The Singer, Not the Industrial Solvent

Laser beams and invisible shields.

If I were an alien visiting from another planet (which, according to some of my friends, isn't that far from the truth), I'd think that "Exene" was an industrial solvent, maybe something that was added to the band X as part of an elaborate and messy industrial process whose end result was impassioned music.

That might not be entirely wrong.

My first exposure to seminal punk band X was when my friend Mason played me their 400-mile-per-hour cover of "Soul Kitchen" (originally by the Doors). I was hooked on the energy and on the bizarre back-and-forth vocals. And then there was Billy Zoom, whose unmoving stance on stage was a stark contrast to the machine-gun pace of the music. (And what's not to love about a punk band whose drummer is named "D.J. Bonebrake"?)

And the cool factor of two married co-lead-vocalists singing these songs as if their lives depended on it was matched only by the cool factor of two divorced co-lead-vocalists singing these songs as if our lives depended on it.

X on David Letterman in the 1980s:


Two weeks ago, Exene Cervenka, co-lead-singer of X, announced that she has Multiple Sclerosis.

Exene's bandmate and ex-husband John Doe told Spinner "She's great. There's a lot of people that live with this. We take care of our own. She realizes that this is another challenge. She's got a lot of support and it's all good. We'll take good care of Exene, don't worry."

Here's wishing her the best going forward.

The quote at the top of this post comes from "Leave Heaven Alone" -- from Exene's fantastic, quieter, and more introspective 1989 album Old Wive's Tales.

(And, just in case you're wondering: record company employees get healthcare benefits that are heavily subsidized by the company. Artists and musicians -- who provide the music that have benefited those record companies for decade after decade -- do not.)

Here Comes the Kónguló

Is he strong? Listen, bud: He's got radioactive blood.

When I was in first grade, we took a class trip to a nature preserve. The next day, our class wrote up a booklet about the trip and our teacher mimeographed it and we all took it home. (Although, in retrospect, it's more likely that we all talked about the trip and our teacher wrote up the booklet.)

I don't remember much about the trip (or first grade in general), but I do remember a long discussion in the booklet about how some people could see thin threads from the spiders in the trees. I was one of the ones who saw nothing. But I knew the theme to Spiderman by heart.

In my mind, the people who could see the spiderwebs somehow had a window into another world -- and perhaps that other world was magical and amazing in ways I could only imagine. When I finally could see the spiderwebs, I was disappointed that they brought me to no new worlds and offered little that was magical or amazing. For that, I'd have to turn to music.

Because in rock 'n' roll, any freak can be a superhero.


Things are a little different in Iceland, where the Icelandic Spiderman seems a wee bit incompetent (hat tip to the I Heart Icelandic Music blog):



Bonus 1: Three Danish teens scat Spiderman:


Bonus 2: the original cartoon theme:

Blog Post

My friend Jennifer held a party every year to celebrate Johnny Rotten's birthday.

It's not Johnny Rotten's birthday today (that was back on January 31st), but it is Jennifer's birthday -- so please celebrate it as you see fit. For me, it's more of a generic celebration.


After the Sex Pistols imploded, billionaire Richard Branson decided to cash in on Johnny Rotten (who bucked the marketing program and went back to his given name: John Lydon).

This was long before Branson was knighted (in 1999 for "services to entrepreneurship"), back when Branson ran Virgin records (first as a string of record stores -- later to be known as Mega Virginstores which, oddly enough, sold no virgins -- and then as an actual record label).

It was years before Branson's Virgin Records would lead to a long-simmering feud with XTC that caused the band to go on strike for six years (a strike that may have been more effective if anyone had known about it at the time).

And it was almost a lifetime before Branson would douse Stephen Colbert for insufficient zeal in promoting Branson's airline.

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In 1978, Branson thought Lydon's post-Sex Pistols band would be huge, if he could find the right musicians. So Branson flew Lydon to Jamaica and they spent weeks scouting local reggae players. Branson then flew Devo to Jamaica and tried to convince them to bring in Lydon as their new lead singer (they declined, although I still salivate at the thought of Johnny Rotten singing "Whip It").

What finally emerged from the ganja smoke was Public Image Ltd., where Lydon chanted (rather than shouting or really singing) over dub/reggae music. They edged away from the avant garde and closer to traditional songs and song structure over the next four records. Meanwhile, in the United States, there was a craze for "generic" brand products (sold in white packages with a distinctive blue typeface that had the type of product, such as "Beer" or "Breakfast Cereal").

By 1986, PiL had become a fairly standard rock band (albeit one with an off-kilter sound). As the music became more mainstream and commercial, it also became less distinct; maybe this was the type of meta-joke that let Lydon laugh all the way to the bank. The band parted ways with Virgin and Branson, signing to Elektra. Ginger Baker and Steve Vai (whom Johnny Rotten would have spit on a decade earlier) played on the new album, the generically titled Album (which was also known, depending on the format as Cassette or Compact Disc), with its single "Rise" (released as a 45 with a sleeve that just said "Single"). And even when Lydon proclaimed "anger is an energy," it came across less as a snarl and more as a tired grumble.

And, because it was 1986, it was inevitable that there would be a video (and perhaps unavoidable that it would be marked by the simple title "Video"):


It was ironic that Baker, drummer for Cream, one of the groups Johnny Rotten labeled as dinosaurs, participated... especially after Lydon, years earlier, made an April Fool's joke of announcing that Baker was joining Public Image Ltd. But the bigger irony was that, by completely subsuming music to product, Lydon obscured the fact that he had finally created something that could stand as music (and not just as attitude dressed up in musical clothing).

Happy Half-Birthday!

Or Maybe Half-Happy Birthday!

This blog launched 6 months ago with a post explaining the difference between collectors and music lovers (complete with video from High Fidelity. (To celebrate tonight, I'm wearing a half a birthday hat and half-blowing through a half-decent noisemaker!)

This was followed by posts on:

• Blotto (The 34th Most Important Band in the World, the most viewed page on this site),


• The Smithereens (Codependency's Greatest Hits),


• Darlene Love (Sacraments in the Church of Rock 'n' Roll),


• XTC (Thanks for Christmas),


• Why those UPS ads drive me up the wall(the Musical Definition of Irony),


• and the Del Fuegos (We Didn't Start the Del Fuegos, which contains my favorite comments of any that have appeared here).

So to celebrate, check out those early posts (or any of the others in the archives on the left side of the screen.

And welcome (or welcome back) to all the readers from all over the world (although none yet from Wyoming or Tennessee). And whatever I did to piss off the people in the island nation of Mauritius (who dropped in once and then never returned), I'm sure I didn't mean it!

And the four people from Homeland Security who visited after I mentioned the TSA, I'm guessing this post will finally bring you back.

Also, I should mention that there are 12 terms that return only this blog when you Google them.

And, as 120 people know, Clicks and Pops can be experienced on your iPhone!

Surrealistic Pillows (Watching They Might Be Giants Watch Themselves)

Doc will solo!

So I'm sitting with John and John from They Might Be Giants. They're watching themselves on TV and sitting on my crappy $20 couch near the one window with an ocean view. (My ex-girlfriend recently claimed the couch had fleas, but I'm pretty sure you only got fleas with the $10 couches).

I'd been a They Might Be Giants fan going back to Don't Let's Start and thought their smart-ass geek-rock (with accordian) was often perfect. Plus, they name-checked the dBs and the Young Fresh Fellows on their new album (and had written a song about James K. Polk), so their bona fides were well established in my book.

The Johns had been plugging that TV appearance for weeks ("and Doc will solo!" they'd proclaim). This was before they had a real band -- it was just John singing and playing guitar and John singing and playing accordian live to prerecorded backing tracks (bass, drums, etc.). And every night my ex-girlfriend's uber-cool brother would control those backing tracks; "it's like remixing an album live every night," he said.

Now, I'm sure it was much cheaper not to bring a band on the road (plus, it was weird and quirky, just like They Might Be Giants). But obviously they wanted a real band and the freedom that would bring to change tempos and not limit their performances to preset times and rhythms.

That afternoon, they were in Burbank in front of hundreds of cheering fans and gushing guest-host Jay Leno. (I was at my crappy day job being cheered by no one.) But by 11:30 at night, they were in my small apartment on the beach on my crappy $20 couch (with or without the fleas) watching themselves on TV. I glanced at it, but mostly I watched them watch themselves. It was surreal -- and they gripped our couch pillows (which may have cost more than the couch, come to think of it) in horror. I think they'd been on TV before, but nothing on the scale of The Tonight Show.

After, they had absurd crticisms about their perceived physical flaws ("my forehead is enormous!") which no one else noticed.

Watching that performance now, it's clear they kicked ass that night (as they did most nights). And, as promised, Doc did solo. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


But I wondered if, in their minds that night on the couch, what they saw looked more like this. (And which of the Johns was the fez-wearing shark?)

The Ludwig Wittgenstein of Rock

I was obsessed in college with a girl who was obsessed with Ludwig Wittgenstein.

We were taking a class whose name escapes me. But we read Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. And the professor apologized that we were reading 12 books in the semester since we easily could have spent an entire semester on any of those 12 books.

Everyone in the class had a crush on her. At the time I thought she didn't realize this, but looking back I'm not so sure.

Anyway, I pursued her and we seemed to have an amazing connection. I loved that she preferred me to the other guys in the class and I desperately wanted to be the guy she already saw me as. For weeks, we'd hang out talking until the middle of the night (about the most important and most trivial of topics) and soon fell into a relationship. We dated for most of the semester and it was wonderful.

One night she told me she hated Neil Young because after she lost her virginity, the guy drove her home and "Like a Hurricane" came on the radio. And she heard the line "You could have been anyone to me" and realized he didn't love her and never would. I told her he was an idiot, but wondered if she'd missed the overall point of the song by focusing on that one line.


In class, we read Ludwig Wittgenstein's masterpiece, a dense, hard-to-understand work called Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The book is all about language and how people communicate and the fact that when different people use the same words they often mean different things. Language that is not based on observable facts is inexact and it has a foggy cloud of possible meanings. The best we can hope for as people as that our foggy clouds overlap enough that we can approximate communication.

Bertrand Russell wrote an introduction to the book and most publishers were only interested in it because of Russell's introduction. This greatly pained Wittgenstein, who felt that Russell completely misunderstood and misrepresented his work, yet no one would read it without Russell's wrongheaded description.

Now, this girl had read Wittgenstein before. And she had very strong opinions about what he meant. So, after we'd both finished our final papers for the class (we both wrote on Wittgenstein), I made the mistake of comparing Neil Young to Wittgenstein. As proof, I brought up "Like a Hurricane." I said that, when words can't convey what Young means, the guitar takes over, bringing you to that place he wanted you to go all along. If Young could make it happen, the guitar solo on this song would continue forever in some realm where Young and his dream-girl find ultimate love and happiness: "that perfect moment when time just slips away between us on our foggy trip."

I finished and felt very pleased with myself and my arguments. We sat in silence for a long time and I thought we were perfectly in synch, time slipping away, and the two of us united and happy.

And then she got up and told me I was worse than Bertrand Russell and I had completely misrepresented everything Wittgenstein ever meant. And furthermore, Neil Young's commitment problems had made life a living hell for David Crosby, who simply wasn't as strong as everyone thought. As she was walking out the door, she turned back and said "I can't believe you'd take my ex-boyfriend's side."

And I suddenly wanted to slide into the fog of that guitar solo, because I knew that Wittgenstein was right -- she and I used the same words and meant drastically different things. Or else she was right and I just didn't understand Wittgenstein or Neil Young. And maybe that's the best proof anyone could ever offer that Neil Young is the Ludwig Wittgenstein of rock 'n' roll.

And that's midnight to you

Squeezing Out Sparks is a masterpiece.

Stung by mistreatment from his first record company and the lack of his early records to capture his band's sound, Graham Parker ditched Mercury Records (leaving behind the scathing "Mercury Poisoning") and lit out for greener pastures.


Determined to make a record as fiery as his legendary live shows with the Rumour (Bruce Springsteen once famously said that Graham Parker was the only performer he would pay money to see), Parker ditched the horn section, dialed down the R&B shadings, and delivered a near-perfect album that combined the familiarity of pub rock, the raw power of punk, and the angularity of new wave with literate imagery and wordplay rarely seen in rock.

Someone could write an entire book about Squeezing Out Sparks (and if I had more time I'd do it myself).

Although the album was a critic's favorite, it barely registered with American recordbuyers -- maybe they felt their "angry young man from England with great lyrics" quota had already been met by Elvis Costello.

Parker would spend much of the 80s and 90s bouncing from record label to record label (Atlantic signed him, ordered him to write with "more commercial" songwriters and told him what he really needed was the big 80s drum sound popularized by Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins and featured on nearly every rock album of the 80s; when Parker balked, Atlantic dropped him without releasing anything) trying to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle that was Squeezing Out Sparks while searching in vain for the superstardom that would have been his in a more righteous world. By the end of the 90s, Parker was recording for indie labels and still giving great live performances (even if the dream of superstardom had faded away). And if his latest records don't quite measure up to Squeezing Out Sparks, they're still great -- Parker recently has been alternating between a more mature and resigned attitude and rip-snorting angry anthems that could stand with his earliest work.

But I digress.

Squeezing Out Sparks explodes with energy from the start. "Discovering Japan" is a frantic rocker about the strangeness of foreign cultures. Or the uncertainty of relationships. Or how the spreading globalism destroys what's precious and unique. Or how the horrors of war leave their mark on countries and their people. Or the inherently doomed nature of romance. Or all of the above and more, set to a pounding rhythm and scorching guitar work.

The lyrics fit in perfectly with the music and seem jumbled without it ("As the flight touches down/My watch says 8:02/But that's midnight to you"). It's the type of song you could listen to again and again, hoping to glean some understanding of what must be a very important message (and wishing for footnotes that explain everything) before you realize that the real message is something that can't be put into words (and can barely be translated into music). (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


It's possibly the perfect way to open an album.

But, then, snuck in just before the end of Side 1 (from back when there were two sides to recorded music -- kids, ask your parents), there's this:


What the hell is that doing on an album of screaming rock songs?

"You Can't Be Too Strong" is filled with disturbing imagery and simple instrumentation that play up the words. Greil Marcus of Rolling Stone knocked the entire album on the basis of this song, which he misinterpreted as an anti-abortion anthem. It's not. And it's definitely not a pro-abortion song, either.

It's ultimately a sadness-drenched song about a man unable to face up to his responsibilities. The song examines the choice the man's girlfriend makes to terminate her pregnancy, recognizing with regret her decision will have a profound respect on a lot of people (and implicitly, that none of her choices are really very appealing). More than anything, it's an lament about the weakness of the original man (and, Parker has claimed, based on his own experiences). Allmusic.com does a much better job of capturing the song's complexities.

Perhaps years later, that's still the relationship that haunts "Discovering Japan" and the disconnect and jumbled memory of that song echoes the disconnect and pain of "You Can't Be Too Strong":

But lovers turn to posers
Show up in film exposures
Just like in travel brochures
Discovering Japan!

Geeky Bonus: When Squeezing Out Sparks first came out in 1979, Arista shipped it to radio stations with a bonus disk called Live Sparks, which contained live versions of all the songs in order. When Arista remastered the album for a CD re-release in 1996, they included Live Sparks and live versions of "Mercury Poisoning" and a cover of the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back" all on one CD. Needless to say, if you don't have the original LP, that's the version to buy.