Hey Ho

I was uncertain whether or not I wanted to write about this book at all.  It is an interesting book to read and it hits a lot of the points I have come to expect from rock 'n roll memoirs, but I was hesitant because the Ramones have been such an important band to me in my life.  There isn't a lot that Marky relates that I didn't already know from reading other accounts, watching documentaries, and just absorbing it from the punk rock culture.
So I'll just drop this in here for what it's worth.  Read the book if you are inclined, it is worth the time.
The rest of this (hopefully) short post is going to be about the band and their music.
At this point, I think it is impossible to overstate the influence that the Ramones had on both punk rock and on rock and roll in general.  The sound, the look, the song structure, the attitude, all of it has been copied over and over with varying degrees of success.  I first started listening to the Ramones when I was in high school, around the same time that I began discovering a lot of other punk rock.  They weren't the first band I listened to, or even the one that I listened to the most, but they were always in rotation in our group of friends.  But my first contact with the Ramones goes back even further.  In fact, I don't remember a time when I actually first discovered or first heard the Ramones because they seemed to just always be around.  I remember joking with my brother about this weird band that might all be brothers because they all had the same last name, knowing nothing else about them.  I might have been 10 or 11 at the time.  Once I started getting into punk rock, they were a group like MC5, the Stooges, and others that were the originators of the sound.  But, this was the early 1990s and there were also a lot of imitators that we heard as well.  This is all to say that now, after having listened to the band's music for 25+ years, I have a different appreciation for it.  When I was young I was drawn to the Ramones for the simplicity and the raw energy of their music.  This is still a draw, but I think that there is a kind of genius in the sincerity of this straight-forward rock style.  The Ramones were never overtly political but the message that they conveyed through their style took on a greater significance than the simplicity of the lyrics would suggest.  I realize that there is probably not a lot I can say about this band that is new, but a lot of their early songs defined a sort of ironic punk detachment that has run through the whole scene.  Their stance and image was cool and it let you know that they didn't care whether you liked them or not.  The Ramones were just the Ramones and you had to deal with it on their terms, or not.
I did get to see the Ramones play live one time.  I was maybe 15 or 16 years old and my brother took me to see a show in Cleveland.  The headliner was White Zombie and the Ramones were opening.  Joey leaned out over the crowd, his foot up on the monitor in front of him.  The song I remember the most from the set is "Pet Sematary."  The set was fast and they powered through a number of their classic songs. 
Thinking back on that day, I am glad that I had the chance to see them.  Growing up where I did, I got to see a lot of bands play, and I still see a decent amount.  This makes me glad.  It reminds me that there is still a collective way to absorb art with like-minded folks.  I think this is a lot of what the Ramones did for pop music and for punk.

Found Writings, Part 4

What follows is a review/analysis that I wrote about a book of poetry that I found in a second-hand book store called Punk Novel by someone named Bad Al.  This book is really something.  Difficult to describe, difficult to read, difficult to write about.  You can see some of the tool marks in my writing as I try to find a way to write about the book honestly but still be charitable (a little, at least) to the author.  I have never seen another copy of this book anywhere and no one I know has even heard of it.  I will try to dig it up and repost the cover here.  If I can't find it, I am not entirely convinced that I didn't just dream it up.
While looking into this a bit, I came across this quote, "Rock and Roll poetry by (probably) Shel Silverstein", which is about the only information that is available for this book on Amazon.
I did not, and probably could not, edit the original post.

Punk Novel

“So this ain't a novel

so what

look how ya grovel cause ya

think it's something hot.”

Punk Novel is a book that I bought a number of years ago in a used book store.  I knew nothing about it, had never even heard of it, but the title and the fact that it was 2 bucks was enough for me.  The book is by Bad Al and it is something of a concept poetry book although I already get the sense that I am giving it too much credit.  Let me be clear, Punk Novel is not good.  It doesn't make a lot of sense and even the author seems to be amazed that the thing was published.  The dedication reads, in part, “I want you to know that only three people in the whole fucking publishing business liked Punk Novel for any reason whatsoever.”

I call this a concept poetry book, but I might also call it a printed concept album.  The title page looks like a track listing of 13 songs (complete with run time though it is uncertain whether the time is meant to represent the time it should take to read the “song” or the time spent composing it) are split across 2 sides.  This format calls attention to the blurred lines between lyrics and poetry.  This is probably the most interesting part of Punk Novel.  The work itself is typeset in a Courier look-alike font and several pages contain collage artwork, which makes me think that this first existed as a zine.  

The poems are not good.  They are simplistic and I would say that some of it resembles slam poetry more than anything else, but I don't want to give the impression that this is as good as slam poetry.  Now, I will say that there are a lot of really dumb lyrics to punk songs.  Sometimes this is on purpose and conforms to a larger theme in the punk aesthetic and sometimes the idiocy is genuine.  But these poems contain a grating combination of idiocy and arrogance.  Bad Al seems to be pretty impressed with something but I can't really see what it is.

One poem, “Hemorrhoid,” is a story song about the community service psychologist that Bad Al's mother and sister go to in order to fix their contentious relationship.  The psychologist wants to see Bad Al, who he thinks is at the heart of the problem, “'Cept this punk don't wanna be shrunk.”  Bad Al recounts all of the tricks that he plays on the psychologist when he goes in.  He reveals what he takes to be “textbook” pyscho-babble but it is a bit it is more or less like an episode of Frasier.  The jewel of this poem, though, is Bad Al's chorus which runs: “MAYBE YOU CAN SHRINK A HEMORRHOID/BUT MAH HEAD'S A WHOLE OTHER THING.”  At the end of the poem, Bad Al reveals to the psychologist that he has been pretending the whole time and the psychologist is amazed at how smart Bad Al is.  Of course.

Perhaps the best lines in the book are the chorus to “Mother,” the first track on the second side, which runs:

I GOTTA TAKE MAH MOTHER APART

PUT HER BACK TOGETHER AGAIN

FEET FIRST

STICKIN' UP OUT OF THE HEARSE

BRAINS LAST

I GOTTA MOVE FAST

MAH MOTHER'S FUTURE'S BEEN HER PAST.

I don't know what this song is about.  Parts of it seem to make fun of “mother's” friends for being old and sometimes it seems to be about killing his mother.  But then again, there are elements that suggest that mother might be abusive or drug addicted.  Thing is, Bad Al is actually better when the poems are more dissociative.  This poem, odd as it is, is more affecting than many of the other poems that either express a unified message or present a narrative.  

Contrast “Mother” with “You the Jury,” which is about how much jury duty sucks.  This poem is pretty unified in this message but one gets the impression that the whole idea from the song is meant to be an ironic twist on either Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury or the movie adaptation of the same name, starring Stacey Keach.  In any case, the narrator of the poem is dismissed from jury duty (Bad Al does allude to Spillane in “Geronimo and Hollywood”).  So, one wonders what the problem is.

My overall impression is that Bad Al steps over decent lines and couplets in order to extend thoughts that don't really need to be extended.  Take this from “Jury Duty”:

“Me and The Knife they called him

before they hauled him in,

me and Rutherford Brown

was how they introduced him as they accused him

of buryin' two inches of ice-cold steel

into the commonweal,

me and him,

me and Rutherford The Knife Brown

made eye contact,

made a sort of pact,

signed a sort of soul contract.”

The first four lines are repetitious and could be reduced to two.  The lines “buryin' two inches of ice-cold steel/into the commonweal” is actually clever.  It is a decent couplet that expresses the dual conceits of crimes committed against individuals and communities at the same time as well as Bad Al's complicit in the community.  Fair enough.  What kills it, though, is the “contact,” “pact,” “contract” triad.  This is not necessary and pushing the stupid rhyme into the third line buries a decent couplet and a decent idea in a long stanza that doesn't end up meaning much.  This happens elsewhere, but you'll forgive me if I don't quote more examples.  

I am convinced that, at this point, I have put way more thought into this book than anyone else has (potentially author inclusive).  I don't recommend this book if you are even able to find it.  I will happily lend my copy to anyone interested in perusing the pages as long as you send me postage and promise to give it back.  There is something a little endearing about this book and I definitely want to have it as a part of my collection.  

Bad Al, in case you ever see this; I'm sorry I didn't like your book, though I doubt you'd be surprised that I didn't.  I can say that I did have fun writing about it and, based on what little I know about you, I think you would take this review in the spirit it's offered.  

Found Writings, Part 3

What follows is a blog post that I wrote back when I thought that this was all going to be about punk rock.  It is more about my early initiations into punk and the music that I liked.  It is a bit more personal take on the music than some of the things that I have written, but I stand by pretty much all of it.  Here it is, without any edits:

Post 2 – The introduction

Green Day/Bad Religion (1993-4)

My first punk rock show was Bad Religion in Cleveland in the early/mid-nineties.  I don't remember which tour.  It was either the Recipe for Hate or Stranger than Fiction tour.  At this point I had already been listening to punk for a while after my older brother had gone to some shows with his friends.  We mainly listened to early Bad Religion and the first couple of Green Day albums.  We had to listen to dubs of Kerplunk because the album was nearly impossible to find at the time.  Within the year, their catalog was widely available.  

It was about a year later when I did get to see Bad Religion at the Agora in Cleveland and they would return every year just before Thanks giving for many years.  Each show, they would play a mix of their classic material and songs from their newest album.  This band has been important to me because of the people who they are.  Not only were they around from my very first awakening to punk rock, but the band – and lead singer Greg Graffin, in particular – showed me that there was a place for intelligence and that smarts, properly applied, are revolutionary.  Punk rock is a criticism and an outlet for anger.  I was angry because I never felt that I fit in with my peers.  I was a smart kid and didn't know how to express this.  Graffin's witty lyrics and political engagement stamped me and set a standard for the way that I still listen to music.  As a dude I worked with in a pizza shop once told me, “we can't all be politicians.”  True, but what we can all do is mean something.  This new standard for music that I came into had no patience for self-indulgence and trifling.  I wanted serious and I wanted meaningful.

These new desires for serious and meaningful might seem to be at odds with my love of Green Day, and particularly in conjunction with Bad Religion.  But I have come to associate the two bands so closely because I came to them at roughly the same time and because these two bands were so different from the Def Leppard, Guns 'n' Roses, and Slaughter that I had been listening to before (I still love G 'n' R, but for different reasons now).  What I saw in Green Day was engagement with emotion.  I don't know if I realized this at the time, but when I look back what I think I identified was unironic investment in emotion.   At the same time that I needed the intellectual stimulation of Bad Religion, I needed my stupid teenage hormones legitimized.  The world is full of platitudes about how a kid will understand things when he grows up and people telling kids they don't understand.  This is bullshit because every teen knows that their emotions are 100% real.  An adult can look back and recognize that these emotions are fleeting but in the moment they are the most real thing.  Green Day's emotion was a perfect counter to Bad Religion's logic.  I now fully recognize that what I saw as originality in Green Day was heavily influenced by the emotional engagement of the Descendents and the witty banter with boredom of the Ramones but at that time, this is what I knew and I have a strong nostalgic draw to these two bands.  

I don't remember the date, but I did get to see Green Day not all that long after the show I mentioned earlier.  This would have been after Dookie hit big and Green Day put on a show at Blossom music center outside of Cleveland.  The big draw was that Green Day would play a show that anyone could go to and to prove this they charged $3 a ticket.  This concert happened after a free show at the same venue had been cancelled.  I went with a group of my friends and my brother's friends and nearly everyone I knew was there.  I don't remember much of the show aside from it being a huge event and a couple of my friends and I spent a lot of time pulling up pieces of sod to hurl into the crowd (I also found $5).  I wasn't as interested in this show because by then I had already been to a number of club shows in Cleveland in much smaller venues.  Outdoor venues like Blossom could house in the tens of thousands and removed the personal connection that had been so important to me.  I have only been to a few big venue concerts and festival shows since then because of this.  I always felt more connection to the bands than to the people seeing the bands with me.

Found Writings, Part 2

What follows is an analysis/love note that I wrote about the Generation X song "Kiss Me Deadly," a song that I still think is probably the best punk song of all time.  It moves around a bit and might not be my best criticism, but I think parts of it still have legs.  I made some minor edits to the post for clarity.

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Post 1 – Kiss Me Deadly

I have spent a lot of time thinking about the topic for the first post.  Even though I have already posted once, that was just a general introduction and was just about setting up the context of the blog.  This one is the important one, though, because it establishes who I am and what this is going to be about.  I thought originally that I would write about my first punk show or my first punk album.  I was also very tempted to write about The Clash.  I don't think that any of those things are quite right.  For this post, I am going to write about just one song.  This is my favorite song and it is one that I listen to every day.  

The best song I have ever heard is “Kiss Me Deadly” by Generation X.  This song has everything: great lyrics, buzzsaw guitar, complex layering of lead, rhythm, and bass guitars, an unostentatious solo that absolutely rocks, Billy Fucking Idol on vocals, and a great hook.  It begins with a slow guitar plucking out a descending melody that will repeat throughout the song.  Idol sings the first verse and chorus to just the opening theme on guitar and the drums and guitars kick in during the second verse.  At this point you really just need to go listen to the song, even if you know it.  

Generation X formed around 1975, which puts them before bands like the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Buzzcocks, and The Damned that are typically taken to be the first British punk bands.  Many of these bands were assembled by managers rather than forming organically out of groups of friends, which would be the norm later on.  Gen X has a big spot in punk rock history because of where the members came from and where they went.  Lead singer Billy Idol had previously been in a proto-punk band Chelsea and would go on to his successful solo career.  Gen X originally performed “Dancing with Myself” that Idol would go on to re-record and release to become a hit.  Bassist Tony James had played with eventual Clash members Mick Jones and Terry Chimes in a band called London SS, and would go on to play in Sigue Sigue Sputnik, the Sisters of Mercy, and eventually with Mick Jones again in Carbon/Silicon.

“Kiss Me Deadly” is a good illustration of the difference between the beginning years of punk rock and what it has become.  It is up-tempo but not particularly fast.  The music is fairly complex, displaying a level of composition that, with rare exceptions, would not resurface for some time.  What I like most about the song, though, is the way that it is heartfelt and uplifting while also being gritty.  Each verse describes a short story about growing up and being a punk in London.  

  The structure of the lyrics is quite poetic and is more complex than most punk songs (which tend to follow the verse/chorus/verse/chorus model but occasionally will also include a bridge).  After three verse/chorus exchanges and a solo, the song enters a bridge, which is a musical interlude in a different key than the verse and chorus.  Sometimes, but not always, bridges will include different patterns of lyrics: typically they will recall elements from the chorus and will have a different phrasing than in either verse or chorus.  What makes “Kiss Me Deadly” more clever than most is that the lyrics for each of the choruses differ slightly and these different parts run together in the bridge.  Musically, it is also interesting because the solo is performed in the bridge's key whereas solos are normally performed in the same key as the verse/chorus.  If this doesn't make sense, listen to the song again and pay attention to the key change after the third chorus.  The change is signaled by Idol's singing the last line of the chorus differently.  His voice almost sounds flat in comparison to earlier verses but this is because he has pitched his voice lower to transition into the bridge.  

At the end of the bridge, the song moves into an extended version of the chorus that brings different elements from earlier in the song together.  Each of the three choruses begin the same: “Having fun/Since I was six,” alter the third line, and end, “Kiss me/Deadly/Tonight.”  So the first chorus runs: 

Having fun

Since I was six

Hidden flick knife flicks

Kiss me deadly tonight.  

The third line for the next choruses are “Discovers teenage sex,” and “Violence for a fix.”  These altered lines each relate to the verses preceding them.  The extended verse at the end of the song pulls together these lines from each of the choruses:

Having fun

Since I was six

Having fun

Well hidden flick knife flicks

With violence for a fix

Discovers teenage sex

Try shooting up for kicks

Kiss me deadly

Of course I'm not the only one who loves this song.  “Kiss Me Deadly” plays in SLC Punk at the end of the movie when Steve-O leaves Heroin Bob's funeral even though Steve-O disdains British punk earlier in the movie.  The band Fifteen plays a modified version of the riff from the chorus in the opening to the song “Helter Smelter,” a song about blowing up cars and making everybody ride bikes.  Jeff Ott, the singer, comments that it “Sounds like Generation X,”  The rest of the song and the lyrics have nothing else to do with “Kiss Me Deadly” or Gen X (this is not an uncommon move for Fifteen, though.  In “No tion” (sic), the song after “Helter Smelter” on the album “Buzz,” the song opens with a copy of the opening to Operation Ivy's “Room without a Window” and, likewise, the rest of the song has nothing to do with OpIvy).  Green Day has been known to cover this song in concert (you can find videos of this on youtube if you look).  

Aaron Cometbus also writes about the song in #54 of his zine Cometbus.  In this issue, Cometbus is invited to go on the Asian leg of one of Green Day's tours (for those who don't know, in addition to writing the fantastic zine Cometbus, Aaron Cometbus also plays drums in a lot of other bands.  Some of the bands he has been in are Cleveland Bond Death Sentence with Paddy from Dillinger 4, Shotwell, Crimpshrine with the above mentioned Jeff Ott, and Thorns of Life with Blake Schwarzenbacher from Jawbreaker and Jets to Brazil.  Cometbus has performed with Billie Joe from Green Day and they have released many albums as Pinhead Gun Powder, so the invitation to travel with the band would not be unusual).  At the final party that Cometbus attends on the tour, he describes Mike Dirnt putting “Kiss Me Deadly” on at the end of the party:

“Over the speakers came the notes that never fail to give me goosebumps: the opening chords of the greatest song of all time, 'Kiss Me Deadly' by Generation X.”

In that moment, Cometbus describes the nostalgia that washed over him as he danced with Billie Joe and remembered their friendship over the years, marveling at the idea that, despite Green Day's wild success and his own relative obscurity, this song brought them back together.  

This is also what this song does for me.  I remember listening to this song with my friend JJ when we first discovered Gen X.  We traded the same CD back and forth hundreds of time because it was pretty hard to find at the time.  Eventually, when I moved away, I gave him that copy of the CD and went years without hearing that song.  I hadn't dubbed the album before I gave it to him.  But when I was in college, we talked on the phone and Gen X would come up.  More than once I asked him to put the album on while we talked so that I could hear their music in the background.  To this day I associate Gen X with one hot summer in Ohio when we drove around smoking cigarettes and listening to music that, twenty years old at the time was brand new to us.  

Found Writings, Part 1

What follows is the introduction that I wrote for what I thought would become a blog focused on punk music.  I wrote a handful of posts, some of which may show up here at some point.  That blog idea grew into this blog and so, here are my initial thoughts on punk rock's appeal for me.

Post 1

I began listening to punk rock at a fairly young age.  When my brother introduced me to the music I didn't even know what it was called but it was fast, it was aggressive, and it engaged in a world that I knew.  I was a privileged kid growing up in the suburb of a major American city, so I was just like a lot of the people who performed this music.  We were angry about a well-being that bred complacency and had an inkling of our own entitlement, including the underlying unfairness.  We never worried about shelter or where our next meal would come from, but we did worry about maintaining a sense of integrity, being true to ourselves, and not losing sight of what we wanted to become.  Punk rock carried a negative connotation in the broader culture for a long time and it has been only relatively recently that it has started to become mainstreamed in a way that rehabilitates that image.  The rest of the world has begun to see that the nihilistic trappings of certain punk icons contained a critical depth that was easy to miss.

In a sense, I missed out on punk rock because the first wave happened before I was even born.  But in a broader sense, this music changed the shape of the culture, influencing multiple generations of young people to investigate the true nature of their surroundings and to investigate themselves.  In this sense, I experienced punk rock in its true essence.  I, and my friends, discovered community and  empathy.  We learned to care about other people's troubles and we learned what it meant to build a family of affiliation.  We learned how to think about the world in a different way.  

What appealed to me as a teenager still resonates for me.  Punk rock still excites me: both the punk that I listened to in my youth and the waves of punk that followed.  While my attraction to punk rock as a teen was more raw, I have come to a different understanding as I have grown older.  Punk is political.  Punk is rhetorical.  Punk is aesthetic.  And punk is visceral.  But most of all, punk is powerful.  Punk is powerful because it helped a multitude of angry young folks to recognize that we were not alone and that we could direct our energy in a positive way.  Punk is powerful because it redirected the lives of many of us and showed us that we could influence the world.  Punk was powerful for me because it showed me that I could embrace this critical, sarcastic attitude and bend it to shape the world around me.  It convinced me that I could be an intellectual and it helped inspire me to become a teacher.

I initially envisioned this blog to be exclusively about punk music, but as I developed the idea I recognized that this might not be sustainable just because my interests are more diverse.  I envision writing about movies, books, philosophy, food, teaching, and whatever else interests me.  I have also thought about engaging some of the ideas that punk rock has introduced me to and writing about the ways that this music has changed my life.  At base, I want to do what punk rock has taught me to do: engage.

Rediscovering heavy metal, Part 1

Heavy metal was the first genre of music that I loved on my own that was separate from the music that my parents listened to.  It all started with bands like Guns 'n' Roses, Judas Priest, and Ozzy Osbourne.  My small group of friends in forth and fifth grades traded cassette tapes back and forth, introducing each other to new finds.  Eventually we moved on to heavier bands like Metallica, Megadeth, Suicidal Tendencies, and Slayer.  But then we also started moving away from metal as we began to discover punk rock in the early 90s.  I saw bands like Bad Religion and Green Day in tiny clubs before they came into national prominence.  My brother took me to my first shows with his group of friends.  As I got more into punk rock and tried to get to as many shows in Cleveland as I could, I pretty much stopped listening to heavy metal.  The things that I used to listen to didn't seem to keep pace with my new interests and fascination with diy.  Between Cleveland and Columbus I saw hundreds of bands with my friends and I even played drums with a few bands in our own shitty performances.

So,  it wasn't until much later that I started listening to metal again through the influence of a few new friends.  But it really grew on me.  Metal had changed.  There was more of it, a lot more sub-genres, and it got really heavy.  I had also changed.  I was still into a lot of the same punk that I had always been into but I was more open to the variety of music out there.  I always knew that there was a lot of cross-over between punk and metal, but I had clung to a kind of anti-prog, anti-excess purity in punk that just stopped being so significant to me.  Plus, I re-discovered that a lot of what I had found in punk was there in metal, too.  It was fast and aggressive.  They are both unapologetic for being what they are, and they both strive to create accepting communities within their fandom.

The very first foray that I made back into metal was listening to Slayer's Undisputed Attitude.  A friend had burned a copy for me because he figured (rightly so, it turns out) that a punk cover album would be a good transition.  The album is spotty (aside from the interstitial solo, the cover of "Filler/I Don't Wanna Hear It" is easily the best track on the album) but it beat the shit out of The Spaghetti Incident?"  That friend was really into Metallica, so I heard a lot of his drunken convincing that I should give their later catalogue a shot.  This didn't work out as well.  I liked their early stuff but couldn't really get into anything after ...And Justice for All.

After a lot of trial-and-error, I found my way back to the niche of metal that I really liked, and it started to go into heavier rotation than a lot of the punk that had been my mainstay for so long.

When I moved back to Ohio and near my family, I had the chance to start going to shows with my brother again.  He had left punk behind a while back and had stuck with heavy metal.  We shared some of the same taste in music, though I think he can run into some pretty questionable stuff (he would, of course, disagree) and we started planning to go to shows again.

Over the last couple of years I have had the chance to see a lot of great shows with him.  We saw the oddly-matched lineup of The Eagles of Death Metal (who do not play death metal), Russian Circles, and Mastadon.  We missed part of Russian Circles but stood through the entirety of Mastodon's 2+ hour long set.  We also went to see Gojira, who are among my favorite bands now.

I don't have a satisfying ending to this post because I want to write about a show we recently saw and this is already getting long.  I recognize that this post breaks the tone and theme of content matter that I have established for the blog so far.  That's what you get.