Day Dreamin' Days

“Memory... is an internal rumor.”― George Santayana

Jane’s Addiction’s debut record for Warner Bros. Records came out in 1988, during an incredible artistic moment for the underground musical culture. Jane’s had already released a self-titled record a year before on XXX records, and had already garnered acclaim in the alternative culture (when alternative meant an alternative to pop…an alternative to what was out there) but Nothing’s Shocking, with the excellent oversight of producer Dave Jerden, who had already worked with the likes of The Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and Herbie Hancock, had the weight and complexity of a 70s progressive record with the post-punk angst of the dirt-glam, heroin chic Los Angeles music scene. I had seen Jane’s Addiction open up for Julian Cope a few years prior. Hated them. Posers. But when I was a new sophomore at UC Berkeley (GO BEARS), sunk into a couch at a black-lit fully-incensed house party and someone put on Ocean Size, it felt momentous.

Soon after, I started interning at Warner Bros. Records, working with A&R legend Roberta Petersen, who had a lot to do with the band being at the label. It was during that summer that I learned of the business significance of the Jane’s Addiction record: it had performed well in sales…it had performed well enough for the label to understand that the current alternative music scene was worth investing in. It was not like a sudden switch had turned on: the label had already released the greatest punk music of the era, mostly through Seymour Stein’s Sire Records. When I had my first meeting with Steven Baker at Warner, who ushered me into my internship at the label, I walked in to his office to find big posters of Hüsker Dü and The Jesus and Mary Chain lining the walls. Yes, I knew they were signed to the label…but seeing them there in prominent display in the office across from Lenny Waronker’s office (the president of the label) blew my mind. What an incredible label; what an incredible moment in music history.

While much is talked about the success of Nirvana and how that success sparked a major label signing frenzy of hundreds of alternative bands…and how the term alternative began to evolve to what it is now, another form of pop music, the story starts even before the commercial success of Nothing’s Shocking. True, that record begat Sonic Youth’s singing to Geffen which begat Nirvana’s following suit; money could be made by releasing great, critically acclaimed music…and Warner Bros, the label that had previously signed The Fugs, Captain Beefheart and Devo (along with the bands from Sire) was the perfect place to launch the alternative sound into the mainstream.

The crazy implosion of Janes Addiction’s reunion this past week, on stage for all to see and tweet, threw me down traipsing the ancient cobblestones of the mid-80s…beyond Nothing’s Shocking, a record that admittedly I don’t go back to much anymore. My high school years+—my formative years of music listening—1984-1988—were framed by the records that were released during those days…by the incredible fertile landscape of the underground music scene. The records that topped the charts of KUSF and KALX, that were featured on the walls of Revolver Records on Clement in San Francisco and Rasputin Records on Telegraph in Berkeley. The bands that played at The I-Beam on New Music Mondays…

I had two long drives last week, to and from Los Angeles for work meetings and to attend the So Cal Premier of Sabbath Queen, a film Reboot is a part of. I had time for some deep listening. Starting with Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising, I surfed-streamed through my favorite records of that time. So instead of pondering the future of Jane’s Addiction, which seems boring and obvious, I thought it would be a good moment to celebrate the art and artists that were shining back in those days, with the understanding that given all that has come since that time…all of the evolutions of music and musicians who have stood on the shoulders of their work, sometimes the true impact of their cutting-edge artistic statements are forgotten. This is a rag tag group of releases during a time when the music scene was in reinvention mode—after the waves of punk and post punk had played out and underground sounds and styles were being reinvented and rereinvented in many dark crevices of the USA. These records went against the grain…they confounded and perplexed many as they created a foundation of what was to come…they set the stage for the music of the 1990s and the 21st century…

Psychic.... Powerless.... Another Man's Sac by The Butthole Surfers (1984): It is impossible to understate the importance and greatness of The Butthole Surfers. When I first heard this record, it blew my mind so completely I had to listen to it from the room next door because I couldn’t handle the chaos….but loved it. The name of the band: crazy. The name of the record: really really crazy. But (and?) music contained within the grooves tops it all, with the Butthole Surfers taking punk and metal and industrial and alien sounds and jamming them down a meat grinder…all with amazing musicality and truly touched and sordid lyrics sung by Gibby Haynes. The opening track—Concubine—might just bare witness to the actual sound made as Pandora’s box opened, and later, the record goes deeper into the inferno with Cherub. What an evil ride; stuff that could only come out of Texas, where the oppressive winds breath the revolutionary spirit. This record still sounds as great and sick today as it did back then. Oh…and their live show back then…with the band against the backdrop of a vasectomy film, foregrounded with the dancing of a naked, silver-toothed elf…double drummers…strobe lights start/stopping the jumping, jamming and screaming of the band members—the best in show.

Teen Babes From Monsanto by Redd Kross (1984): Redd Kross doubled down on seventies nostalgia only five years after the bell-bottomed decade was over…but their style of punked-out glam and paiselied-Sex-Shop fashion displayed on this EP of cover songs, and the following tours, and their appearance that same year in Dave Markey’s Desperate Teenage Lovedolls, and through their next solid record of original material, Neurotica (1987), and tours after, showcased how original, fun, righteously silly and powerfully influential the band was. It blows my mind that the brothers McDonald, Jeff and Steve, were only 21 and 17 respectfully at the time the the EPs release and yet could throw down heavy veteran rock sounds, like their covers of The Stooges’ Anne and David Bowie’s Savior Machine. The curated songs on this EP, each inspiringly covered by the band, is a mini-Harry Smith Anthology of American Trash Music Culture that definitely marked a changing moment in the scene. It still holds up, even as the band continues to release incredible records. I did not love the expanded addition of Teen Babes that came out a few years ago…you cannot mess with perfection even if you add great tracks to the mix.

Red Roses For Me by The Pogues (1984): Red Roses For Me introduced the world to the greatest Irish songwriter of the times, Shane MacGowan, as well as a killer band that fearlessly slammed Irish music into the ferocity of English punk (Henry VIII be damned). The Pogues would go on to release two incredible follow-up records over the next few years, Run, Sodomy and the Lash and If I Should Fall From The Grace of God, but Red Roses For Me has an immediacy and a relentless rawness that celebrate the primal origins of this liquored up monster group whose music is more of a movement than a night at the pubs.

Psychocandy By The Jesus and Mary Chain (1985): With the reverb on 11 and the noise of the ocean splashing over everything, Psychocandy scratched scratched scratched the skin of the inner-ear with every listen, damaging yet satisfying. Crazily hooky pop songs, evolutions from the Phil Spector/California Eden wall-of-beach-sound—but with added 100-foot waves of SSSHHHHHHH. That noise solo on Taste The Floor is only matched by Brian Gregory’s anarchy on The Cramps’ TV Set…there is a lot of fucking NOISE all over Psychocandy. But it is the marriage of the noise and the sweet sweet melodies fueling songs like Taste of Cindy, You Trip Me Up or the album’s opening track Just Like Honey: that is what makes Psychocandy so perfect, so iconic spurring hundreds of bands dressed in black shoegazing with feedback loops…

Telephone Free Landslide Victory by Camper Van Beethoven (1985): While they were actually from Santa Cruz, Camper Van Beethoven seemed like hometown heroes in San Francisco, playing legendary gigs at The Vis, The I-Beam and the Farm. It was a scene…always with the likes of Jackson Haring, Marty Brumbach, Scott Lowry (David’s brother), and Jay Harding in the audience. I was already deeply into ska and rocksteady music, punk rock and country, and Camper Van showcased a truly unique blend of those genres…a sound that I had not heard before. Telephone Free Landslide Victory, with its matte-barn sound harnessed in absolutely beautiful silk-screened outer packaging (provided by Bruce Licher’s Independent Project Records), prophesized a whole wave of mediocre indie-rock bands to come later, but that does not diminish its greatness, for in this case the parent superiorly out-shadowed all of its children. With songs like Take The Skinheads Bowling, The Ambiguity Song, Oh No (Here It Comes Again) and the countrified cover of Black Flag’s Wasted…and all of its ska-ish/somewhere-else-in-the-worldish instrumentals, the record is a great listen…still sounding wonderfully convoluted today.

Fishbone (1985): Sticking with new purveyors of Ska, let us leave Santa Cruz for the heat of LA where Fishbone recorded their debut EP that became a soundtrack for the courtyard dwellers at Lowell High School sophomore year. Through this EP, Fishbone promised to be the most exciting and evolutionary band since Funkadelic…with more of a blazing two-toned punk than funk disposition (at least at this moment in their career). Like all of the bands on this list: there was nothing like Fishbone ANYWHERE (and no, none of the “funky” LA bands in their stratosphere could hold a candle). Best songwriting. Best musicians. And their live performance…I would not see lunatic explosiveness like lead singer/trumpeter Angelo Moore again until I saw EYE from The Boredoms for the first time. Those almost monthly live shows at The Stone in San Francisco…sardines convulsing through the electrocution of some alien core shook the club like it was 1906. As the kingpin song on the record saizzzzz: Party At Ground Zero…a B-movie starring YOU…and the world will turn to flowing pink vapor stew (whacka-do).

New Day Rising/Flip Your Wig by Hüsker Dü (1985): In 1985, the Minnesota trio Hüsker Dü was PEAKING creatively…releasing Irish Twin LPs, both of which found Bob Mould and Grant Hart perfecting their ferocious mix of punk, metal, and hooks upon hooks upon hooks. On these two records alone, you have Makes No Sense At All, Every Everything, Flip Your Wig, Books About UFOs, New Day Rising, The Girl Who Lived on Heaven Hill…both albums chock full of amazing songs, chain-saw riffs, revved-up motor drums. They would go on to sign to Warner Bros. Records (by Karen Berg if my memory serves me right) and continue to make solid records but these two ‘85 classics are the go-back-to everytime (ok…along with New Day Rising)….

Perfect Prescription by The Spacemen 3 (1987): By 1986 I was working at KUSF, which offered me the ability to get turned on to so much new music. I would often join the Music Director’s listening sessions he held with other members of the staff…which is where I first heard The Spacemen 3 and their classic record Perfect Prescription. I would soon go back and hear their debut record Sound Of Confusion, which was much heavier…awesome thick space rock and roll inspired by The Thirteenth Floor Elevators and the MC5. Perfect Prescription was a whole other complex animal, with Velvet Underground/Lou Reed drones and JJ Cale underpinnings, a soft bomb of a blissed-out wonderland, a record of quiet, groovy melodic meditations. Ecstasy Symphony into their needle-veined version of The Red Krayola’s Transparent Radiation may be one of the most sublime, soul massage recordings in existence with songs Ode To Street Hassle and Come Down Easy not too far behind. They are just some of the many classic songs on this record, a record I still listen to weekly when a levitation is needed.

You’re Living All Over Me by Dinosaur Jr (1987): I ran into a friend doing jury duty in 1987, and when we were both excused, she said there was a record she had just bought that I needed to hear. When she put it on, and the first song hit, Little Fury Things, my brain started dripping onto her apartment floor. The bombastic guitar noise that leader J. Mascis was blowing out of the speakers: I have never heard anything like it. It was like hearing Neil Young simultaneously playing and melting on the surface of Mars. J.’s voice was contrarily folky…while that band kept exploding through verse, chorus, solo, rebirth. Kracked, The Lung, Raisans: songwriting brilliance driven through a grungy fucked-up big, loud, compressed Tasmanian chaos of guitars, pedals and huge amplifiers. And yes, I did leave some of my brain behind that day.

Invisible Lantern by The Screaming Trees (1988): This record was the first sound of grunge I heard coming out of Seattle. Back at KUSF…I was hanging with Music Director Tim Zeigler when the postman arrived with the day’s record packages. When he opened the one that contained Invisible Lantern his eyes perked up: we needed to hear it NOW. We went into Studio C, KUSF’s production studio, and threw it on turntable 1 and turned the volume wayyyy up (I miss those after-high-school days at KUSF). The production was mushier than that of Dinosaur Jr.’s…but a dark, fiendish, garagey goo that hit my eardrums perfectly, with a modern-day-without-the-cheese Jim Morrison on vocals. What a voice. I was being introduced to Mark Lanegan, one of the great singers of his time (RIP) and his band, the Screaming Trees. Tim and I sat captivated listening to this record, swampy song after great swirly swampy song, looking at each other wide-eyed every time Gary Conner took a tripped out guitar-hero lead. Blown away by every song on side one, only truly breathing when flipping the platter to side 2, just to hear more inspired fuzz.

Oh My Gawd!!! by The Flaming Lips (1988): I had already started digging the Flaming Lips when I heard their debut long player Here It Is, first heard (again) at a KUSF meeting (Tim Hyde the MD at the time). I had already met Wayne and Michael when they came to the studio for an interview, and I recorded their station announcement (Wayne reporting that acid was now legal in San Francisco) before sneaking into the I-Beam at 17 to see them that night. But it was in my Freshman year at UC Berkeley when I bought Oh My Gawd at the record store near Top Dog on Durant that my love affair began. The Flaming Lips were the modern psychedelic group I was looking for, early Pink Floyd put into a blender via huge crazed rock like the album’s opening track Everything Exploding and Can’t Stop The Spring, to the reality-shifting pulsations of The Ceiling Is Bending, and of course, the mind-altering opus One Million Billionth Of A Millisecond On A Sunday Morning—“Early in the mornin', just before the dawn
I turn my T.V. on and watch the fuzz.” They would destroy the studio’s piano in the end, after finishing the platter with the epic final integration, Love Yr Brain, with its fantastic tripped-out lyrics from vocalist Wayne Coyne, a song they still perform to this day. My favorite record of a great year of records with a band that would go on to change my life time and time again for the next decades. People argue about what the best era was for the Flaming Lips. I love them all AND Oh My Gawd! is easily one of the best during their crazed psych years.

Superfuzz Bigmuff by Mudhoney (1988): The heaviest rock album of the year was an EP by the true kings of Seattle grunge, Mudhoney. I had heard their first single, Touch Me I’m Sick, but nothing prepared me for Superfuzz Bigmuff with their evil twin guitar attack and the Sabbath-rich rhythm section. The screaming of Mark Arm. The blazing solos of Steve Turner. Thee heaviest. How many bands were birthed after this record came out? After they first toured America? Superfuzz is a perfect thing, six songs that hit hard and define a plaid-shirted music generation. And hot, damn those last two songs: If I Think (one of my all time favorite recordings, that sweet stoned-out verse of bewildered questioning into the crashing down chorus of a revelation) into In and Out Of Grace, which bellows fumes from beginning to end, all over the place, with one of the greatest guitar riffs, monster noise jams and epic vocal performance packed into a clawing, scratching animal. Grunge love.

Daydream Nation by Sonic Youth (1988): No Wave purveyors of experimental noise rock Sonic Youth had one of the most consistently great outputs of music in the eighties. From Bad Moon Rising to Evol to Sister to Daydream Nation: each record a brilliant next step…each a fresh new evolution of a band that was redefining and deconstructing the rock sound. I loved them all, and chose Daydream Nation for this list because not only did it break their unique musical sound to a whole new audience, but if featured Teenage Riot, a song that defined the X Generation with its feel and message, featured in a video hat-tip to all the great artists that brought them to this moment (Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Neil Young, Einstürzende Neubauten, Minor Threat) and all the bands that were also making their mark on the underground music scene (The Butthole Surfers, Redd Kross, Pussy Galore, The Minute Men, amongst others). The double record is a wonderful listen with each of the three songwriters at their compositional best, with a perfect mix of noise craziness and rock prowess, with a trilogy of songs at the end of the record that take your breath away: “It's an anthem in a vacuum on a hyperstation. Daydreaming days in a daydream nation.”

Can you imagine my bewilderment when less than a decade later I had signed two of these bands and two artists deeply associated with two others to Warner Brothers?

~~~~~~

OK….I am stopping here and I am not even close to showcasing all the incredible records from the mid-eighties. Los Lobos released Will The Wolf Survive in 1984, their first release that launched a career of one of the crown jewels of US bands…mixing Tex Mex, Rhythm and Blues, rock, rockabilly, blues…creating a sound that they alone showcase. Other great records: The Feelies’ The Good Earth, The Waterboys’ This is the Sea, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ The Mercy Seat, This Mortal Coil’s It Will End In Tears, The Violent Femmes’ Hallowed Ground…and more. Highly impactful records all…enough to fill a book (ooooooh…what an idea!). It was just a fantastic evolutionary time in music that we are still celebrating and seeing the influence of today. Thank you Jane’s Addiction for the crazy fall-apart last week….it sparked a trip down one of music’s great eras!

What records of that time would YOU put on the list?

RIP Nick Gravenites (seen with Los Lobos last summer at Rancho Nicassio)

The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock

By: T. S. Elliot

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
 
 
Let us go then, you and I, 
When the evening is spread out against the sky 
Like a patient etherised upon a table; 
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, 
The muttering retreats       
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels 
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: 
Streets that follow like a tedious argument 
Of insidious intent 
To lead you to an overwhelming question …         
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” 
Let us go and make our visit. 
 
In the room the women come and go 
Talking of Michelangelo. 
 
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,       
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes 
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, 
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, 
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, 
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,         
And seeing that it was a soft October night, 
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. 
 
And indeed there will be time 
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, 
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;         
There will be time, there will be time 
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; 
There will be time to murder and create, 
And time for all the works and days of hands 
That lift and drop a question on your plate;         
Time for you and time for me, 
And time yet for a hundred indecisions, 
And for a hundred visions and revisions, 
Before the taking of a toast and tea. 
 
In the room the women come and go         
Talking of Michelangelo. 
 
And indeed there will be time 
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” 
Time to turn back and descend the stair, 
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—         
They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!” 
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, 
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin— 
They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!” 
Do I dare       
Disturb the universe? 
In a minute there is time 
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. 
 
For I have known them all already, known them all:— 
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,         
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; 
I know the voices dying with a dying fall 
Beneath the music from a farther room. 
  So how should I presume? 
 
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—       
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, 
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, 
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, 
Then how should I begin 
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?       
  And how should I presume? 
 
And I have known the arms already, known them all— 
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare 
But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair! 
It is perfume from a dress       
That makes me so digress? 
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. 
  And should I then presume? 
  And how should I begin?
       
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets       
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes 
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?… 
 
I should have been a pair of ragged claws 
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
       
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!       
Smoothed by long fingers, 
Asleep … tired … or it malingers, 
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. 
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, 
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?       
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, 
Though I have seen my head grown slightly bald brought in upon a platter, 
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter; 
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, 
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,       
And in short, I was afraid. 
 
And would it have been worth it, after all, 
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, 
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, 
Would it have been worth while,         
To have bitten off the matter with a smile, 
To have squeezed the universe into a ball 
To roll it toward some overwhelming question, 
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, 
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—         
If one, settling a pillow by her head, 
  Should say: “That is not what I meant at all. 
  That is not it, at all.” 
 
And would it have been worth it, after all, 
Would it have been worth while,         
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, 
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor— 
And this, and so much more?— 
It is impossible to say just what I mean! 
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:       
Would it have been worth while 
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, 
And turning toward the window, should say: 
  “That is not it at all, 
  That is not what I meant, at all.”
         
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; 
Am an attendant lord, one that will do 
To swell a progress, start a scene or two, 
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, 
Deferential, glad to be of use,         
Politic, cautious, and meticulous; 
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; 
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— 
Almost, at times, the Fool. 
 
I grow old … I grow old …       
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. 
 
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? 
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. 
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. 
 
I do not think that they will sing to me.         
 
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves 
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back 
When the wind blows the water white and black. 
 
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea 
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown       
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.