Whose Blood, What Tracks?

To the left is a poorly-cropped paragraph from Patti Smith’s review of Bob Dylan’s 1974 album Planet Waves, printed in the April 1974 issue of Creem. (Which has an absolutely awesome cover featuring the world's forgotten boy searching & destroying a whole bunch of vinyl.) This isn’t even the best part of that review – that comes either when Smith describes how The Band’s music makes her nervous “like a bumblebee in the face” or when she sums up Dylan’s sex appeal thusly: “Positive energy behind a negative mask is very sexy. Like a full basket under straining pants.”

What’s interesting about this particular paragraph is the choice of words in sentence two: “…hero is bleeding is tracked through the snow…”. Could it be that Dylan, recognizing a particularly evocative turn-of-phrase from the pen of a fellow poet, purloined the title of his very famous, very classic next album from the not-yet-famous, soon-to-make-a-classic-album-of-her-own Patti Smith?

Which begs further questions. Did Bob Dylan read Creem regularly? Or did he just read his own reviews? 

Living On Dreams

Why is it that we like death songs so much? Especially the slow, melodramatic kind? There are enough of them to form a full-on rock and roll subgenre. Think about it – from the car crash in The Everly Brothers “Ebony Eyes” to the bike crash in The Shangri-La’s “Leader Of The Pack” to the everything crash in Eminem’s “Stan”. It’s a thing.

My own pick of the bunch is Hot Chocolate’s “Emma”, which really oughtta be called “Emmaline” since that’s the name singer Errol Brown repeats often enough that it becomes the song’s hook.

Hot Chocolate was a British soul/disco band that had a string of hits in the ‘70’s. Most famous in America for the number 2 hit “You Sexy Thing” (you know it - “I believe in MIRACLES!”), with any justice there really ought to be a resurgence of interest in their music due to the use of their song “Brother Louie” over the opening credits of Louis C.K.’s TV show. (Which version, oddly, also becomes a death song due to the alteration of the line “Louie, Louie you’re gonna cry” to the more Louie C.K.-like “Louie, Louie you’re gonna die.” But I digress)

I was eight years old the first time I heard “Emma”.  My older sister played this morbid little tune for me, probably in an effort to creep me the hell out. It kind of worked, but I was also kind of fascinated. I demanded to hear it again, and I’ve never really tired of hearing it since.

“Emma” utilizes a formula that worked well for Hot Chocolate: a spare, pulsing bass, Errol Brown’s schizophrenically smoky and strangled vocal delivery, and their sonic signature – a guitar hook played through (according to Wikipedia, anyway) a Marshall Time Modulator, whatever that is, which ends up sounding kind of like a riff that’s been programmed into a computer and played back underwater.  

The sound pulls the listener in, that bass throbbing like the heartbeat of a man alone in a shabby motel room with nothing but his tortured thoughts, that guitar riff snaking through the song like the ghost of a long gone lover, but the real drama in “Emma” is in the unfolding story in the song’s lyrics. In a nutshell, the singer meets Emmaline at five, she wants to be a movie star even then (as five year olds often do) and everyone thinks she can do it ‘cos she has a face like an angel. Then, when they turn seventeen the singer and Emmaline get married. (Yeah, seventeen certainly does sound young, but keep in mind that twenty-one doesn’t really rhyme with “Emmaline”). He works hard and promises that one day she’ll be a star. But Emmaline can’t stand the grind of searching for that elusive starring role and one day the singer comes home to find Emmaline lying on the bed, still, cold, gone.

“Emmaline!”

The whole song pivots around this ending – Brown, who has been coolly building up to it with all the skill of a great dramatic actor, pushes himself past the point of hysteria, screaming the title name repeatedly, drawing it out, gravelly and rough, the sense of emotional catharsis for those few seconds comparable to John Lennon’s “Mother”. (Extra resonance in this comparison - Brown has said that he wrote the song as a way of memorializing his own deceased mother.)  

The delivery method of that catharsis might be called into question. It’s cheesy stuff, in a way – over the top, melodrama for its own sake. The reading of Emma’s suicide note, for instance, is a maybe a touch too far, with background voices suddenly to the fore, extra echo added for eerie effect.

But you know, “Leader Of The Pack” is cheesy stuff too, and it’s still a totally classic record. Though it might be argued that The Shangri-Las classic has one up on “Emma” in that it’s postmodernism in action, a song aware of its own schlocky over-the-topness.

Still, I think “Emma” is a classic too, give or take any degree of self-consciousness. And that suicide note, while melodramatic, also packs a punch that any listener should have no trouble relating to. Emma tries and fails, and though she loves the singer, she ends up confessing to him, in a turn of phrase that never fails to wrench my gut with its weird mixture of pith and poetry, that she “just can’t keep living on dreams no more”.

Well, nobody can. That’s no reason, of course, not to keep on living, but who hasn’t at some point felt worn out, drained, dragged down by the failure of their own expectations?

We go on. Maybe that’s why we like songs like this so much, ‘cos it gives us a chance to feel more alive, like we’ve survived while others have been swept away by their own desires. Maybe we just wanna feel superior.

I hope not. Hopefully there’s some sense of pathos in our attraction to these songs and their tragic characters.

I think there is when it comes to this one, and that’s why it’s my favorite of the death song subgenre. Unless Jody Reynolds’ “Endless Sleep” counts. Which I don’t think it does, ‘cos the girl in that song survives. Could be near-death songs are a subgenre worth investigating, too. Next time, maybe.
  

Electric Rainyland

It won’t stop raining. Seriously, it’s August. Dead of Summer. Why won’t it stop raining?

Not sure why I care so much, I’m not even an outdoorsy type. It’s not like I just can’t wait to head out to the lake with a six-pack to catch some rays or anything. I’m just about the palest person I know.

 

But dammit, I think seasons should live up to expectations. Stick to the familiar pattern.  And this summer has let me down.

Maybe it’s one of those weird emotional holdovers from childhood. When you’re a kid you want it to be sunny so you can go out and….do whatever it is that kids do. I don’t really remember. Come to think of it, I guess I spent most of my time inside reading comic books and watching reruns on television. So there you go.

Still, summer means sun, leisure, late nights, no school. Ah, no school. It’s weird how that feeling of not having to go to school does a number on the psyche. I haven’t gone to school in more than twenty years, but somehow I still look forward to summer with the same kind of anticipation.

That’s why it should be sunny. Because I want to fully enjoy not having to go to school again. So I can hang out and play video games. So I can crank up Zeppelin or The Who. So I can stay up and watch Letterman. So I can head to the movies or the baseball game. And at the baseball game I’ll turn to my companion and utilize the old Ferris Bueller quote, as my friends and I so often did, regardless of whether it was even appropriate, which means we’d use it even during summer vacation: “Do you realize, if we’d played by the rules right now we’d be in gym?”

Once, in my junior year, on a rainy day towards the end of the school year, my friends and I nearly skipped school. Yeah, that’s the kind of rebellious thugs we were – we NEARLY skipped school. As we milled about before the first bell debating whether or not to leave, I tried to pump myself up for the possible truancy by imagining all the fun we might have. Since it was raining we’d have to stay indoors. Which means we’d end up at the mall, or Burger King. Doesn’t sound like much, but hey, when you’re seventeen and among friends, throwing around wisecracks and lewd jokes and generally acting obnoxious, going to those quaint places and just hanging around can be a helluva lot of fun. It was a simpler time, then. Maybe. Probably not.

The thing I really wanted to do was go back to my house and listen to records. The album I remember specifically wanting to listen to was Electric Ladyland. With the rain and all, it seemed appropriate. Side 3 – “Rainy Day, Dream Away” into “1983” into “Moon Turn The Tides…Gently Gently Away”. I imagined all of us sitting around, watching the rain through the window, floating away on that weird aquatic/astral soundscape while Jimi sings about starfish and mermen. Escaping into some kind of elsewhere. And without drugs even. I mean, none of us even smoked pot. Though I suspect that was due more to lack of ingenuity than anything else.

The point is that feeling of escape. Tripping out on eerie underwater music when we oughtta be in gym. That feeling of escape was so intoxicating back then. I’ve tried so hard so often to replicate it in the years since, and usually failed.

Maybe I don’t have anything that I feel the need to escape from anymore.

Maybe I didn’t then. We didn’t actually skip school that day. Hell, the horrible truth is I kind of liked school.

And I generally like the things I do now. Still, I have this nagging urge to leave. Find something, somewhere else, where something beautiful and weird might be happening.

Maybe I’ll throw on Electric Ladyland. It might be the only escape.

John Lydon's Forgotten Fury

Make no mistake, the name John Lydon will forever be associated first and foremost with the glorious noise he and his bandmates in the Sex Pistols made over the course of two tumultuous years in the late seventies.  Personality and legal conflicts made a shooting star out of the group, and those two factors alone contributed to Lydon’s violent desire to sever his every last tie with them. Given the earth-shattering effect of the Pistols’ music, Lydon must have also felt enormous pressure to escape the shadow it cast.

His next band produced at least one effort that was up to the task. Public Image Ltd.’s 1979/80 Metal Box/Second Edition blended disco, dub and dissonance to hugely influential and enduringly listenable effect.

Between the scorched earth Pistols and trailblazing Metal Box, though, came PiL’s initial effort, the oft-overlooked First Issue. The album has been especially easy to overlook in America, where the be-suited brains at Warner Bros. delayed release of the album in 1978, supposedly because the huge bass sound made them queasy. Despite attempts at re-recording, the album was shelved, and it languished in America as an import-only obscurity for decades.

Earlier this summer, reissue label Light In The Attic finally corrected that bit of corporate negligence, and Americans can now bask in the corrosive wonder of John Lydon’s first post-Pistols effort. It’s a bracing listen.

First track “Theme” is a clear signal that the listener should be prepared for anything. Nine minutes of Keith Levene’s blistering garage/mirage guitar wrapping itself around a lurching, sodden rhythm, over which Lydon repeatedly intones, with wavering degrees of hysteria, “I wish I could die.” It’s a beast of a track.

It’s also a clear signal that PiL is a complete band effort – remove Lydon from the track and the combination of Levene’s guitar and Jah Wobble’s ever-steady bass still get the feeling across.

And it’s a not altogether pleasant feeling. The song is an ugly black cloud, no way in, no way out. Lydon has claimed that the song is simply an over-dramatized reaction to a bad day, but one could be forgiven for hearing something darker. Dark enough that the only logical response might be uneasy laughter. That reaction is given validity at the end of the track, when Lydon tongue-in-cheekly states “I just died.” Then as the instruments fade out he finishes the thought: “Of terminal boredom”.

There’s no comic relief let-up in “Religion” (PiL did love the one-word titles), a two-part diatribe against the Catholic church, and organized religion in general, if one chooses to hear it that way. The song is presented first as a no-frills spoken-word piece, then once again with jarring, rhythmically wayward musical accompaniment. Maybe it’s over-serious, but something in the delivery – the insistence of Lydon’s recitation, the way the rhythm keeps shifting – pulls in the listener and doesn’t let go.

The tempo picks up on “Annalisa”. The beat is simple, caveman-like, with Lydon wailing amelodically about a pair of English parents who let their child starve because they thought she was possessed. It’s fiery and effective, the repetition trancelike, Lydon’s monotone chilling, but like a couple of songs on side two, it shows up the transitional status of the album; not as songful as the Pistols or their punk brethren, not as risky as the post-punk that PiL would embody and inspire.

The Sex Pistols are dredged up again in “Public Image”, at least lyrically, with Lydon pouring all the venom he can muster at the unseemly machinations and exploitations that led to the rise and fall of his former band. Musically it’s something slightly different, with Levene’s chiming, echoing guitar pattern ringing around Lydon’s wavering voice in ways that Steve Jones couldn’t have dreamed of (and admittedly maybe didn’t care to.)  U2 fans should pay attention, because The Edge certainly did.

The album ends on a bizarre note. “Fodderstompf” is another long track consisting of not much more than a disco groove and the Lydon/Wobble duo repeating the phrase “We only wanted to be loved” in shrill Monty Python-as-old-ladies voices. It’s annoying, funny, boring, and hypnotic all at once. Like “Theme” it can make the listener do a 180 in their reaction. You laugh, then something in the impulse behind the phrase “We only wanted to be loved” makes you feel a little squeamish.

And if that’s what PiL wanted – to provoke – then so be it. Because it isn’t cheap. There’s too much real emotion in this music, too much intelligence, too much pure blood and guts, for it to be a simple provocation. It’s an act of palpable release, a testament to fortitude, and it can now take its place alongside The Sex Pistols and Metal Box as a fascinating Lydon-led cry from the soul.