrayals were called out. Yet another internecine punch-up in an ideological phone booth. The most successful negotiations of this thrilla in vanilla, this simpering symposium, are those that managed to internalize the rationales of both the fast and fundamental-camp and the experimental expansionists. Then, without manifesto, to blast, tempest-bull-in-teapot-shop-style, through the police tape and stage sets until you slam into a bonafide wall and bust your head open on something truly intractable. Immovable object, unstoppable force, etc. So long as – and this is the bit in the horse’s teeth, the pig in the blanket, the camel in the needle eye – you don’t come to rest at the X where something dull happened or is happening.

Thus those flying spiders in the Muddy Waters t-shirts. That’s how Who Put Out The Fire? starts, like one of those ninja movies when eight daggers are thrown at once, dispersing into an inescapable high velocity array. And it’s coming right at YOU! Says the camera. Say the speakers. Don’t worry you’re safe here with me. When I listen to either of the two Monorchid LPs – Who Put Out The Fire? or the earlier Let Them Eat The Monorchid – I’m struck by the nonchalance of their chalance, if you catch my drift. Nonchalance deriving from the Old French word chaloir, meaning “concern,” but in the negative, obv. Monorchid are seriously concerned, about their music, about themselves, about the world. But they perform their concern fast and loose, like cats on ice, at the casino; damned, damning, demanding. Hellbent for leather and  all that. Weasels caught in garden weasels. (How’d I get on this apparent animal analogy jag?) Chris Hamley and Andy Cone conjoin their guitars like Siamese twins only to yank them apart like an eighteenth century surgeon with a barber pole for a shingle. Their two guitars are a pair of asps with bees in their bonnet, wasps in their sonnet, dogs in their gonnit. They spar and prod, nipping at each others’ achilles, slashing their counterpart’s tires, until they’re riding rims on cobblestones. There’s a bit of all your favorite back-and-forth guitar teams from Tom and Richard, to Thurston and Lee, to Robert and Ivan. It’s a treble party, and the punch is spiked.

 

Singer Chris Thomson has done his time in a large handful of bands: Circus Lupus, Skull Kontrol, Coffin Pricks, Red Eyed Legends, none of which are unworthy of a listen. But Monorchid is – probably not coincidentally – the best band he’s played with and the site of his best performances. He slurs and splatters with the best of ‘em, landing somewhere between a swagger and a disillusioned fuck-it-all drawl. Half the lyrics are beautifully unintelligible. But they’re peppered with turns-of-the-knife turns of phrase. For example,

 

Opening the song “New Tricks,” with the line, “I want my records back…” as good an indication of state of mind and heart as a song might be hoped to intimate.

 

The decisive “was” of the song “A Was For Anarchy” is followed by “B was for the babies, C was for the cancer that killed entire everybody,” and then the spoken confession, “and I miss my friends they’ll be dead in the head or dead in the ground and they can’t be with me right now.”

 

In “Alias Directory,” amidst a clutch of stalactite guitars: “Could the methods be clearer or the finger pointing nearer?” followed by the rushed, arrhythmic “it’s hard to admit that nobody’s gonna rescue you.”

 

Who Put Out The Fire? settles the punk debates by not giving a damn about all the whys and what fors. The rhythm section is deep and definitive, anchoring all the chaos above with heavy ropes, doused in brackishness and brine. Even as the hurricane hits, this ship ain’t going nowhere. Meanwhile, scratched into the glass through which this magic appears, the tangled-bramble guitars insinuate a desperate math rock or a manic-amphetamine prog. Listening between the layers of drum/bass and vocals, one discovers fantastical arabesques that rightfully have no place in music this angry, this fast, this ready to fight. While it might not be easy to assign structural identifiers like “verse” and ”chorus” to these songs, they are constructed with the same concern described above. This is music rigorously constructed to sound accidental, as if the truck that ran through the window of the furniture store laid out a beautiful mid-century living room complete with conversation pit and fireplace. Tension builds to pinnacles and occasionally, just to keep us honest, ravines.

 

As the album reaches its conclusion, the Monorchid throw a final curveball, closing with “Abyss,” a 1978 song by the Danish band, Sort Sol. It’s an anthemic rave-up, about picking flowers, “meant for you,” and declaring earnestly that “I want to let you in on some secrets /  there is one that I keep deep inside.” It’s a kind of key to what we’ve just been through. It says, "we meant it. That shit was real." Sometimes life comes across messy and out of control, but there can be reason to the rhymes, methods to the madness, a hand inside the ragged puppet, and a concern that can only be expressed through abandon (from the Old French abandoner. The original sense: “bring under control,” later “give in to the control of, surrender to.”)  

 

 

Damo Suzuki (1950 - 2024)

 

What will the revolution be made of? What will it look like? How will it sound? In the wake of two significant deaths inside a week, I’m left to wonder. First, Wayne Kramer, guitar player with the MC5, house band of Detroit’s White Panther Party. And today, Damo Suzuki, singer for Köln’s CAN from 1970 to 1973. The MC5 played standard chord-progression rock and roll, albeit loudly and with a will to ferocity that was not the standard at the time. Their most lasting claims to fame are uttering the word “motherfuckers” in their ambiguous “kick out the jams” (just as applicable to a football game as a revolution), and being the other band signed to Elektra the same weekend that Danny Fields (nee Feinberg) also signed The Stooges. The MC5 were managed by Detroit’s resident rabble rouser, pot-promoter, and poet, John Sinclair. He’d founded the White Panther Party as a complement to the Black Panthers – a collective of White kids prepared to support the Black revolution. Sinclair imagined rock and roll as the perfect vehicle to inject radical politics into the veins of White hippie culture and he tapped The MC5 as his Detroit-assembly-line-coupe replete with American flags and rifles slung alongside guitars across the paisleypunk hoods of his shiny new roadsters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wayne Kramer (photo: Leni Sinclair)

 

The MC5 provided the perfect image of rock and roll revolution. But the image was as far as it went. Lester Bangs reviewed their debut, Kick Out The Jams, for Rolling Stone in April, 1969, two months after its release. He could hear little difference between the MC5 and bands like the Seeds, Blue Cheer, the Kingsmen, and Question Mark and the Mysterians. What difference he could discern was in the style, not the substance: “The difference here, the difference which will sell several hundred thousand copies of this album, is in the hype, the thick overlay of teenage-revolution and total-energy-thing.” Despite Sinclair’s best intentions and efforts, Bangs could see through the scrim. The guns and bandoliers are costumes, like Alice Cooper’s b-stock Dracula or Kiss’s greasepaint and platform heels.

 

When Holger Czukay, Irmin Schmidt, Michael Karoli, and Jaki Liebezeit formed CAN, the revolution they had in mind was the product of a cultural destabilization shuddering through Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. It was felt on university campuses, at lunch counters, in the streets, in the halls of government, and in skepticism towards the accepted values of Enlightenment modernism. Suddenly the pictorial sensibilities of art history were undermined by conceptual concerns. Hans Haacke held a referendum on Nelson Rockefeller in the foyer of MoMA. The inviolable moral obligations of democracy and capitalism now appeared to be little more than ring-fenced fields of wealth and power. And Germany’s history faced not just criticism, but outright repudiation, announced by the mores and values of the postwar generation.

 

African American sculptor, Malcolm Mooney, joined CAN for their first proper release, Monster Movie, in 1968. Mooney’s vocal approach is more rhythmic than melodic. His lyrics and delivery are repetitive and he seems to have nudged the band away from traditional song structures and toward slowly mutating repetitions gathered around an insistent cyclicality provided by Liebezeit’s (“monotonous” – his word) drumming and Czukay’s lock-groove bass lines. When Mooney was forced to leave the band for health reasons in 1969, Damo took over vocal duties. Legend has it that the rhythm section discovered Suzuki busking on the streets of Munich while they killed time at a café prior to an evening performance. Apparently, they invited Suzuki to join them on stage that same night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is no evidence of a learning curve. Damo somehow embodied CAN from the first documents of his tenure. He adopts Mooney’s rhythmic, repetitive approach and the band becomes a kind of Rube Goldberg machine that produces the beginnings of its own processes. Woven between the slanting shunts of Schmidt’s keyboards and the Epicurean clinamen of Liebezeit and Czukay as they swerve to create the universe, Damo creeps like a vine. In the folds of the rotting undersides of fallen trees, mushroom heads, camphor fumes misting the surfaces of stones. On “Abra Cada Braxas” from The Lost Tapes, Damo’s voice is a kind of gelatin, forming itself around the contours of the pulses of the band. I cannot tell if what he is singing is English, Japanese, German, or no language at all. In its responsiveness, its plaintiveness, its pleading, it suggests something every bit as human as whichever bare lightbulb folksinger seems to sing your life to you. But then, around the eight minute mark – abracadabra! – he is Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire, Jarry’s Pere Ubu, the circus barker in that dream in which the clown, the strong man, and the bearded lady suffocate you in the cotton candy machine. Don’t tell me you haven’t had that dream.

 

Damo appears on the consensus three best CAN albums: Tago Mago (1971), Ege Bamyasi (1972), and Future Days (1973). And then he disappears. Only to reappear about ten years later, emerging first in one city and then another, playing with local bands organized for the occasion in a flickering constellation he called the “Damo Suzuki Network.” If Can evinced an Epicurean world view, post-CAN, Damo lived a Heraclitian existence: never the same river twice. Never the same song twice. Never the same words twice. Never the same day twice. For some forty years, he bounced around the globe like a spring loaded jester, subverting whatever we thought a band was supposed to be, or a song.

 

I love the 1972 footage of CANfrom the German tv program, “Spotlight Music Show.” I love that Damo sits cross-legged at the side of the stage, eschewing the literal and the figurative spotlight. One member of the band, contributing one element among five.

 

And that allows us to return, after some delay, to the revolution. CAN, during the Damo Suzuki years, enacted something that strikes me as truly revolutionary. They dispensed with notions of progress, with part-by-part development over the course of a piece of music, a song. This pretense of progress is both (and uncoincidentally) a manifestation of Enlightenment thought, pushing through levels of understanding in an effort to arrive at a final, teleological answer, and it is the internal logic of capital: growth, expansion, maximization of profits, hyper-accumulation. CAN, emerging from the calamity of these logics, its German members born during or immediately after the War, denied the ideology and allure of these Western, modernist pretensions and chose, instead, to hang tight; to remain in place, cycling and cycling through the present moment. They went neither forward nor backward, neither up nor down. They stayed put with “all gates open,” as one of their songs would have it, absorbing the nuances and details that music misses when it feels compelled to progress. Listen to the three records with Damo, or maybe better, live recordings from those years. This performance from Rockpalast, 1970 is superb. The band really hit their stride about halfway through, near the 45 minute mark!

 

There’s an argument to be made that, in a proposition like CAN, the most difficult role is that of the vocalist. The instruments can find phrases, riffs, rhythms and grind on them. Granted, the 4 instrumentalists of Can did this with unique sensitivity and conviction. But  Damo Suzuki faced restraints that the others didn’t. He couldn’t tell tales, what with their beginnings, middles, and ends. He had to steer clear of declamatory language. There could be no recourse to conflict and resolution. So Damo flowed between a choppy English and Japanese with long stretches of makeshift consonants and vowels such as what goes down in “Abra Cada Braxas.” Both Mooney and Suzuki displayed deep understanding for what CAN meant as a musical idea and as a kind of political theory in practice. The revolution can’t tell you what to think or do. Not even the revolutionary knows what the  revolution looks like or how it sounds. You’ve got to keep your gates open and trust you’ll know it when it happens.

 

The MC5 were on the stage at the Festival of Life when the shit hit the fan in Chicago in 1968. What followed was described by the official Walker Report as “a police riot.” The  truth was that the MC5 were not interested in manning the barricades. As Kramer himself testified, “the minute we stopped playing, we just threw our shit in the van and we drove right across the grass and over the median to get on the freeway to get our asses back to Detroit. That’s when the tear gas started flying.” All this not to suggest that the artist has to be the first one out of the trench. But there’s gotta be some revolution in the way the work is made, in how it’s constructed; not just in what  it means, but in how it means. I’m flying under the banner here of Godard’s edict not to make political art, but to make art politically. Trotsky, in 1938, wrote the following to the editors of the Partisan Review: “Truly intellectual creation is incompatible with lies, hypocrisy and the spirit of conformity. Art can become a strong ally of revolution only in so far as it remains faithful to itself. Poets, painters, sculptors and musicians will themselves find their own approach and methods, if the struggle for freedom of oppressed classes and peoples scatters the clouds of skepticism and of pessimism which cover the horizon of mankind.”

 

Clearly, we haven’t scattered those clouds yet. The horizon is shrouded in a thick pall of skepticism and pessimism. The revolutionary groundhog – let’s call him Petersburg Pete – is looking his long, dark shadow squarely in the eye. The forecast, I’m afraid, is for six more weeks, or years, or eons, of winter. But, in Damo’s voice, I can hear the faint echo of the revolution to come. It sounds like CAN.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pitchfork (1996 - 2024)

When it was announced, a few days ago, that Pitchfork would be “folded into” GQ, I laughed. But what was so funny? For one, parent company, Conde Nast’s use of the phrase “folded into” as if paper (or anything else foldable) was involved. Also, for anyone who’s read Pitchfork’s music journalism with any degree of attentiveness, we have seen the site mature beyond the rockist paradigm of straightwhitemale to cover (and be covered by) a much more diverse range of culture and cultural producers. So, to end up “folded into” – sorry I’m gonna keep using the scare quotes to confirm that I am not and cannot use the phrase with a straight face – Gentleman’s Quarterly, a veritable mancave of grooming products, sockless suits, and other rebarbative, reinforcements of male-ennial egos and entitlements, well, sometimes the farce is just too obvious. If capitalism has a sense of humor, it’s knuckleheadedly broad.

I’ve read a number of requiems for the site over the past few days – none of them, by the way, on Pitchfork, which has not covered its own demise as music industry news (which it assuredly is). Some have discussed – and blamed – the changing business models of the music industry. Others have lamented the lack of interest in and attention span for thoughtful and longer-than-a-Ritalin-label writing on popular music and its effects in contemporary culture. Still others have pointed the finger at algorithmic recommendation engines, arguing that as machines and (let’s face it) pretty rudimentary statistical models [X-is-like-Y] or [subscribers-who-streamed-X-also-streamed-Y] supplant the model of the expert/connoisseur/obsessive, we surrender our individual and collective tastes to a system engineered for expediency and profit.

All the above are surely true and surely symptoms of what Shoshana Zuboff has called “the age of surveillance capitalism” in which our greatest value to society is our data as perceived from the single-point perspective of clicks and likes. The algorithm is watching. But it doesn’t care if we’re dancing naked or practicing cannibalism, so long as it can convert our online actions into sellable data packets.

After my laughter subsided, my first thoughts were a little different (although certainly related to all the above). I found myself wondering when, as a society, as a culture, we stopped valuing the position that Pitchfork occupied? Once upon a time, a writer or an editor, maybe even a publisher, would dedicate time and energy to an endeavor meant to contribute to a debate of the essential values of a particular field of human endeavor. Whether it be the Journal of Applied Microbiology, Cat Fancy, Needlepoint Now, or Baseball Digest, the founding and presiding concern of the publication would be to engage with a readership who cared deeply, sometimes too deeply, about microbiology, cats, needlepoint, or baseball. In the case of Pitchfork, the web site covered the world of popular music, initially focusing on its somewhat less popular strata. Since it began in 1996, Pitchfork rose in prominence and increased its influence. To receive a high numerical rating from the site was a boon to an artist’s profile and sales. (I can personally attest to this. My band, The Fire Show, benefitted from ratings of 7.9, 8.1, and 8.7 for our three albums. Thanks Joe Tangari!) But Pitchfork sold to Conde Nast in 2015 and started to shift its priorities, even outsourcing its recommendations [if-you-like-X-you-might-like-Y] to Spotify.

When did we stop valuing the privilege of making contributions to the discourse of a field? When did we decide that being the most respected source of information for a given branch of the cultural tree was not good enough to merit survival? When did we stop caring about the importance, privilege, and even the prestige, of having opinions that other people trusted? And last, but definitely not least, when did we decide that helping listeners, readers, and viewers, make sense of the cultural productions with which they engage, and in turn, to make sense of the world and their own place in it, was not a worthy-enough mission? Note that I’m not asking why we turned our backs on all these valuable roles. I know the reason, as do you, Conde Nast made it plain. It’s about money. The bottom line is the final arbiter of value. Every other form of value, be it protection, guidance, ministration, provision, commiseration, compassion, generosity, can’t compete with the balance books of the CFO.

I mourn the death of Pitchfork not so much for the particular type of music journalism they offered. I read it every day in order to understand and stay in touch with generalized currents, but I valued other, nichier music sites more. I mourn the death of Pitchfork as a highly visible symptom of this moment in technocapitalism. Conde Nast’s profit-driven decision is a goiter on the gasping neck of a culture that once tried to tell us something about who we are. The goiter will soon envelop the whole body and eventually the head. We will all succumb to the accountants’ evaluations of what we do, why (if) we matter, who we are. Music cannot escape being consigned to this list once compiled by Karl Marx,

“Since money is the transformed form of the commodity, one cannot see what it was that was transformed into it – conscience, virginity, or potato.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shane MacGowan (1957 - 2023)

All in one night I witnessed it. It was probably 1985 but I could be off by a year or two. The Pogues were in Boston, playing a club called Spit on Landsdowne Street, right behind the famed “green monster” of Fenway Park. Only a few songs into their set things started to get scary. A dozen or so Boston Irish had claimed the pit as their own and were using the Pogues trad-punk as an excuse to act out the stereotype of Irish song and sensibility: drink and fight and drink and fight. I’d been to quite a few rowdy punk shows by then, but I was not expecting the Pogues with their fiddles and pennywhistles to devolve into a veritable riot. In no time, however, the scene was so violent that panic set in. The crowd was too thick to allow for an easy escape. But the ceiling was low and traversed by exposed pipes. So I hoisted myself up and installed myself in the maybe twenty-four inch gap between the pipes and the ceiling. I lay on my belly looking forward and down upon the band, Shane MacGowan, drink and cigarette ever in hand, bellowing sad, romantic ballads alternating with shit-kicking, two-steps in which the word “whiskey” just barely edged out the word “love.” I also had a birdseye view of the mayhem. Boston kids in the 1980s with little love but lots of whiskey, beating the living shit out of each other. This was not moshing, but brawling, the Pogues providing an excuse to release the burdens of animosity and anonymity collected over brief lives and understood as the prevailing condition of their lot. Sure, there were college kids too who wanted just to feel something. But this was not a casual violence. It was urgent and desperate and understood itself as a kind of communication that would find expression only in the rarest moments. This was now-or-never violence. My refuge in the pipes lasted the entire show, half of it taking in the plain pub spectacle of the Pogues, the other half witnessing something I wasn’t ready for and instantly understood.

 

When the show ended and the crowd let out into that canyon behind the baseball park’s intimidating back, I walked shell-shocked into the night. I looked down at my shirt front to find it covered in blood. Thankfully none of it was my own. But that only made it more unsettling. To be covered in strangers’ blood, wending the streets of new Boston. My friends and I turned the corner onto Boylston and headed downstairs to our favorite local dive. A place so off the beaten path that the rest of the Pogues crowd were sure to miss it; a place so anonymous that I can’t now remember its name.

 

We’d been there a while when I noticed, sitting alone at the bar, Shane MacGowan. I don’t know how long he’d been there. Maybe before we arrived or maybe he slipped in sometime after. In front of him in a neat row, four drinks: a double whiskey, a glass of water, a beer, and a cup of coffee. Dutifully, he sipped from each one in turn. He had a method. Inebriation. Hydration. Caffeination. Repeat. Or, if you like: Medication. Maintenance. Forward motion. I imagined then, or maybe only now in hindsight, that this was Shane MacGowan’s existence. Providing an outlet for the pent-up frustrations and torment of rooms full of young men and then heading to a slow, quiet corner to rejoin his demons. Those demons never let go of him. Or him of them. It’s always a dance, ain’t it? He and his songs danced to the demons. They sang of love and whiskey, but also of the patina of romance in the reflection of sunrise in a curbside puddle walking home from the pub where the whole night was spent drinking away the certainty of perpetual defeat. Things would never get better except fleetingly; never longer than the length of a song. But singing along to the chorus – about a girl, about the old days, about a movie that hadn’t been made yet – could numb the pain of knowing that the song would end and that it was only ever a song anyway, not your real life or your mother’s or your dad’s or your kids' or theirs. The rain will always fall. The puddles will form. The sun will rise. And the pub and the songs wait at the end of the day to put you back to bed.

 

In 1989 the Pogues were touring America. By then, they were playing big venues: arenas, stadiums. They opened a tour for U2. 1989 was the summer of Tim Burton's Batman, the movie that launched a thousand marketing campaigns (just as it was designed to do). But Shane MacGowan’s had no truck with Hollywood superheroes or their product placement in whatever it is that took the place of hearts in the hyperconsumerist America of Ronald Reagan. MacGowan’s aspirational cultural consciousness fixed – even as a young boy - on the likes of James Joyce and Dostoevsky. Struggling with an unappreciative crowd at the University of Michigan, MacGowan exited the stage in a huff (as he often did in that drug-poisoned period of his life), only to return a moment later to deliver a bullseye critique of shallow American hubris: "Fuck you and your fucking batman!" Hardly a week goes by when that line doesn’t play across the bottom third of my mind’s eye’s mind as I look and listen to the world.

 

 

 

Shane MacGowan’s songs were full of blarney. They might have had the secondary effect of charming us while we sang along. But it seems pretty clear that they were first and foremost written as songs that Shane MacGowan could sing along to. They were the songs of his Irish immigrant parents. But they were his parents' songs made a little harder and more truthful, a little more foul-mouthed and a little more desperately romantic. The songs were excuses to get out of bed. But they were also acknowledgments of going back to sleep with nothing having changed. As Michael Lenzi said to me about MacGowan, “he always seemed to be saying goodbye.” That strikes me as true a thing as one can think or feel or say about Shane MacGowan. He was never sure he’d see you in the morning, or you him, or the sun in the sky kissing that same damned puddle once more before a new rain started and another glass of whiskey got poured.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

Robbie Robertson (1943 - 2023)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m pretty sure a full-skeleton x-ray would reveal traces of the Band in my bones.  Their music and something of each member’s musical personality is braided into my ribs and spine. If Aristotle hadn’t said of tragedy that it

is an imitation [mimēsis] of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude…through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions,

I would’ve said it about the Band. The trajectory of their individual and collective lives arced from Olympian heights to the grey liquid layer at the bottom of the dumpster. A loneliness haunts their music and their biographies, pulsing with the indolence of an out-of-breath EKG. Richard Manuel hanged himself in a Florida motel room after a downer gig. He was 42. Rick Danko spent time in a Japanese prison for possession and died of a heart attack at 55. Levon Helm died after a long struggle with throat cancer. Now Robbie Robertson is gone, leaving only Garth Hudson.

Where to start? I guess with that faux-alligator cassette case that my dad kept in the cabinet in the den. It held ten or twelve cassettes. A few of them never caught my eye. But a few of them did. I remember finding an incongruous Black Sabbath tape in there. I know for a fact that my dad was not into Sabbath or anything like it. Maybe he thought it was a Friday night jam for the lost tribe of Jews in Ethiopia? More likely it was given to him by one of his younger drug buddies. There was Neil Young’s Harvest which got play in the car with some frequency and which I promptly made my own. I bought the vinyl shortly thereafter. I treat my vinyl with kid gloves. But Harvest I wore out. At some point in the 90s, I bought another copy and inserted it into the original gatefold sleeve. That’s the one I still listen to.

And there was The Best of the Band. This too got play in the car. And this, too, I ran off with. But I never bought it on vinyl. I needed to go back to the sources. First, The Band, which I learned only later – I was thirteen, there was no internet – was their second album. Then their first, the epochal, majestic, otherworldly, and wholly-of-this-world, Music From Big Pink. It is one of the three or four greatest rock albums ever made. I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. Before college I had the Band’s complete catalogue on vinyl and I’d seen The Last Waltz at least five times. Our Aunt Pamela painted the cover on the back of a denim jacket for my brother Matt and I’m jealous to this day.

The tragedy that is the Band casts Robbie in the role of villain. But real life doesn’t have roles. Time and circumstance change people. They make people weak. They make people do things they wouldn’t have/couldn’t have done at other times, in other circumstances. Time and circumstance can force an ordinary person to do and make extraordinary things. But they can also wring the talent from a person like blood from a workshop rag.

This can’t simply be a eulogy for Robbie. It must also be a requiem for the Band.

At the beginning, the Band was a collective. Look at the photograph in the gatefold of Music From Big Pink. Really look at it. Totally confounding. A group of thirty-three people – six of them children – gathered for a portrait in front of a barn. In the foreground, planted at the children’s feet, two oversized plastic mushrooms, red with white polka dots. The adults range in age from their twenties to their seventies. The men wear mostly plaid shirts and dungarees. A few wear suits. The women are in their rural Sunday-best. Printed on the photo, to the left of the group, in black, all-caps, serif font, are the words, “NEXT OF KIN.” They’re hard to make out because they’re printed atop a picnic bench and partially on top of the trunk of a tree. At the upper left corner of the photo is a smaller – roughly one inch by one inch – inset photo of a middle-aged couple. One must assume they couldn’t make the group shoot, but that someone deemed it important to include them. It’s like the missing members of the Latin Club cropped into the high school yearbook page. Amongst the large group of thirty-three, the five members of the Band. They are not out front like the Beatles on Sergeant Peppers’. They don’t stand out from this crowd. They’re mixed in, dressed like the rest of the gathering in farm hats and work shirts. The image tells us something. As an ardent fan at Bob Dylan’s 1965 press conference said, “that’s an equivalent photograph it means something it’s got a philosophy in it.”

The philosophy of the photo is “we.” The band, the family, the families. Not the hedonistic selfishness of hippie sex, hippie drugs, hippie music. The Band put their backs into it. They pull as a group, ten hands on the frayed rope, hauling the past up out of the well. In the history of rock and roll, few bands – very few bands – have worked as cooperatively as the Band. Each member is more interested in making nooks and crannies than in filling them with jam. It is the irregular contours of each player’s part that fit together with the others’ like the grooves of a key in a lock, like the unexpected joinings of jigsaw puzzle pieces. Here is one of Robbie Robertson’s great gifts: chipping away at the surface of the song – his guitar quite recognizably the sound of stone directed at flint – leaving excavations, indentations, evacuations, and abdications; small, rhythmically sporadic gaps and crevices where Manuel, Danko, Helm, and Hudson can gain purchase, place flourishes, or further abrade the smooth swellings of the odd constructions they called songs. Together, the five of them each scatter fragments that somehow coalesce as music. This little miracle is why so many of their contemporaries took a big step back when first they heard the Band. So many who thought they knew what a song was, how its little machinery worked. So many who retreated and doubted what they thought they knew.

J. Royal “Robbie” Robertson (the J is for Jaime) was plucked from relative obscurity by Ronnie Hawkins, the Arkansas rockabilly howler who made his living performing north of the border. Hawkins’ music demanded that the singer regularly hand off to the hotshot guitarist who would fan the song’s flames with a solo. (Witness Hawkins return the favor as he opens the proceedings of The Last Waltz, the Band’s farewell concert filmed my Martin Scorcese.) Yet, despite his hotshot bona fides, Robertson rarely took a proper solo in the Band’s songs. He preferred to make those little jigsaw shapes than to slash through the song with samurai flash. When he does take a solo they tend to be brief. And rather than grabbing the song by the throat, they prick its belly, they force it to convulse ever so slightly, to change shape ever so briefly. Listen, for example, to the solo in “King Harvest (Has Surely Come).” Robertson enters at 2:52. His guitar is miniscule, a gnat buzzing in the ear of the field ox. He chokes the neck of the guitar, forcing it to fight its way out of his grip. Harmonic shards squeeze out of the song like little metallic bubbles. The solo almost recedes back into the song. It trips itself like a Catskills comedian. Resting a moment to allow the audience to fill the gap where a “real” solo would have made hay, it then starts to tighten the line, tauter and tauter, while the Band catches its balance and slithers across the canyon on the solo’s tense vibrations.

On Music From Big Pink, Robertson wrote only four of eleven songs. Most people, even fans of the Band, miss that. Richard Manuel wrote three and co-wrote one with Bob Dylan. Rick Danko and Dylan collaborated on another. They also include a cover of Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” and the 1959 country ballad “Long Black Veil.” The following year, for their self-titled second album, Robertson wrote or co-wrote all twelve songs. There’s a very reasonable argument to be made that Robertson became the leader of the Band because he had to; because the Band could no longer function as a cooperative. It’s the same old rock and roll story: the drugs, the alcohol, the sex. The trappings of fame interfering with the reasons that fame arrived in the first place. Robbie was ambitious. Robbie wanted more. He learned the nuts and bolts of recording during the second album so that he wouldn’t have to trust others with those crucial tasks. Robbie is cast as the villain in the Band’s bio. But without Robbie it’s likely there wouldn’t have been a Band bio to speak of.

I do think, however, that it is fair to say that Robbie wasn’t, at heart, a songwriter.  He was a great guitarist, an inventive arranger, an accomplished bandleader. But he lacked anything like the lyrical gifts of Dylan, under whom the Band apprenticed, and many of his songs are weighed down by rigid perspective-taking: “Stagefright” written in the voice of an anxious performer, and (ugh) “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” the first-person account of a bereaved Confederate soldier. Other songs – think for instance of “Life is a Carnival” – are hogtied by barbed-wire conceits that trap the song in the constraints of all-encompassing metaphors. For a while, though, he had enough musical tricks up his sleeve to keep the songs lively, often surprising. “Jawbone,” from the second album, is a musical obstacle course, careening from syncopated waltz time to drunken-sailor shanty, to a thorny, hiccupping chorus riff as off-kilter as King Crimson at their proggiest. But the Band was nimble enough to navigate the song gingerly, making it feel casual. The five of them had the kind of instrumental and vocal charisma that could start a fire even with waterlogged kindling. In the Band’s early days, the weary, yet ethereal voice of Richard Manuel could break your heart singing the contents of a soup can.

I saw the band only once. I was a little too young, born too late. It was after the Last Waltz breakup and the subsequent reunion, without Robbie. I’ve seen other bands past their prime, sometimes missing key members. But without Robbie, the Band was merely a cover band of themselves. The Band was precisely the sum of their parts. More than any other band, subtracting even one member reduced it to a one-wheeled Schwinn. It might still go, but you couldn’t call it a bicycle anymore. Still, the evening ended in glorious Dylanesque fashion when, peaking on mushrooms, I spilled from the theater with the crowd onto the still-light summer evening streets of Boston, directly into the midst of a Shriner’s parade, dodging fez-topped men in miniature cars weaving synchronized patterns down Tremont Street. Maybe life is a carnival after all.

It's hard to know what other people hear when they listen to music. But reading tributes and reviews of the Band, one comes continually across descriptions which emphasize their “homespun” sound, their rejection of the acid-inflected electric music of the late-60s, their attachment to a relaxed, back porch American musical mood. Rarely does anyone mention how physical this band was. There is so much feel, so much body in their music. Consider their radical reworking of Marvin Gaye’s “Don’t Do It,” a staple of their live sets. Watch their bodies in the encore version performed in The Last Waltz. Try to sit still through the 3:05 mark of this 1971 version at New York’s Academy of Music. Robbie’s fiery guitar solo drains into a mournful horn figure and it sounds as if the song has run out of gas, as if it’s gonna have to pull over to the shoulder. Levon confesses “my biggest mistake was loving you too much” while stumbling down his drumset stairs in his clumsily tied emotional bathrobe and the Band kicks back in with the renewed vigor of desperate bodily love. The Band extracts the funky unconscious of Gaye’s version, nudging the horn section punctuations into rhythmically vicious positions. The Band’s version is testament to their skill as listeners, as bodily feelers of a song. It’s as if they’ve dug down deep into Gaye’s version and excavated the devastating funk buried deep within.

I think that way back when, watching the Band on the big screen in Scorcese’s film, I was subliminally hooked by their bodies. Rick Danko’s bass playing is not about the notes, it’s all about how they fall in time. He drops brackets, allowing the phrases and riffs of the song to make sense as units of thought, units of feeling. When you watch Danko play, his body is a conduit. The song pulses through him, distending, extending. He lopes like he’s riding a horse, easing out of the saddle and back down again. You could turn off the sound and just watch Danko and you’d still be able to feel the song. Levon Helm is spindly and sly, like a back-alley assassin who rejects the revolver as too ostentatious, opting instead for a short blade that can get the job done with minimal exertion or attention. He’s in and out before anyone knows they’ve been done. Watch his hands in “Up On Cripple Creek.” His grip is lethal, halfway up his drumsticks. He’s stabbing more than stroking the drums. Watching his shoulders, you might conclude that this is where the song really resides. In his shoulders the rhythm of his drumming meets the phrasing of his singing, sometimes at odds. But they both live there, in some kind of harmony. And, returning to Robbie, in the darkness of whatever theaters I sat in back then as a thirteen or fourteen year old – you couldn’t rent The Last Waltz yet, the technology hadn’t arrived – I watched Robbie’s body infected by the songs, dancing along to Saint Vitus’ palpitations. His right arm flying up as if he’s just touched a live wire, as it does here at 1:34 of “Ophelia.” With his hand he stirs the air, vibrating the already-vibrating molecules, insuring that they continue shivering until every last oscillation is exhausted. This is what it means to inhabit and be inhabited by a song. In Robbie’s body, in the collective body that was the Band, the songs quiver like the hum of cosmic background radiation, the energy that surrounds all matter, of which we are a part. This energy, this vibration, coursed through the Band. Its intensity has reduced by increments. Now, Robbie’s gone and the light is almost out...but for those songs. 

I’m putting on “Tears of Rage” right now.