"GREG GINN, MEET MICHAEL SESSION...": A Conversation with Charles Sharp

This is a first for the Beast. We’ve reviewed books and interviewed authors but we’ve never reviewed a Ph.D. Thesis. But the subject of Charles M. Sharp’s 2008 dissertation, titled Improvisation, Identity and Tradition: Experimental Music Communities in Los Angeles, is something quite close to the Beast’s heart. And something we have been waiting to read for a long time.

It's a mammoth piece of work, clocking in at almost 500 pages. Sharp was kind enough to lend us a copy for informal perusal and we quickly found out why: despite the academic tone one expects in a Ph.D. disseration, it is the first text we've seen to weave together -- in a sort of crazy-quilt fashion -- the unruly and often confusing 40-year history of L.A.'s various experimental music scenes. There are chapters on Ornette Coleman, Horace Tapscott and UGMAA, Bobby Bradford, Nels and Alex Cline, Vinny Golia and Nine Winds Records. Perhaps the paper's centerpiece is a long and fascinating account of the late clarinetist John Carter's Roots and Folkore series, which Sharp rightly calls "one of the most important pieces of experimental jazz during the 1980s." There are individual case studies of working L.A. musicians like saxophonists Lynn Johnston and Michael Session and tubaist William Roper, and revelatory portraits of lesser-known figures like Lee Kaplan and Titus Levi, whose behind-the-scenes support for L.A.'s nascent improvised music scene proved invaluable in keeping it alive.

But Sharp has gone farther into areas that have either been neglected or passed over in any single history and connected them to a much wider and richer tapestry, particularly in the fascinating parallels between experimental jazz and punk rock in Los Angeles: The Masque, The Deadbeats, SST Records, The Minutemen, Al's Bar and The Weirdos (among many others) are all brought to the fore as spiritual inheritors of L.A.'s free jazz past. Sharp's vitae as both a musician and an educator (he teaches at Cal State-Fullerton) allows him to straight-facedly parallel the music of both Ornette Coleman and Black Flag and make it riveting rather than ridiculous.

If you have nothing better to do on a rainy Saturday (i.e. tomorrow), Sharp will moderate a panel titled The Cost of Free Jazz with guests Jeff Schwartz, Jeff Kaiser and Vinny Golia at the EMP Pop Conference at UCLA. (It's free BTW.) We recently sat down with the newly minted "Dr. Sharp" at the Royal/T Cafe for a brief chat about how he managed to pull all this off; rather than some salt and pepper-haired academic, we found a guy who, refreshingly, looks like this:

THE BEAST: I couldn’t bring the whole thesis today, sorry.
SHARP: Well, it’s quite a monster.

How long did it take to complete?
Ten years from the time I started grad school to the time I finished. It was during the same period that Steve Isoardi was doing The Dark Tree, so we were almost chasing each other doing interviews…it was kind of weird. He was at the UCLA Oral History Department and I knew he had done Central Avenue Sounds and was starting to do the Beyond Central interview project with people like Bobby Bradford…I did one of my first interviews with Nels just a week before Steve did an interview with him.

How do you even begin to approach a project like this? How do you make sense of such diffuse material? Do you simply look for connections and go from there?
Well yeah, it’s a history and to go chronologically that makes it a lot easier.

But a lot of it hasn’t even been linked up together.
Well yeah, that’s true. That’s why it took such a long time. It was originally going to be going over some of the same stuff that was in The Dark Tree – I played with a lot of those people, I was very interested in that scene – but I was also playing with guys like Lynn [Johnston] and there was no historical connection between any of this. I didn’t see at first why that was, but then I realized, ‘Well, that’s what this is all really about.’ This music is about freedom but that freedom is defined very differently by different groups of people. So, for example, even though [SST Records founder] Greg Ginn listens to John Coltrane, his understanding of Coltrane is completely different from Michael Session’s understanding of Coltrane…I realized that they could talk to each other, they should talk to each other, and not just because I think it would be interesting. Those two guys have so little in common and yet so much in common, so how do I make those connections? How do I draw those threads out ? Once I figured that out, it was a matter of looking at all these different narratives and trying to weave them together at a different level.

Ornette Coleman

Were there any “eureka!” moments when you were doing your research?
Yes, almost everything was like that. [laughter] I started out with jazz and then it grew to the free-jazz guys and then the punk jazz and the free improvisers and the classical music players like Kraig Grady and David Ocker – that whole Independent Composers' Association thing was a real revelation, especially how similar it was to a social organization like COMA [California Outsider Music Association]. Both were happening at the same time but either they weren’t aware of each other or just weren’t able or interested in fusing those things. Then you had the top-down version of the L.A. Festival coming at the same time, so being able to lay those out brought the social issues to the fore, which is what really interested me…The music is diffuse and strange and capitalizes on the ability for anybody to interpret any way you want. This is music that doesn’t tell you what to think. It poses questions. This is true of all of it, whether its punk rock or improvised music…What amazes me is the degree of separation between Black Flag and John Coltrane and how can I listen to both of these...and I can appreciate all those things because I can find something that makes sense to me, that’s home to me, that I understand, that I can appropriate. Of course, ‘appropriate’ is a bit of a dangerous word when you’re talking about people doing stuff cross-culturally, but the very definition of the word is “making it your own”; if you understand something and you absorb it and it becomes part of your history or tradition.

Horace Tapscott's Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra

That reminds me of what Tapscott used to say to his audiences: “Here’s another one that you wrote.”
Yeah, although he was speaking in terms of the wider community. I mean just on an individual level, you listen and interpret and make it your own, so Greg Ginn "owns" Coltrane, not in the monetary or copyright sense, but it’s his own music even though his relationship coming into it was entirely different than Michael Session, who was sitting in the park trying to practice. Both have every right to that. We’re not yet into issues of buying and selling and who does it. When Horace said ‘This is one you wrote’ or ‘This is your music’ or 'This is your band,’ he wasn’t just talking to people in his immediate neighborhood, otherwise he would’ve just played in his neighborhood, and he didn’t, and that’s really important.

I remember a few years ago there was that multi-part series on KCRW called ‘The United States of Los Angeles’ where each chapter was dedicated to a different neighborhood and treated them all separately. But you chose not to deal with L.A. as separate communities. What was behind that?
I wanted to show how people were using music to break outside of those neighborhoods. So many of the communities in Los Angeles were the result of redlining and politics, and it was really hard for people battle out of that. This is why the community for Horace Tapscott stayed here and the community for Greg Ginn was there and they were like two miles apart but never met, which is amazing to me.

[The hideous shriek of an espresso machine drowns out most of what he says here]

Michael Session

…by listening to the Minutemen and Tapscott, you’re thinking in a little bit different way than someone who just listens to one of those things…You have some kind of fusion of those things together, so there’s some moments of overlap that creates this thought about aesthetics: ‘How does it pose questions to you that gives you an orientation to the world?’ That’s the link to all of them. The other link was that all this music was experimental and that’s never going to appeal to a huge audience…All of these people I interviewed had the intention of gravitating towards music whose meaning wasn’t always immediately clear to them right away, music that really tests and pushes the connection between the work and the world. Ethnomusicology is sort of premised on this idea that music can almost be understood as culture itself. It encodes how you think about the world in some way…One of the great beauties of music is that it’s always shrouded in some sort of mystery; experimental music capitalizes on that mystery and works those edges harder than anything else, questioning whether this is music at all…by thinking about that, you’re thinking about how people make that leap from the work of the imagination to the work of being in the world.

Older, Wiser?: Greg Ginn

Especially in Los Angeles, which is not shy about displaying its complete indifference to these types of music. Do you think this music functions better under threat?
On one end, no. Nothing works good under threat. We might want to have some romantic myth about that, but there would be more musicians playing it and more money for everybody if we just threw more money at it. If I had a million bucks I could say: ‘Let’s book a gig every night a week in this place right now! What’s it going to take? Ten thousand dollars a night? Fine, let’s do it!’ Is that going to make the scene better or worse? It’s going to make it infinitely better! Nothing gets helped by having no gigs, no record labels, no options for the music to get out there…

Black Flag

Still, in the late 70s and early 80s, you write about the similarities between the burgeoning L.A. punk scene and this burgeoning improvised music scene, especially since both groups were using the same D.I.Y. tactics: starting labels, fanzines, putting up their flyers of telephone poles, booking gigs in basements, fencing schools, wineries, churches…
Yeah, every single one of those instances is because of individuals who are going to lose money every single time, every single one of them. Now does being under pressure make people more cunning? I doubt it. If [Angel City Jazz Festival Organizers] Rocco Somazzi and Jeff Gauthier got a huge N.E.A. grant, do you think they’d squander it on Dom Perignon? Or would they book more shows?

Depends on what kind of a mood they’re in…
Granted you get more autonomy – if you can play in a fencing school you can play whatever you want as opposed to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion…If the Dorothy Chandler started booking Vinny Golia every week, do you think his music would suddenly blow up? No, not at all. If anything they would say to Vinny, ‘Can you tame it down a bit?’ I mean, they wouldn’t even invite him in to begin with, not because they don’t like the music but there those invisible perceptions over who should be doing what and why and what’s more valuable or worthwhile to the community…Then you’ve got the elite maintaining these really rigid mini-structures. I mean, how to we crack that open and reverse engineer that?

From Left: Lynn Johnston, Charles Sharp, Vinny Golia



You spoke earlier of the L.A. Festival. Your section on the one in 1990 curated by Peter Sellars is quite fascinating in regards to that “top-down” approach to multiculturalism you mentioned.

The first one Sellars curated was really diverse, even though it was really criticized by a lot postmodern cultural critics like Mike Davis…as being sort of a ‘bad’ example of multiculturalism...For the most part, they didn’t like the idea of any multiculturalism at all, that those things should remain separate. My point was: 'Who defines what makes these different in the first place?' From the bottom up, those difference are infinitely mutable. Like I went to a Gamelan concert and knew nothing about it at the time and it was awesome. It blew my mind. Now did I understand it the same way as the Balinese guy sitting next to me? Not at all. Will I ever? No. Does it mean I didn’t understand it? No. so if we go back to this idea that classical music is for the old white people, jazz is for the black people, this ‘free’ music is for the younger white hipsters – it destroys all the magic that the music does…Maybe there’s a few people who think, ‘I’m going to make music only for the immediate people around me' and you realize the people around you aren’t the people who are geographically stuck there but who are around you, who feel you, and that transcends geography, easy…I think that’s one of the trends in Ethnomusicology now in that it’s increasingly focused on ‘place.’ I kind of avoiding talking about a lot of that theory, especially geography, because it tends to ground everything back down to ‘regionalism’ and I’m trying to figure out, 'How do we break out if that?' In Los Angeles and anywhere you have to deal with the real civic urban rules, like the ridiculous zoning laws here that make it almost impossible to open up any kind of little performance space…That has a huge effect on the music.

Fishbone

Why do you think hardcore punk was so well aligned with improvised music? You’ve got Vinny Golia playing with Patti Smith at the Roxy, The Minutemen sharing a bill with Charlie Haden’s Liberation Orchestra at McCabe’s, Jonathan Gold leading an ensemble that played Terry Riley’s “In C” at the Anticlub – a lot of exciting cross-pollination!

Yeah there was. I was surprised I didn’t find more connections between the No Wave scene in New York and the L.A. punk scene. There was some eye opening moments talking to some of the people in the punk scene who were really into jazz back then, like Scott Guerin. His dad was a jazz musician, he grew up listening to jazz – actually very similar to my own story. It doesn’t surprise me at all that he was making this really tweaked-out punk music that actually would have been way more in place in the No Wave scene. No question if he had moved to New York he would’ve been on that Eno No Wave compilation; instead, he’s in L.A. and he has no fans and he plays gigs for no one and there’s like five people on the scene who even likes jazz. [laughter] Some of them were really important people, like Brendan Mullen, but it’s this tiny subculture within a subculture. The early Masque scene was way more diverse than I ever expected…with bands like The Weirdos and The Screamers – that stuff is totally weird. They would’ve easily fit into No Wave, and they were before No Wave. The preceded it by far! That’s amazing to me. They were playing the Masque with all off these dirt teen metal bands who can’t even play and then you have this freaky-arty other component…If nothing else, the only thing that’s bringing them together is their opposition to the mainstream-trapped-in-a-box-commercial- made-for-mass-appeal. Anything that didn’t appeal to the masses was going to fit there – that doesn’t surprise me at all. What surprises me is how it got quickly reversed into a million hardcore imitators of Black Flag. All that diversity disappears and becomes associated with the exact opposite of diversity. I mean, what a flip flop! That original scene actually wanted diversity. They sought it out! It’s not surprising that a lot of that original scene was into hip hop, because hip hop was emerging at the time, and Brendan Mullen and some of those guys were into early rap. One of the first guys on the Masque scene – I can’t remember his name – started one of L.A.’s first hip hop clubs. There’s also connections between the electroclash and funk scenes, the mobile DJs, bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Untouchables and Fishbone were getting gigs at some of the first hip hop clubs in town and they’d switch off between punk rock to the early N.W.A. stuff.

Nice young boys!: The Minutemen

You have a lot of the usual suspects in this paper, but also so many fascinating characters who don’t get as much ink and are sort of in the shadows. Like Lee Kaplan, who started the Sunday concert series at the Century City Playhouse and seems to be some sort of weird fulcrum for the entire improvised music scene.

Oh yeah, he’s such an interesting guy. He was invaluable to this scene by being brave and maybe foolish or unaware that that sort of thing should work [laughter], which is great. And Lee never made a dime off any of those shows. He was willing to take risks and lose money, and in a sense making money was his goal, consciously or not. When I was interviewing him, he’d be talking about the series in business-model terms – 'We wanted to guarantee this many people'; then he’d pause and say, ‘But then again, it was the Art Ensemble playing – just for me!’ and that right away negates everything about losing money. [laughter] He was ready and willing to just lose it all!

Nels and Alex Cline

The question is that would have he been able to do that if he didn’t know guys like Nels or Alex from high school and I would guess no. But would Nels and Alex and Vinny have been able to do what they did without him? I don’t think so. How did he get contacts with all of those different musicians? From working at Rhino Records…That music was barely his taste to begin with when he started booking the series, which was just a monumental connection to every other improvised scene in the United States and between all those different scenes in L.A. Some of John Zorn’s first shows were at the Century City Playhouse, when he was playing with Eugene Chadborne. I wouldn’t be surprised if Zorn, when he came out to L.A., heard some of those early punk bands, because it’s after he plays here that he goes back to New York that’s when all of his cut-and-mix stuff starts happening…I think there’s some influence between New York and L.A. that’s gone unnoticed, from somebody coming out play at the CCP, seeing a punk show that’s totally wild and weird and bringing that mix back to New York, but nobody in New York realizes the connection is here in L.A. – that’s my conspiracy theory anyway.

Another fascinating “facilitator” – and I many ways my favorite character in your whole narrative – was Titus Levi, who started the California Outside Music Association (COMA) and was involved in the early days of Option magazine.

He’s a great guy. I’ve known him forever. I met him when I worked at Kinko’s and he came in with a flyer for a show: “50 copies in solar yellow!” I noticed the show: “Some guy playing microtuned accordion? Hmmm.” He invited me to the show and introduced me to Lynn Johnston. He’s definitely a unique guy. He has a Ph.D. in Economics and teaches at a school in China right now. He was another who was willing to risk it all. What was really great about him was that when he founded COMA, he was already heavily involved in curating the L.A. Festival and public-sector arts programming. I find it hard to believe he started COMA in his twenties! I questioned him a lot about what he thought are the boundaries between what’s “outside” and what’s “inside” and it wasn’t always easy for him to express.

Titus Levi (red shirt) confers with Charles Sharp et al

"I know it when I hear it"?

Yeah, and he was brilliant at it, too. He always curated interesting shows. He was like Lee Kaplan in that he rarely booked himself and his own bands; he played cello but I think he never felt satisfied with his own music to pursue it more. Titus really worked hard to encourage this kind of circulation between all these micro-scenes in L.A. Another good comparison is someone like Nels, who did play every night when he did the New Music Mondays. Nels I’m sure was really influenced by COMA and played in some of those shows.

On the musician side of things, there’s someone like William Roper, who seems to be in a universe by himself: an African-American tuba player who improvises as well as plays in punk bands.

Yeah. Bill played in a jazz band in high school because he said he didn’t want to get jumped by thugs on his way home. [laughter] His training is in classical music. He never considered himself a jazz player; he didn’t start improvising until he got involved in this weird performance-art scene…He was a chef at Gorky’s downtown. Gorky’s had a stage, and all those artists were living down there before the rezoning forced all of them out, and Bill’s at home practicing Bach on his tuba, and he sees someone at Gorky’s playing the vacuum cleaner: “Hey, wanna join my chamber ensemble?” “Sure!” [laughter]…Bill is inclined to experimentation. He has no interest in being average and ordinary. He’s willing not to fit in. And he enjoys that, I think.

William Roper

What outsider artist doesn’t love his or her outsider status to a certain extent?

Yeah, but the interesting thing about Roper is that he felt like an outsider even when he was playing with Horace Tapscott’s band, not to mention the really straight-ahead jazz bands he plays with. There’s not that many African-Americans in classical music and there’s not that many tuba players in classical music to begin with, so he’s got the “outsider” thing going on every level.

Maybe that means less competition, the further out you go.

Could be. That’s another part of what I was thinking about when I was writing this: All these scenes are on the outside, and on the outside everything is closer together in its relation to the inside. Not everything out there is going to be equally related. The fringes are closer together than they are to the center.

That makes my head hurt.

UPDATE (2/27/11):
Improvisation, Identity and Tradition 
has found a publisher in Duke University Press!
You may now kiss the bride.

SOLIDARWIŚĆ

A Modern Labor Protest Song for Wisconsin State Employees
Who Now Find Themselves in a Crowd Scene from Hoffa*

*set to the tune “Boyz-n-the-Hood” by Eazy-E

Woke up early on a February day

Snow drifts blowin’, Sky’s all grey

Mainline coffee so the day can start

Warmin’ up the car like Dale Earnhardt

About to go when my feet just froze

My body stopped in a deer-like pose

Heard a sound like a herd of moose

People be chantin’ “No more abuse.”

I peeked thru the curtains and saw the crowd

All my fellow C’headz like a giant storm cloud

I bailed outside like a crackhead stalker

And found ‘em chantin’ “Down with Scott Walker!”

Then I let the NPR play

I heard some shit about cuttin’ my pay

It was union-bustin’ on ol’ State Street

So all y’all can read my Tweet

"Marchin' down the street in my snow boots,

Flippin’ my finger, showin’ my glutes

Tell those Koch Boyz who think they’re blessed

Welcome to the Cairo of the Midwest"**

‘Cause the peeps in the street will always win

Shit be bouncin’ off our thick skin

Now you must know, O Guvnuh Walkah

Packers winnin’ must be somethin’ in the watah

[The rest of the song devolves into a string of random obscenities]

**137 characters -- nailed it!

Holy Shit! P.A.P.A.! Live in Concert! Today!

From the L.M.W.M. (Last Minute Word of Mouth) Department:

Horace Tapscott with P.A.P.A. at UCLA, 1981

[photo courtesy of Mark Weber]

In celebration of Black History Month, the Pan Afrikan People's Arkestra featuring the Great Voice of UGMAA and conducted by saxophonist Michael Session will play today at 5pm at Bryant Temple AME Church, 2525 W Vernon Ave, Los Angeles, $20.00, 323-293-6201.

Bugfuck L.A. Crew Storms Network TV

Four Days in Febbo

The Beast hates Westwood. Hate hate hate hate. Hate so thick and creamy it could pass as Fosselman's ice cream. So of course where does Seattle's Experience Music Project decide to hold its 10th Annual Pop Music Conference (and first outside of Seattle)? Why, UCLA, of course! A lovely campus with many desirable resources to be sure -- but also a labrynthine mess of expensive (and paltry) parking and a confusing layout of buildings and side streets. In other words: UCLA is micro-Westwood within macro-Westwood -- the equivalent of a smaller-scale replica of Las Vegas within Las Vegas itself.

The subject of this year's conference (Feb. 25-27 -- that's next week, ffolkes!) is Cash Rules Everything Around Me: Music and Money, which makes one think that relocating to L.A. is a bit of an insult -- as if the organizers couldn't think of a better place to essay/assay the base and unrefined materialism of the music industry. So of course, our bitching must mean there's some pretty good panels available over the three days, right? RIGHT. You want names? How about Simon Reynolds, Oliver Wang, R.J. Smith, Greil Marcus, Eric Weisbard, Ann Powers, Robert Cristgau, Dan Charnas, Johnathan Lethem, Holly George-Warren, Cheetah Chrome, Seymour Stein as panelists. All of spread out evenly over all three days, which unfortunately means driving from the San Gabriel Valley all three days, which equates to about 4 1/2 hours of drive time plus about $40 in parking fees. Sigh.

Among the panels that interested us: "Scenes, Screens, and Schemes: The Multifarious Politics of Pop in Los Angeles" (ahh, there's that L.A. bashing), something enigmatically dubbed "Death's Kingdoms," "SoCal Polyphony", "Panic in the City: Episodes from a History of Suburban Revolt," "The Cost of Free Jazz" (with panelists Charles Sharp, Jeff Schwartz, Jeff Kaiser and Vinny Golia) and "Southland Sounds: Understanding Los Angeles Through Music." The titles of some of the original papers are even more tantalizing and frequently hilarious. To whit: "Go-Go Dancer and One-Hit Wonder: Toni Basil as Embodiment of Cultural Mobility in 60s Los Angeles"; "Forget It, Seymour Stein – It's the Chinatown Punk Wars"; "Hair, Hunger and Hollywood: Hear N' Aid and the Story of How Los Angeles Almost Saved Ethiopia," "The Jonas Brothers Are Dorky and Miley Cyrus Is a Slut: Gender, Power, and Money in the Disney Ghetto," "Animals, Cannibals, and Blah, Blah, Blah: Ke$ha and her Native Style"; "King of Bling: Liberace's Gilded Age" -- and those are just on the first day!

P.S. Across town, a day before the UCLA extravaganza (Thur., Feb. 24) , USC will host a one-day mini-conference entitled Work It: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Pop Professions, with an equally great lineup of speakers: Ann Powers, Daphne Carr, Marissa Meltzer, Daphne A. Brooks, Nikki Darling, Gayle Wald, Margaret Wappler. This is also free and open to the public.

P.P.S. Yes yes yes it is all fine and good to listen to people talk about music, but if one is starving for a little nonverbal conversation, mystical trumpeter-teacher-shaman Wadada Leo Smith will perform with members of the Southwest Chamber Music ensemble Sat. the 26th downntown at the Coburn School as part of the SCM's "The Voice of New Classical Music" season. Not a bad night to get in a break from the flying bon mots.

“M¡PUNK”: A Nostalgic Stumble Through the Music of 1979-1981

On a live wire right up off the street

You and I should meet

Junebug skipping like a stone

With the headlights pointed at the dawn

We were sure we'd never see an end to it all

And we don't know

Just where our bones will rest

To dust I guess

Forgotten and absorbed to the earth below

Lately, Remember When? has been hitting me hard in two places: right in the forehead and right in the nuts. I wondered: “What was the soundtrack to my life before I became seriously – and somewhat stridently – committed to particular types of music like punk or funk or free jazz?” I decided to unearth the Top 40 Casey Kasem-sanctioned songs of my tween youth—that amorphous, confusing but somehow liberating time between 11 and 13 when you felt the rebellion in your bones (among other bodily areas) but hadn’t yet fully appropriated music that directly satisfied that rebellion. Add to this living in a bit of a cultural void—rural Wisconsin—with only a cheap Radio Shack AM/FM clock radio to connect you with the outside world. The cheesy music of your junior high years was the only rebellion you knew, be it soft rock or R&B slow jams or effervescent pop confections. Then you saw Kid Creole and the Coconuts or Captain Beefheart or Joe “King” Carrasco on the shitty 1980-81 season of SNL or The Pretenders, The Jam or The Blasters on the even shittier SNL ripoff Fridays and you realize that there’s so much more to be investigated. After that, you throw away the clock radio and get your first turntable and your first Clash album and never look back.

Until you reach your forties.

A brief note on what I’ve included: with a few exceptions, you won’t find “867-5309” or “Jessie’s Girl” or “Under Pressure” or “Whip It” or “Don’t Stop Believin’” any of the more obvious songs on the radio at the time. I’ve instead tried to unearth songs that made up the lower half of the Billboard charts, songs that you forget about for about 20 years until you hear a snatch of them on the radio – or, more importantly, hear their ironic usage in a Quentin Tarantino, P.T. Anderson or Judd Apatow film – and all of a sudden you're back under the swirling mirrorball of the Burlington Junior High School dance, quivering with hormones and feeling simultaneously as invincible as titanium and as vulnerable as a soap bubble in a cutlery shop. You feel a sort of warm fuzziness for these groups who hit it big and then sort of retreated back into the forest of memory. (You even remember snatches of useless facts unaided by Wikipedia: How the hell do I remember that Quarterflash’s original name was “Seafood Mama”?) Their triumphs may have been brief blips on the radar, but lest we forget that the careers of the Rolling Stones or Van Morrison or Dylan or Madonna are exceptions to the rule.

It’s a bittersweet remembrance because you can never return to that period of your life and yet it’s still with you. Like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five, you are unstuck in time. Like Billy Corgan in “1979” (lyrics quoted above), you suddenly return to that gauzy, ill-defined fence-hinge between the Smiley Face 1970s – where disco, prog and country-rock held sway – and the synthesizer-and-hair-mousse 1980s. You also realize that you’ve reached a new fence-hinge in your life where you no longer look forward but start looking back. Quoth the sage Don Draper: “Nostalgia - it's delicate, but potent…It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”

I know I know. Hey oldster, wipe that croc tear and get to the music!!

PART ONE: Herky Jerks

“This Beat Goes On/Switchin’ To Glide” The Kings
Label: Elektra. Single released: 1980. Songwriters: David Diamond & Mister Zero. Producer: Bob Ezrin. Highest Chart Position: #43. Album: The Kings Are Here!

“Ah! Leah!” Donnie Iris
Label: Midwest National/Sweet City. Single released: 1980. Songwriters: Mark Avsec & Dominic Ierace. Producer: Mark Avsec. Highest Chart Position: #29. Album: Back on the Streets.

Hallowed progenitors of Dork Rock. Caught somewhere between the criminally overlooked Power Pop of the 70s (Big Star, Gary Myrick) and their New Wavey inheritors (The Knack, The Cars) were nervous, twitchy dudes who sort of looked like Eugene Levy (Iris) but had tremendous naive moxie (Kings), exuding a sort of combed-over edginess that trickled down from the nerd-rage politics of Elvis Costello.

Originally from Oaksville, Ontario, The Kings were very un-Canadian in that they had quite the attitude: The Kings Are Here! was the snarky title of their debut LP. This song is distinguished by a trio of killer characteristics. First, there’s bassist/lead singer Dave Diamond’s whiny nasal growl. Second, there’s the crunching monolithic Bachman Turner Overdrive beat that even pond scum could tap it’s pseudopodia to. Third, and most important, the propulsive bleebling riff from keyboardist Sonny Keys, which at first sounds like a Farfisa organ but is actually a Yamaha YC-10. No matter, it’s a tip of the hat to the role organ players have played in linking the garage rock of the 60s to the New Wave of the 70s: the Attractions’ Steve Nieve, the Sir Douglas Quintet’s Augie Myers, Joe Carrasco’s Kris Cummings, and the Mysterians’ Frank Rodriguez.

The song’s topic, like that of early rap, is suffering though the workin’ week just so you can raise the roof on Friday (“Nothin’ matters but the weekend/From. A. Tuesday. Point. Of. View…”) but like white dudes they just gotta geek out about it. Single was originally released privately in 1979 on a limited number of independent pressing on the Extreme ER-1 label – you can check out the somewhat tepid original here. Legend has it the Kings were recording at Nimbus 9 studios in Toronto when they were overheard by big timey producer/fellow Canuck Bob Ezrin. Referred to as “The King of Greasepaint Bombast” for his shepherding of 70s icons like Alice Cooper and Lou Reed, Ezrin had just come off a grueling eight months of producing the monolithic art rock of Pink Floyd’s The Wall and perhaps needed to get his groove back with scruffy up and comers. Ezrin relocated the Kings to L.A. (get it?) and added his trademark “zang” – crunchier guitars, organ more prominent in the mix, echo-chambering Diamond’s voice at the end of the chorus – that should have come from a producer half his age. (Unfortunately, Ezrin would then go on to ruin that goodwill with producing KISS’s monumentally embarrassing Music from The Elder two years later.) Single is unique in other ways as well: it’s actually a medley of two songs, unheard of for an unknown band in 1980 (Elektra released the single without the segue but it didn’t really blow up as a hit until they added “Switchin’”); also may have inadvertently predicted the rise of social networking: “I have lots of friends that I can ding at any time...Can mobilize some laughs with just one call.” The Kings continue to ding their friends to this day, and were the subject of a recent documentary The Kings: Anatomy of a One-Hit Wonder.

Cut to 200 miles almost directly south from Toronto to the light-industry burg of Ellwood City, Pennsylvania. Donnie Iris was a Fortune 410 wearing nerd-o with the worst teeth before the advent of Shane MacGowan who had a peerless ear for The Hook and also possessor of a remarkable voice skilled at singing different genres, from disco to rock to New Wave. He was also a self-motivated rocker whose career is more remarkable than it first seems if viewed in reverse order. Think “Ah! Leah!” was his first appearance aboveground? Think again! Turns out, he found himself an unfortunate member of the melanin-challenged funk combo Wild Cherry in 1976 – AFTER they hit it big with “Play that Funky Music.” But was that his debut on the music scene? EL WRONGO. His band The Jaggerz was formed in the mid-60s when Iris was already 22 and had a #2 Billboard with “The Rapper.” This was in 1970! Which means when Iris hit the big time with his 1980 debut album Back on the Streets, he was already 37 and has spent 15 YEARS scratching around for his big break. In other words: it took him Justin Bieber’s entire lifetime to get his due, exhibiting a sort of Herculean patience only seen in the hard-won career trajectories of Bob Seger or Jandek.

As for the song, “Ah! Leah!” was a cruising-with-a-learner’s-permit song, a hormone-pumped testing of the gas pedal with a gloriously swooping chorus that expresses exasperation at a certain coquette’s mind games without getting bitter or misogynistic about it. Iris can only shrug and roll his eyes and say: “Here we go again!” This is back before the words “bangin’” or “smokin’” were applied to hot babes—the word of the moment was “foxy” or “she’s a total fox!” (Back-up phrase: “I bet she’s hot to trot.”) This is also in the nascent pre-MTV era, where bands made videos where a gorgeous chick would walk by and the guys in skinny day-glo ties would lower their sunglasses, watching her go by while mouthing the lyrics (“You’re lookin’ better than a body’s got a right to!”). Iris is now a mortgage broker, a frequent “guest bartender” at watering holes all over the Ohio Valley and just released a Christmas album with his band The Cruisers, entitled Ah! Leluiah!

Not To Miss This Week

Tonight, 2/07. Since 1983, Mark Dresser has been expanding the sonic possibilities of the double bass through solo and collaborative projects that explore the musical, technical, and social dimensions of live and telematic performance. From his early years working with Tim Berne, Anthony Braxton and John Zorn, Dresser has displayed an inquisitive disregard for conventional musical boundaries. In the Mark Dresser Trio he is joined by “hyperpianist” Denman Maroney and flautist Matthias Ziegler to push their shared artistic obsessions to even greater heights, making use of unconventional amplification and extended techniques to explore new worlds of sound and intuitive collaboration. 8:30pm, REDCAT at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, $20.

Thursday, 2/10. Robert Pinsky, former U.S. poet laureate and jazz enthusiast, will read poems with accompaniment by renowned jazz cornetist Bobby Bradford and his Mo’tet (Vinny Golia on winds; Roberto Miranda on bass; Chris Garcia on drums). 7pm, Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum, Free.

So long, pals

Live Death!

Argurably THE anthropological find of 2009 was the Detroit punk Never-Wases Death, three brothers/bruTHAS from the riot-torn era of the Motor City who in many orgasmic critics' eyes were the missing link between Iggy & the Stooges and Bad Brains. Now Drag City has stepped in to create the sort of InstaNostalgia that comes with such a rediscovery of music that wasn't discovered to begin with. (The fact that their lost tapes were discovered "in a Detroit basement" add to the ready-made mystique.) In the wake of Spiritual, Mental, Physical, DC's second volume of Death demos (read the Pitchfork review here), the three Hackney brothers will be hitting California on their massive comeback tour: Friday, February 25 at Slim's in SF, Saturday, February 26 at The Echo in LA and....wait, that's it?