rock the tube, vinyl 2, 101'ers, please kill me

so we haven't been going out that much. part of it is that we're trying to save money. part of it is that since i've started playing at the wreck room's wednesday night jam thingy, my butt-hunger has returned (kinda like i stopped exercising when i started playing again around '97 or so). while i would still maintain that it's _always_ better to play than not to play, and i would rather do so than watch _anybody_, there's a lot of waiting involved in playing, which basically means sitting watching tv with the sound off unless you smoke and/or drink -- and i've always found the instant gratification of nicotine/alcohol more irresistible than, say, playing slot machines. but it's less tempting to smoke when i'm not in that environment, and i like hanging out at home as much as anywhere else. (plus, as i said, it's cheaper.)

so we've been watching lotsa rock video on the tube -- our household idiot box is equipped with neither antenna nor cable/satellite, so it functions solely as a monitor for our dvd player and vcr. to begin with, tommy ware (who usedta play gtr with jasper stone and is looking to put together a band to perform the toons from his new rekkid; if you play bass or drums, you should call him up) generously let me borrow the ny dolls and dead boys dvd's i wrote about here a few months back. tommy and his wife marissa are among the only ppl i know in this neck of the woods who dig stuff like the dolls, t. rex, and like that, so it was a happy accident indeed when they were visiting nyc last yr and stumbled on ex-dolls frontguy david johanson and his current band performing at pier 84. not long after that, david got together with fellow surviving dolls syl sylvain and arthur kane and played a coupla u.k. dates for old times' (and new money's) sake. the whole event (including the resurgence of arthur "killer" kane, who'd moved to salt lake city and become a mormon in the years since dolldom and, sadly, shuffled of this mortal coil not long after the shows took place) was recorded for posterity.

a caveat: it's inevitable that the dolls sans johnny thunders and jerry nolan (r.i.p. both) are a little like non-alcoholic champagne, but nevermind. they music is great, and the pickup musos standing in for johnny 'n' jerry are fine. and yet, and yet. syl remains the same bouncy, corkscrew-headed clown as always (but don't underestimate him; "14th street beat" from his long-forgotten eponymous rca album way back in '78 is prolly the best post-doll waxage of all) and arthur amazes merely by being able to play notes 'n' speak in more-or-less complete sentences. but david...ummm. to say "the years have not been kind" is putting it mildly. cat looks like the crypt keeper. and when he takes his shirt off, guh. unlike iggy pop, who's somehow managed to maintain a fairly buff physique well into aarp eligibility, david looks like the old guy at the end of the bar, with saggy old man skin hanging off his scrawny arms.

the dead boys dvd is, as my grandfather usedta say, a whole 'nother bag of rice. shot for network tv (60 minutes, i think), the dvd brings you a whole set from cbgb's back when it was still, well, cbgb's. i always thought stiv bators was a pathetic li'l iggy wannabe and his band were strictly second-string mc5/stooges, but in light of all that's come down the pipe since then, this stuff sounds pretty good today (even though a little of it goes a long way for me these days). best part of the disc for me is the interview with the present-day eugene richard o'connor (aka cheetah chrome), either about to embark on or fresh from the rocket from the tombs reunion tour. (for those of you who joined us late, rocket was the mid-'70s cleveland outfit that spawned both the punk-rockin' dead boys and the more art-creepy pere ubu.) when gene sez, "i was an idiot back then," you know that he knows whereof he speaks: a proud, happy survivor who can still light them strings up. _almost_ makes me wish i'd seen the reunited rftt when they came through dallas.

still, so disturbed was i by the spectre of david jo that i had to go digging through the boxes of shit in the shed to find the heaps of fourth-generation dubbage of various rockarama that buds have sent me on vhs over the years. on one of 'em, courtesy of clark paull -- the detroit dude who, um, replaced me as the "american correspondent" for sydney-based webzine the i-94 bar -- i found a buncha vintage dolls footage from tv (it was the midnight special, i think, or maybe the brit old grey whistle test), featuring johnny 'n' jerry still alive and david as young and relatively unscarred as he was the time the dolls played dallas in '74 and david campbell saw him stick his head through the club's ceiling.

speaking of my buddy clark, i gotta tellya, since the last time i weighed in on the vinyl vs. cd issue a few weeks back, i've had an epiphany: fuck the dumb shit, rekkids just sound _better_. paul boll even explained the science of it to me, something about all the high-end garbage in digital formats being fatiguing on the ears. and as new dad marlin von bungy said, "vinyl carries more bass. i guess that's why all those dj's love it." while that doesn't mean i'm gonna try and replace all my cd's with rekkids (a fool's errand, and remember, frugality is my byword), there are a few crucial items that i couldn't wait to discover in half price books' bins (helpful hint: the one by ridgmar mall has a much hipper selection than the one on south hulen, i don't know why). one such was having a rave up with the yardbirds, the record which prolly inspired 70% of the bands on nuggets and, closer to home, the fort worth teen scene comp. more to the point, if it's true that all the music i like boils down to a dozen or so records (true for most of us, i think -- everything else we like is just an attempt to recapture that initial rush), then this is definitely one of 'em: one side of seat-of-pants experimentalismo disguised as pop music, another of r&b as pure dirty alcohol-sodden energy. sure, there are bonus track-laden cd versions of this available, but they stand in the same relation to the pristine artifact as the "big montana special" does to the original arby's sandwich.

so anyway, i'm on musicstack.com and i find a nice clean copy for under $20 (my arbitrarily-determined absolute ceiling for high-end vinyl purchases) and wouldn't ya know, the guy selling it is none other than my detroit pal clark paull. so i send him a check, he sends me a record, and a few back-and-forth e-mails ensue. i happen to mention that the day the mailman brought the package, i was listening to bob seger's smokin' o.p.'s (don't laugh; bawwwb didn't always eat the shit -- in fact, the summer of '73, i used to call the radio station in my town every night to request "ramblin' gamblin' man," which they claimed they couldn't play because it _wasn't a hit_, and smokin' o.p.'s boasts killer versions of "bo diddley" and "let it rock," as well as bob's magnum opus "heavy music"). he responds that he was in his local borders last week and had a cd reish of the self-same seger side in his hand, but put it back in favor of elgin avenue breakdown revisited, the sole release by the 101'ers (the band joe strummer fronted before the clash), now on cd.

now, my sweetie loves her some joe strummer -- in fact, his posthumously-released streetcore was one of both of our fave discs the year we met -- so on the way from converting some sub-par cd's she'd culled from her collection into cool vinyl at good ol' half price (where i found a copy of the temptations' greatest hits II which has all the great norman whitfield/dennis edwards-era jams i grew up listening to, including one i slowdanced to with a girl a full head taller than me when i was 12 and thought was _the shit_) i stopped at _our_ local borders and copped it for her. it didn't disappoint, either. clark had hipped me that one of the toons wound up evolving into the clash's "jail guitar doors," and that there were some live covers at the end that were pretty rough going. he was right about it being clash-like -- strummer was clearly a fully-formed performer long before he met mick jones, and well versed in rockabilly, r&b, and rock 'n' roll; there's a direct line running from this stuff all the way to streetcore -- but i had to disagree with him about the live shit, which i thought was pretty boss. in fact, it reminded me of the second side of having a rave up, where the lagered-up yardbirds (including a pre-deity eric clapton, if it matters) rip it up royally, enough to blow the roof off the marquee club where it was recorded. i find it nothing but miraculous that said impulse survived the decade-plus that separated the yardbirds and the 101'ers; i hope it's still alive today _somewhere_.

a sign that i'm getting a few more rings around my trunk: i find that the farther rock (or rawk) travels from black music, the harder it becomes for me to identify with. it's interesting playing with cats who know dream theater but not hendrix, who are conversant with the chili peppers or rage against the machine or, uh, system of a down but not john lee hooker. rock seemed real when it was white trash kids from the wrong side of the tracks or urban ethnics from the 'hood aping the sounds of electrified country blues or gospel-inflected vocal harmony, or even later, when it was kids from the 'burbs imitating cute english guys imitating superannuated bluesmen and early rockers. when it became subsequent generations of kids from the 'burbs imitating previous generations of kids from the 'burbs, i kinda lost interest. punk was actually the last gasp of that: the dolls sure knew who bo diddley and sonny boy williamson were. i guess that's why i like going in record town so much -- it helps me feel connected to the qualities that drew me to music in the first place, as well as the environment where i learned about it. or maybe i just like to talk story with other old men in rock 'n' roll clothes (although i suppose my recent experience with clark provides an online, um, analogue of that).

so anyway, i'm sitting here listening to the stooges' funhouse (wherein acid hoodlums from down the street invent punk-rock) while my sweetie is reading legs mcneil and gillian mccain's please kill me: the uncensored oral history of punk, which larry harrison calls "the best book about music that contains not one word about music." there are other books like it out there -- we got the neutron bomb: the untold story of l.a. punk by marc spitz and brendan mullen, and michael azerrad's our band could be your life: scenes from the american indie underground 1981-1991 are the ones that immediately spring to mind -- but i just don't care about their subject matter as much as i do about the new york-detroit-cleveland '60s-'70s axis that mcneil and mccain chronicled. they do a stellar job of weaving reams of eyewitness testimony into a narrative flow that's near-cinematic, and even succeed at making johnny thunders and jerry nolan seem like tragic heroes rather than the ne'er-do-wells you know they were in life. it's occurred to me in the past that somebody oughtta write a book like this about the fort. but not me, not this week.

eventually i suppose we'll get some coin and leave the house again (except for wednesday nights, when i'll continue driving the five minutes from my house to the wreck to sit watching tv with the sound turned off, smoke cigarettes, drink beers, and play a little music). in the meantime, my sweetie is about to start reading the chapter on the dolls, so it's time to throw too much too soon on the turntable...