It’s a remarkable record: rhythmically propulsive, texturally dense, and deceptively complex harmonically. And as much as Mould influenced his contemporaries, they influenced him as well.
Read More“Divine Intervention” comes from the album Girlfriend, which Sweet wrote in the aftermath of his first marriage. Many of the strongest songs are about doubt, insecurity, and loss, and he doesn’t shy from them.
Read More1990 was my first year of college, and my roommate stocked our dormroom with one important piece of gear: a CD player. While the format had made its debut eight years earlier, it was just beginning to go mainstream.
CDs cost twice as much as cassettes, so it was a significant commitment to change formats. Years later, I squinted at the fine print on the Wonder Stuff CD The Eight Legged Groove Machine (released in 1988) and saw this: "ENJOY YOUR C. D (you payed enough)" (sic). And this from a record with a track called “It’s Yer Money I’m After, Baby”.
But the superior convenience of CDs convinced me to switch formats. My roommate graciously agreed to let me use his stereo, and that inaugurated an expensive 20 years of CD collecting.
The first CD I bought was Vivid by Living Colour, largely on the strength of their hit single Cult of Personality. The song has since become a minor classic, although the muddled politics of the lyrics grated on me even then. But still, the musicianship is top notch, and Vernon Reid’s solo sounds as great to me now as it did back then.
Not long after this was released, Billy Joel evidently decided to get into the "song that lists a bunch of stuff from history" game by releasing the insipid (even for him) We Didn't Start the Fire. He ditched the opening quote from Malcolm X, stripped out the politics, and chant/shouted his way through a song with all the moral force of a grocery list. This idea is so bad that it became a #1 hit and and earned Joel a Grammy nomination.
In all the tributes to Lou Reed this week, they’ve missed one critical milestone: on April 17, 1989, Lou Reed was the guest on the radio call-in show Rockline. It changed my life.
Most weeks, Rockline featured acts that were comfortably inside the rock mainstream (the previous guest was Eddie Money), but every now and then they’d have someone interesting. I’d never heard of Lou Reed, so I was only half-following the interview, which mostly served as background noise while I did homework.
Then they played Dirty Blvd., the lead single off of his new record New York. There, in my bedroom, listening to KLOS on my Realistic clock radio, a new universe of rock opened to me. The music was stripped down and bit sloppy, and I saw that it was fine just as it was. The words mixed the literary with the everyday, and even though I could tell that the literary and street references were a bit dodgy, anyone could see he was going for something a lot more interesting than the other bands I was listening to.
I bought the cassette and played it so often it warped.
In his liner notes, Lou Reed says that you should listen to New York straight through, “as though it were a book or a movie”. He got some critical grief for this at the time (so pretentious!), but he’s right. So, to get you started, here’s Romeo Had Juliette, track one from New York.
Growing up in LA, I played freelance gigs whenever I could squeeze them in between classwork. One I particularly enjoyed was the Asian Philharmonic Society, where I was a member of their all-anglo percussion section. One of my fellow players was a student in my teacher’s studio at CalState LA. She was quiet, serious, and wore black combat boots, and when she said she had a band, I was expecting something like Sonic Youth.
But in the late 80s, drummers who wanted to make a living weren’t playing art rock, they were playing hair metal. My friend hit the stage with hair and makeup that would have fit right in at a Poison concert.
Having seen so many talented friends struggle to make a living in music, I don’t blame anyone for trying to get whatever edge they can, even if that means playing in an all-girl hair metal band with a lead flute—which, for the record, was every bit as bad an idea as it sounds.
Hair metal is such an obvious target of derision, there’s hardly any point in attacking it. I’m mostly just disappointed. The bands who made hair metal should have been great: they practiced a lot; they liked The Rolling Stones, The Ramones, The Clash, The Damned, Wire. A group of misfits and outcasts like that should have produced LA’s answer to the New York Dolls.
Instead, we got crap like Mötley Crüe and Warrant. In fairness, they sold truckloads of records, which they promptly converted to truckloads of drugs. Say what you want about hair metal bands, the hedonism and debauchery they sang about was no affectation.
The only band that really delivered on the promise was Guns N’ Roses (the unconventional apostrophe replacing the more metal-inflected umlaut that had been a mainstay of ersatz-heavy band names since Blue Öyster Cult in the late 60s). About bloody time.
On a clandestine late-night MTV binge, I heard Welcome To the Jungle for the first time. Finally, here was music that gave the (vicarious) transgressive thrill that had been missing from hair metal all along.
The drum parts were also unbelievably easy, which meant that when my friends and I covered Sweet Child O’ Mine in our rock band, I could get swept up in the show as much as my friends in the audience.
I’m Jes Sherborne. I develop software for fun and profit and play drums in the band Notary. I live near Chicago with my super-smart, lovely wife and two delightful children.
jes.sherborne@gmail.com
Copyright © 2012–2021 Jes Sherborne under a Creative Commons license. You dig?
