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...or dub-minded. thanks for this. I love just about every phase of PIL, but this is my favorite. I've seen the Whistle Test DVD, but unfortunately this wasn't on it.
Strange you posted this today - Jah Wobble is playing in New York tonight. that doesn't happen often.
I prefer this era, the Wobble/Levine period, over the later stuff (though that stuff's not without its charm).
I'm actually kinda surprised you like this, jon, but I'm glad you do. You should watch the other vids on youtube (esp. Love Song and their American Bandstand appearance - this in particular is a very special television moment.
Yeah, I live in NYC but I'm not too interested in seeing Wobble play. I can't really imagine what he sounds like now, but it's hard to imagine it's be very good.
I'm actually kinda surprised you like this, jon, but I'm glad you do.
I'm fulla suprises. I like Pere Ubu too*. I don't disavow artisticall ambitious rock, I just think it's a difficult balancing act. get too far out into the ether and it's not rock anymore, stay too basic and you become formulaic and ambition becomes an empty gesture.
*(any band that can do something as ambitious as 'The Modern Dance' and then turn around and do a straight faced cover of 'Pushin' Too Hard.' gets it)
Ubu's first three LP's and the singles comp 'Terminal Tower' make for some mighty listening. I love 'em.
Saw the reformed Rocket From the Tombs play a few years back. Unfortunately. It was a very, very sad sight. Thomas could barely stand (he, in fact, sat through a few numbers) to support his own weight, was drinking heavily from a flask during the show, and mumbled incoherently between songs. Cheetah Chrome's one cheesy motherfucker, too, singing like a washed-up bar rocker. Thomas has still got his singing voice, though, somehow. '30 Seconds', 'Final Solution', & 'Sonic Reducer' all worked, which was odd, considering those are their best known songs. The rest of the set was a heaping plate of suck.
Have you read Richie Unterberger's Unknown Legends Of Rock And Roll? There's a chapter on RFTT in there where the theory is given that the tension between Laughner's ambition and Chrome's bar rock instincts is actually what made them an interesting band. Cause ambition is great, but if you lose the visceral charge, then it's all over.
as a wise man said:
june first, 67
something died and went to heaven
I wish sgt. pepper never taught the band to play...
Looking up that phrase via google (as I'm a music nerd, but can't stand the Dictators & don't know their lyrics) brings up Metachat & Metafilter in the top 4 results.
yeah item, i was mainly commenting on your timing. Wobble actually has two albums out now. Haven't heard them, but it sounds like it would be more of the same - that "world dub" sound again. I really want to like him, but uh, when i hear it it's well, not good...
i get dick's point too, but it's a lyric in a song - doesn't have to be taken literally or puritanically. Heck, i bet even handsome dick lets his hair down, puts on a Sade record and gives the gloryhole a check every now and then. All that bullshit machismo has got to be compensating for something. I mean come on - dissing the Beatles in 2001? Who the fuck cares? It was an important and necessary thing to do in '77, but now it just middle-aged punk back-in-the-day wannabe-badass pathetic. Time to move on, guys.
That whole episode was kind of dumb, I'll admit. The couple of times I've jawed with him, though, he was a genuinely friendly and open faced guy, and his historical contributions to rock and roll outweigh a minor gaffe.
(I won't bother trying to convince you of their greatness. Tasts in music is often like taste in food. I could rhapsodize about onions, photograph onions beautifully and make creative recipes, but if you don't like onions, you don't like onions. I imagine your Dics dislike is something similar. I could rhapsodize about the inspired goofiness of the vocals. Adny Shernoff's half-satirical/half celebratory dissections of adolecent goonery, the catch chouruses, but if it ain't your bag, it ain't your bag)
i get dick's point too, but it's a lyric in a song - doesn't have to be taken literally or puritanically.
I don't think they do. I know from interviews that several members of the Dics are big beatles fans. It's more a realization that something did go away in the post-Pepper era.
i didn't mean it from a fan-of-the-beatles perspective, I meant it from a gg allin mentality of I'm not a rocknroll badass unless I'm cutting my asshole open and making a bloodshit slurpy every second. Sorry, don't know where that came from. It's just so tiresome. Maybe it's not the end of the world to get caught with a Hall and Oates cassette in the deck every now and then (I use them as an example only).
And where would punk rock be without Sgt. Pepper? Why is it one or the other? Can't they co-exist?
And shortly after that album, we had VU, The Stooges, MC5...certainly not the top of the pops, but what went away really? (And the White Album a year later.)
I saw the Dictators in 2004 for the first time, and they were great. Really funny, really energetic.
I can talk some shit about the Beatles too...
And where would punk rock be without Sgt. Pepper? Why is it one or the other? Can't they co-exist?
They obviously can. The same song that contains that verse contains the line "Murray The K is not her today," Murray being of course the DJ known as the 'Fifth Beatle,' so I wouldn't take it to heart. I think it's just recognizing that post-Pepper the idea of simple, crude, innocent rock became more....difficult? fraught? I'm not sure of what word I'm looking for. But even though something was born with Pepper, something else went away, and I think the first wave of NYC punks (Dics, Ramones, Blondie, even the Talking Heads to a degree) were trying to regain the spirit of that pre-Pepper era but not in the baldly nostalgic way of say Sha Na Na. Springsteen and his ilk were doing a similar thing (Bruce has a cameo appearance of the Dics 'Faster & Louder,' he's a longtime friend and fan of them and yells the second '1-2-3-4..')
difficult? fraught?
produced? excogitative? unspontaneous?
Yeah, i totally understand the sentiment, it just seems like kind of a long time ago.
Springsteen never ceases to surprise me with stuff like that, but it sorta makes sense that he liked punk. In other ways it makes no sense at all. I would loved to hear The Ramones' version of "Hungry Heart". But I guess I know what it sounds like in my head.
Yeah, i totally understand the sentiment, it just seems like kind of a long time ago.
We're kind of in a similar time now, though, and some kind of similar rebellion/return to the basics seems imminent. I hope.
Springsteen never ceases to surprise me with stuff like that, but it sorta makes sense that he liked punk.
He was also a huge Clash fan. But he had too much sentimentality to be a punk himself, I guess. (BTW, check out the DVD in the new Boss box. The story of Ernest 'Boom' Carter, Max Weinberg and the big drumlick in the middle of 'Born To Run' is a doozy).
We're kind of in a similar time now, though, and some kind of similar rebellion/return to the basics seems imminent.
i sorta have this theory that today is different in some respects - that anybody can get their hands on the shit they want, that everything is "in". I only half-believe it, and if it's true, it'd certainly make it harder to shake things up. Interesting this comes up in a PIL thread, cuz there really is no John Lydon of today. It sure as hell ain't Kenye West, is it?
yeah, when i saw BS up on stage with costello and others paying tribute to Strummer i was like "of course he's a Clash fan".
Did you ever see my response to something a few weeks back about being curious what well-known musicians like? I'd link to it, but the profile feature's busted. I mentioned Hit Parader's listening booth thing, where they'd play records for Rob Halford or whoever. Remember that? I think that'd be a really fun job.
I saw that. I remeber reading those when I was a teenager, too and sometimes being surprised as hell at some of the answers they gave. (Lemmy likes old Steve Miller for instance).
This book is based on the same idea and got me to hunt down some cool stuff. david Hidalgo from Los Lobos really digs Harry Partch, for example.
Oh yeah, and I'm something of a Manowar fan as well.
Me too. and Twisted Sister, and the Del Lords who are all branches of the Dics family tree.
Wow, that book looks great, I'm going to get that.
I'm currently laboring through The Accidental Evolution of Rock'N'Roll: A Misguided Tour Through Popular Music. It's ridiculous and all over the place, but I'm mainly reading it because he claims Kix was the greatest rnr band in the world for 15 years. Heh. I grew up near Maryland, which had no shortage of local metal.
you guys should check out Jonesy's Jukebox on indie 103 in LA, hosted by Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols. he plays absolutely anything,including disco- and he played Motley Crue yesterday.
the bottom line is, almost any decent musician is going to be open-minded and like all kinds of music- it only stands to reason. When punk came out in '77, it just wouldnt have seemed right to people to hear the guitarist from the Pistols liked disco. But now he's older and free to say he likes whatever he likes.
sure, The Grit. My aunt and uncle used to read that, probably because the kid who sold them the subscription seemed nice, and it allowed them to talk to him.
No, isn't a grit like a burnout or something? Is that really just a Maryland thing?
I used to really love Kix. They were like a local Hanoi Rocks, who me and my friends adored. I remember I was test driving a car with my parents (I was really test driving the cassette deck) and I made the guy put in my Kix tape. That song with the breakdown monologue with all the drug talk came on. Everyone was biting their tongues. I approved of the sound system.
What's the puke song? It's been ages, and uh, I only liked their early stuff. heh.
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