A Timeless Wavelength

Dinosaur Jr. – Little Fury Things

Remember that scene in High Fidelity where they’re trying to come up with the top 5 greatest album opening tracks?  Well, this one would definitely be somewhere on my list.  I first became aware of Dinosaur Jr. in 1992, when bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam became overnight sensations and started a national obsession with formerly obscure bands who played vaguely ’70s-style arena rock through cheap overdriven amps.  Someone in the news media named this “grunge,” even though as far as I can tell no band in history actually ever called themselves a grunge band.  It was never even very clear what this genre was supposed to consist of:  I once bought a tape called The Best of Grunge Rock at K-Mart (yes! K-Mart!), and have since racked my brain trying to figure out how Smashing Pumpkins, Tin Machine, and Helmet were supposed to have anything to do with all those plad-wearing smack addicts from Seattle who were burning up the pop charts.

Anyway, one good side effect of the “grunge” craze was that mainstream record stores across America suddenly started selling albums by smaller independent bands that only college kids and indie snobs had heard of before.  I picked up my first Dinosaur Jr. tape, 1991′s EP Whatever’s Cool With Me, after I heard Nirvana’s Chris Novoselic mention them in an interview.  (Ironically, he was complaining because it was hard to find their albums in record stores.)  I liked what I heard, and pretty soon went out and bought the group’s sophomore album, You’re Living All Over Me.

The difference between the two was like night and day.  Whatever’s Cool With Me was essentially a J. Mascis solo project, Dinosaur Jr. proper having split up some time ago.  Its production, while not quite as polished as mainstream radio hits of the early ’90s, was still pretty clean and professional.  You’re Living All Over Me, however, featured lo-fi pioneer Lou Barlow, and sounded like it was illegally recorded at a live show on a Walkman in some kid’s jean jacket pocket.  It was raw, gritty, and wonderful, and made me wonder why all the other music I heard was so overproduced.

The album opens with “Little Fury Things,” which begins with a blast of sound that’s part distorted guitar and part anguished scream.  This sound gives way to soft vocal harmonies and mellow guitar chords, but those chords are played through horribly overdriven amps over Barlow’s heavy distorted bass.  You wouldn’t think one song would recall both late ’60s folk-rock and late ’70s punk at the same time, but it does.  Once I heard this song I knew I wouldn’t be able to settle for Top 40 radio “grunge rock” ever again.

Gogol Bordello – 60 Revolutions

Imagine if the Pogues hailed from Eastern Europe instead of Ireland, and immigrated to New York’s Lower East Side, where they absorbed the lyrical stylings of American hip-hop.  Then you might imagine something like Gogol Bordello, a self-described “gypsy punk” band that rock out on fiddle and accordion while singing in English, Russian, Ukrainian, and even Spanish.

It’s amazing how well these varied musical styles and ethnic influences blend.  Lead singer Eugene Hütz boasts of his musical and sexual prowess as effectively as any hip-hop MC, and equally as profficient at describing his life as an ethnic minority in a rough neighborhood.  The only difference is that his ethnicity is Roma, and the rough neighborhood was in Communist-run Kiev.  On “60 Revolutions,” he vows to stand up “to this karaoke dictatorship / where posers and models with guitars / boogie to the shit for beats.”  How do you say “sucka MCs” in Ukrainian?

Henrietta Collins and the Wifebeating Childhaters – Drive-By Shooting

Fresh from his long stint as the frontman for Black Flag, Henry Rollins kicked off his solo career with the album Hot Animal Machine. Soon afterward, this new solo project itself spawned a side project. . . of sorts:  Henry and the band who were not yet known as the Rollins Band adopted female monikers and released the album Drive-By Shooting under the deliberately provocative name Henrietta Collins and the Wifebeating Childhaters.

The album sounds pretty much like what you’d expect from a group with that name:  a lot of over-the-top, cartoonish violence.  Listening to this album makes you appreciate the fact that, contrary to all expectations, Henry Rollins has actually mellowed out and matured a great deal over the years.  His recent work has certainly produced nothing to match this exchange from “Hey Henrietta”:  “Why’d the chicken cross the road?  ‘Cause I SHOT him!  Yeah!”  This isn’t the guy who goes on the spoken-word tours and has his own show on the Independent Film Channel;  this was the young, rambunctious Henry who was shipped off to military school and pumped full of Ritalin to make him sit still.  Parts of the album venture well past the bounds of good taste (the aforementioned “Hey Henrietta” makes light of raping a policewoman, for example), but this track, a jaunty little surf tune about gang violence,  is just irreverent enough to work as satire.

Quintron – Place Unknown

New Orleans’ Mr. Quintron is an interestingly eccentric musician as well as a classic Maker.  He performs on a homemade keyboard made out of parts salvaged from a Hammond Organ and a Fender Rhodes, all stuffed into a case shaped like the front of a 1920s-era automobile, complete with working headlights.  His music has a sort of retro-weird feel to it:  Quintron’s organ stylings recall the exotica and “space-age bachelor pad” recordings of the ’50s and ’60s, and remind us that not all Hammond organists were trying to sound like black Gospel musicians.

But it’s his incessant tinkering that really makes Mr. Quintron special.  Aside from his car-organ, and a few oddities like a saliva-controlled synthesizer, Mr. Quintron is probably best known as the inventor of the Drum Buddy.  This is an analog drum machine that looks like a prop from a sci-fi B-movie.  It consists of a light bulb surrounded by a rotating cylinder, around which are several photocells.  Special paper wraps for the cylinder are made with strategically placed holes, and when a hole passes under a photocell the light hits it, producing a weird and thoroughly un-drum-like sound.  The speed of the cylinder can be manually controlled, and the performer can even stop the cylinder by hand and “scratch” it back and forth, DJ-style.  It’s like a hip-hop Rhythmicon.

This track, “Place Unknown,” from the album Are You Ready for an Organ Solo?, got some radio play when I was in Baton Rouge.  I like it because it gives shout-outs to my home town, as well as a number of other places I’ve lived.

Cowboy Junkies – Run For Your Life

The Beatles’ Rubber Soul provided a segue between the Fab Four’s early teenage pop period and their Indian-influenced quasi-psychedelic phase, and this musical turning point is paid perfect tribute by the multi-artist cover album This Bird Has Flown. Its closing track, “Run For Your Life,” performed by the Cowboy Junkies, is a wonderful example of how recontextualizing can work wonders for a song.

The original version of this song may be one of the more dissapointing works in the Beatles’ catalog.  It’s essentially an ode to domestic violence:  the narrator sings that he “would rather see you dead, little girl / than to be with another man,” then proceeds to explain how jealous he is and how he fully intends to carry out his death threats.  The lyrics alone would make this song deplorable enough, but the fact that they’re sung by the utterly non-threatening John Lennon over the Beatles’ jangly pop music makes it sound as silly as Vanilla Ice’s gangsta posturing.

The Cowboy Junkies’ cover is immeasurably better.  The music is slower and much more ominous, and lead vocalist Margo Timmins is as menacing as John was harmless. It sounds like the Angelo Badalamente soundtrack to a David Lynch film noir, and when you hear her sing “run for your life if you can, little boy” you know that, at the very least, someone’s going to wind up missing an ear.

The Moog Cookbook – Buddy Holly

For some reason there was a resurgence of interest in analog synthesizers in the mid-1990s, and one of the best groups to jump onto this particular bandwagon were the Moog Cookbook, a duo consisting of Meco Eno and Uli Nomi, a couple of mystery musicians who performed wearing what looked like homemade spacesuits.  In reality, they were producer Brian Kehew and multi-instrumentalist Roger Joseph Manning, Jr., sometime Beck sidekick and member of retro-’70s band Jellyfish (remember them?).  The two released a few albums of analog synth covers of popular songs, sort of a lowbrow Switched-On Bach with more of a sense of humor.

I chose this track, a cover of Weezer’s “Buddy Holly,” because, in addition to the normal array of Moogs and Korgs and other synths with Klingon-sounding names, they make use of a simple electronic doorbell.  It’s one analog synth anyone can play and nearly everyone already owns.  Granted, its repertoire is rather limited, but for the “oh-oh” part in “Buddy Holly” it’s absolutely perfect.

Rufus Wainwright – The Origin of Love

Hedwig and the Angry Inch is probably the greatest ever rock opera about an East German transexual’s tormented relationship with her glam-rock protégé.  (It’s certainly in the top five.)  And the song “The Origin of Love” from the Hedwig soundtrack is definitely my favorite ever song based on Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium.  (Besides, when you’re a philosophy student who writes about popular music, you take what you can get.)

As much as I liked the soundtrack to that film, I thoroughly enjoyed Wig in a Box, a tribute album in which various indie-rock acts such as Sleater-Kinney, They Might Be Giants, and Frank Black perform their renditions of songs from the musical.  Rufus Wainwright’s version of “The Origin of Love” is especially good.  Wainwright has a way of making his cover versions of songs sound as though he had written them.

Both the original John Cameron Mitchell version and Wainwright’s cover turn Plato’s work — a bit of satire at the expense of one who himself had scathingly satirized Plato — into a beautiful and sincere expression of the connection between love and pain.  The song tells the story of a time in the distant past when humans were two-headed, four-legged creatures who defied the gods, and as punishment were split in two and scattered apart.  The emotion we now know as love is really just the pain of being separated from our other half, and the physical act of lovemaking is our attempt to put ourselves back together.  In Plato’s dialogue Aristophanes’ speech is intended as comic relief, and provides a foil for Socrates’ account of non-physical love as superior to the physical — the source of the phrase “Platonic love”.  But in Hedwig this bit of comedy is taken quite seriously, and both Mitchell and Wainwright do an exceptional job of telling Aristophanes’ tale in a way that is both sweet and sad.  (Wig in a Box does contain another version, by Jonathan Richman, which completely rewrites the lyrics, but this is both musically and lyrically far inferior.)

The Pixies – In Heaven

David Lynch’s early film Eraserhead is something of a cult classic, and one of my favorite films.  It’s utterly weird, funny, and terrifying at the same time.  It’s also famous for a bizarre musical interlude in which a puffy-cheeked lady who lives in a radiator sings a song about heaven.  If that sounds like something that only makes sense if you’ve seen the movie, don’t bother — it doesn’t make any more sense in context.  But it did make for a nice cover version by indie rock superstars The Pixies.

Klark Kent – Away From Home

As The Onion brilliantly pointed out, Sting used to be kind of cool.  Back before he started churning out lite-rock pap, he fronted The Police, one of the greatest bands of the post-punk/New Wave era.  But while he was a great singer and songwriter, he could also be controlling, and unwilling to acknowledge the creative contributions of the other members of his group.  Drummer Stewart Copeland was probably the single greatest musician of the bunch, but he was rarely given free reign to exercise his songwriting skills.  (In fact, the only Copeland-credited Police song I can think of is “Miss Gradenko” from their farewell album Synchronicity.)

When he felt artistically confined, Copeland did what many second-banana artists do:  he formed a solo project.  Not only that, he created a completely new alter-ego in the form of Klark Kent, whose biographies variously described him as an eccentric Welshmen, an Indian Sufi mystic, and a humble computer programmer.  His songs are a lot more lighthearted, clever, and humorous than those he recorded with The Police, and the instrumentation is more reminiscent of the synth-heavy pop of the early ’80s.  I can’t help but wonder what his songs might have sounded like had Sting allowed them to be used in The Police instead.

This track, “Away From Home,” could be the ultimate anthem of the young adult moving out of his parents’ home for the first time.  It celebrates both the joys (“I don’t have to clean my room!”) and sorrows (“My weekly pay won’t even dent”) of that momentous occasion over a catchy pop rhythm that sounds miles away from Sting & Co.  I just hope that I and every online lyrics site misheard the line “I entertain my rancid date.”  Do I even want to know what this means?

Camper Van Beethoven – Sweethearts

As we say goodbye to a president who inspired intense devotion in some, but even more intense hatred in others, I feel compelled to go back to this track from Camper Van Beethoven’s 1989 swan song Key Lime Pie. Written as a farewell to the Reagan years, this song recalls the hope and confidence Reagan often inspired, while at the same time dismissing that confidence as illusory.

Musically, the song reflects Dave Lowery’s interest in Americana, with its mournful slide guitar and country chord structure, while Morgan Fitcher’s violin gives it an additionally tragic edge.  The lyrics draw on a favorite cariacature of Reagan as an Ozzie and Harriet throwback obsessed with Mom, apple pie, and strengthening the military-industrial complex.  We’re told that “he’s always living back in Dixon / Circa 1949,” and treated to a barrage of middle-American clichés:  the five-and-dime, the USO dancehall, and Mom.  Lowery sings that “In black and white, life is so easy,” referring not only to Reagan’s black-and-white movies but also to his clear-cut, good-versus-evil worldview.  It’s scathingly critical, yet at the same time the song’s bittersweet feel makes you wish it really were so easy, and long for a life like that of a Reagan movie hero.

The last verse has a beautiful image:

Angels’ wings are icing over

McDonnell-Douglas, olive drab

They bear the names of our sweethearts

And the captain smiles, as we crash

I love this image of American fighter planes as protecting angels who are nevertheless still vulnerable. . . the wings’ icing over calls to mind the Cold War, the event that more than anything else defined Reagan’s political career.  Many saw him as recklessly charging ahead in his single-minded mission to defeat the Soviets, all the while exuding confidence and calm:  the captain smiling as the plane goes down.  The song closes by repeating the line “Everything is fine,” which I like to imagine as a pre-recorded message blaring out of Civil Defense bullhorns across a lifeless nuclear wasteland.

Yet for all the line’s ironic intent, there’s a certain air of sincerity about it:  Everything is fine.  We made it.  We survived eight years of Reagan without a nuclear war; anything’s possible.  Even as this song presents a scathing critique of the Reagan administration, it’s also a ballad of hope, reminding us that our worst fears have a way of not coming true.  It’s a message that rings as true at the end of the Bush era as it did at the end of the Reagan era.