Tag Archives: punk

This Scene Is Dead

This scene is dead. No, not A Year of Songs… this scene is probably more like a fair beauty cast under a wicked spell waiting for her prince to plant a big fat smacker on her pale lips… or maybe more like an irascible old bear at the ragged end of hibernation, hearing the chirping of spring birds and putting his big old furry paws over his ears and trying to go back to sleep.

The scene to which the song refers is the virtualized songwriting workshop I participate in on a popular musician’s website which has became the victim of its own success when its once high search engine ratings increasingly made it a target of robotic spam assaults, assaults that ended up dragging down the servers and bringing the massive site to its virtual knees.
Dire portrait painted, however, let me rush to assure the reader that the reference is ironic. The first line of the song was taken from the title of a thread in the new forum, a result of a massive effort to move hundreds of millions of bulletin board posts, user reviews, and blog articles to new servers run by a shiny, big-player customer service outfit that runs customer support and social media bulletin board/forum software for a number of Fortune 500 joints.

The regulars in the Songwriting Workshop are sensitive artist types, for sure, but they’re also self-reliant. When the old forum software ground to a near halt, forum regulars set out on their own to create a temporary forum using free forum software.

Now we’re all more or less back at the old/new site… dazzled and occasionally bewildered by gleaming but unfamiliar virtual surroundings. But, you know, we’re resilient, too. We’ll make it.

But that Sad that it’s so dead in here thread title kept bouncing up in the listings as folks would comment, commiserate, or crack wise and — with the first days of the RPM Challenge weighing on me, desperation begat the slightest hint of inspiration. (And, yes, much perspiration was subsequently required.)

Oh, wait, I hear you gentle readers murmur. WTF is this RPM Challenge?

That would be this: Every February the RPM Challenge goes out to songwriters to try to create an album of music in 28 days, hopefully doing everything from writing to recording and mixing in time to pop a CD in the mail by noon on March 1st. (And, yes, you can jump in at any time in February. If you approach this stuff the way I approached term papers in my long lost academic life, you will probably be hitting the big red button about 9 am on the 28th of Feb.)
Anyhow, backstory laid out, excuses made, rationales aired, let’s move on to the song at hand…

Longtime readers of this blog may recall my nostalgic rhapsodizing on those magical years at the beginning of the punk rock era we like to call The Late Seventies. 

I first chopped off my hair — which had been nearly waist-length — back in ’73. I had been at a concert for one of my favorite bands, the arty, intelligent, jazzy Traffic. As I waited to get in, I looked around me. The others had long hair, freak clothes…  they didn’t look much different than me, really.

There had been a time in the late 60s when just having long hair seemed like a badge of being interesting, iconoclastic, outsider.

But by ’73, at least half of the people I saw with long hair I was running into appeared very much to be leaden brained dolts who couldn’t bother to try to find two neurons to rub together. Two days later, three feet of hair became two inches. Suddenly, cops had longer hair.  I felt a bit like I’d just arrived on the planet.

When Patty Smith’s Horses album came out, with the title song’s harrowingly visceral, yet poetically surreal account of a brutal high school attack, I knew it was finally on, the change was coming any day. The new era had arrived.

While the signs of new music were around in ’75 when I started prowling the new, small, sometimes underground clubs where music biz outsiders played, the LA punk scene didn’t really blow up until late ’77.

Blow up, perhaps, being a relativistic term.

By my count, there were maybe 50, full-on, hard-core, can’t walk down the street without folks staring and pointing punk rockers in LA — and maybe another 200 folks who were more like me, short haired, non-hippy, non-disco, somewhat disaffected types. A lot of that cohort probably looked a lot like rock writers of the era… glasses, dark sport coats, skinny jeans, dark t-shirts or white shirts buttoned to the collar and/or worn with the soon-to-be-totally annoying skinny ties that looked so cool for such a short time.

The scene was magical.

Really.

Okay, sure, some of the clubs stank. Literally. Toilets regularly overflowed at the divey venues and overburdened, blackmarket warehouses-turned-nightclubs.  Bouncers were often jocks or thugs who often appeared to think the clientele were sissies from Mars. And, for sure, it was an arty, boho, largely anti-macho crowd in those early days.

That would change as wannabe bands like The Cars, The Police, as well as bands that had once been part of the punk scene like Devo and the Dickies began to draw in new elements, specifically suburban dudes, jocks, and frat boys who turned the once-relatively friendly/benign ‘pogo pit’ into the ‘slam pit.’  Moshing, as it was originally known in the UK, took a particularly ugly turn in the 80s as that cohort met and didn’t always mix well with old school hardcore punks. And a half.

By late ’78, it seemed to me and my pals down in Long Beach that maybe the LA punk scene that had seemed so vibrant just a year before might be dying. I remember telling a bunch of pals from a couple of bands who were having a strategizing/commiserating jawbone session, “Let me be the first to say, punk rock is dead.”

I reminded them that the Haight-Ashbury hippies had held a “Funeral for the Hippie” in 1968 and that, though hippie attire and trappings grew in popularity with the mainstream, the real core of the hippie movement was pretty well dead by the 70s, even as the look became a costume for much of middle America.

Of course, punk rock didn’t die in ’78.

But something did.

Punk rock, the commercial genre, though, barreled on, going from the wildly divergent outsider music of the late 70s  to the highly formulaic, tightly conformist, cliche-driven  cookie cutter crap of the 80s and the pop punk pre-gurgitations of the 90s — in near perfect parallel to the emergence of mall rat chain stores filled with racks of identical “punk outfits” — just add glory spikes and purple hair dye.

That out of the way, here is my first recorded lyrical effort from my one-man assault on the RPM Challenge…

Sad that it’s so dead in here
sad to see the flocks have fled
sad to say its inevitable
but some things must be said

This scene is dead
the scene is dead
the reasons are many
excuses are few
this scene is dead
the scene is dead
God knows the scene is dead

We were so cool
so beautiful
so free so hip
the people to be
What we had is gone, what we did is done
the songs we sang as good as never sung

This scene is dead
the scene is dead
God knows the scene is dead

Came back to see what had become
of the place where so much was said and done
footprints in the dust
shadows in a mirror
was it yesterday
or a thousand years

This scene is dead
the scene is dead
the reasons are many
excuses are few
This scene is dead
the scene is dead
God knows the scene is dead

this scene is dead
the scene is dead
ooohoooh oohoooh
oohooh oohooh
this scene is dead
the scene is dead
God knows the scene is dead

 

 

 

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Attention Cultural Paradigm Shoppers…

The Slam

I loved the early days of the punk/new wave era.

From the moment I cut my hair at the end of the summer in 1973, I’d felt something was coming. Where long hair had once been a sign that the person under it might be nice or might be weird or crazy — but at least they’d be interesting — it had by then become a badge of mindless conformity.

Then, one day in late 1974 or maybe ’75, I heard an advance copy of Patty Smith’s harrowing story of a school hallway murder, Horses. It was electrifying: a visceral, stream of consciousness puzzle, shattered images of a sudden violent crime seen from the vicitim’s point of view, weaving The Land of a Thousand Dances into the ending with deadpan irony.

Music like that was hard to come at the time. We waited. We hung on rumors. A single. A poem printed in a minor magazine. In time a few more bands emerged, Television, some quirky bands in LA. And then, the Sex Pistols. Bam. A badly recorded single. Another. And a name for it all that had been hanging around as a rock crit term for at least a few years, usually reserved for post-hippie bands like Iggy and the Stooges: punk rock.

I bought my first electric guitar and amp ($20 and $15 respectively from the pastor of a church near the gas station I was working at) the week the Sex Pistols album came out on import in the US. I brought the amp home the same day a buddy and I picked up the import. After listening to the album all the way through — loud — I turned the guitar and amp up all the way and achieved a level of freedom and exultation I’ve rarely known and never recaptured in the same way. The sheer exultation of pure, raw, noise. A great feeling. Everyone should do it once.

Flash forward a few years and I have a punk band called Machine Dog. I’m going to every punk or no wave show I can get to in LA. Only a year or so before, in 1979, I’d declared punk rock officially dead — reminding my friends that the hippies had held a none-too-celebretory ceremony called The Funeral for the Hippie in 1968, just a year after the fabled Summer of Love. And, as I pointed out to my younger punk rock pals — they were pretty much smack on. From there on out it was the downhill slide to flower decals and polyester flares.

In ’79 it was feeling grim. Venues were disappearing. The 50 core punks and the maybe 150 or so sympathizers that comprised the regular audience (we’d see each other everywhere) were dispirited.

And then something odd happened. New people showed up out of nowhere. A lot of them still had long hair but within months it was typically cut off to a mohawk or buzz. The pogo pit was quickly taken over by jocks and surfers turned punk. The LA Times christened the new, super-agro moshing favored by the newcomers as The Slam, aka slam dancing.

Shows that would have drawn 50 people in ’78 or ’79 were suddenly drawing hundreds — and drawing the less-than-amused attention of the cops, as well. The punk paradigm had shifted and a lot of the original punks and fellow travelers had moved on. Where a few years before you rarely saw someone at a show you hadn’t seen before — by 1980 and ’81, it was becoming unusual to see a familiar face.

At that point I realized that I’d watched the same thing happen in the discotheque scene from around ’74 and ’75 — there was a burst of wildness and a sense of freedom — and then the scene seemed to all but die by ’76. When I heard there was a movie set in the disco milieu due for release in 1978 all I could think was — wow, how could your timing be so bad. Disco’s are dead.

Uh huh.

A decade later, I’d watch — this time from a safe distance — as house/rave culture in Europe and grunge in America would go through a similar germination and blossom cycle.

But, of course, what was really happening was parallel to the beats, the hippies, any hipster scene. For a few golden moments, an enthusiastic culture of creativity, experimentation, and exploration grows in pockets/geodemographic nodules, cross pollinating with others. But bright lights burn quickly. Relentlessly creative, restless types get bored, die, evolve, move on… but usually not without leaving behind the spores of that subculture that take root once again.

And it is usually that second wave that “puts it on the map,” economically and demographically. I used to call it the K-Mart Phase of Cultural Paradigm Shift. Today, of course, we’d have to change that to Walmart.

But you get the idea.

The Slam

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Wednesday, January 11, 2006

lyrics
The Slam

Went to the whiskey just the other night
did a little dance that I learned in the Times
Beach punk made a grab for my date
smashed by beer bottle right in his face

La La La La La La

Aint it great how the media
regulate your culture — tell you just who you are
10,000 kids and they just found themselves
cause they saw the punk report on the Evening News

La La La La La La

They threw me out on my face but that didn’t phase me
cause The Dance is Art and Art ain’t free
Well, I’m proud to be a Punk and I proved that’s true
when I pogo’ed through the window of the Emergency Room

La La La La La La

Fall 1980
(C)2007, TK Major

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The Slam

The Slam

The original punk scene in LA was very small, scruffy, and thoroughly art geeky. When I started going to shows, there was maybe a hard core of 50 or so and maybe another 100-150 hangers on like me. It’s safe to say that all of us had felt out of place for years, if not forever.

I remember the day I decided to cut off the long hair I’d been growing since I got out of high school (okay, there were a few trims along the way, but at its longest it was maybe 6 inches above my belt)… it was a Traffic concert at the Santa Monica Civic in 1973.

There I was, in line, waiting to see one of my favorite bands. A band I thought of as artful and smart… even when they were playing stoner grooves like “Low Spark of High Heeled Boys.”

But as I looked around me, I felt as though I might as well be at a Grand Funk or Deep Purple show. Wherever I looked, there were long haired dooods… I could feel the IQ points ticking away. The next day I arranged to get my hair cut.

It was a long wait, waiting for something to happen. There were glimmers along the way. In 1975 or so I stumbled onto the nascent Hollywood scene. I was shocked to find young people with short hair (Like me! They were like me!) and straight leg jeans. (It hadn’t occurred to me… I hit the thrift store the next day.) I remember seeing a Sparks-like band called The Quick a few times. In some ways they were what would later be called power pop, I suppose, but at the time they seemed almost revolutionary.

Few small venues even booked original music. If you were not in a touring act, you’d better be prepared to spend your time playing Doobie Brothers covers. When my friends and I found even a cover band with a few shreds of personality or originality we cherished them as a few drops of water in a barren desert.

So, when a few signs of life started poking up around 1976-1977, I was practically beside myself. The year before the first (and, for me, only really satisfying) Patti Smith album came out, with its strange blend of arty pub rock and drug poetry lyrics. A Tom Verlaine/Television cassette made its way around. The first singles started coming out of the British punk scene.

At first I didn’t get the Brit scene. When I read about the Pistols, they seemed plastic, like the Monkees. The first time I heard them — on a really crummy portable stereo — it really did sound like noise to me. (And you have to realize that I’d seen Captain Beefheard a couple times by then. We’re not talking about a Loggins and Messina fan, here.) But after I’d heard the first single a few times I decided that, whatever the background of the band, there was something really going on there, no matter how bogus the motivations behind the project or culturally suspect such the media manipulations seemed.

Flash forward a few years.

It’s early fall 1980 and, after I’d predicted the demise of punk as we knew it the year before, it really had looked like it was dying out in LA. Silly me.

By mid-1980, a new suburban punk was then beginning to leave its heavy Doc Marten bootprint on the scene. The result was that most of the early scenesters were gone.

This was nothing like the arty, ultra-boho scene of ’77 and ’78. The new, rapidly expanding scene was made up of dudes, suburban headbangers, their own longhair recently shorn, exuding all the mindless conviction of any new and rabidly fanatical set of converts.

While the LA Times pop music coverage was lucky enough to have a couple of writers at the time who actually got into the scene and participated (Craig Lee, RIP, bro!), much of the paper’s coverage was dominated by a sort of culture-vampire perspective, seemingly slightly revolted by this new music scene — but afraid to look “out of it” or stodgy.

Near the beginning of fall of 1980, the Times’ Sunday entertainment magazine featured a lead photo spread and article on, and I quote, “The Slam” — which was, according to the culture mavens at the TImes, taking the local music scene by storm.

I am absolutely positive that I had never, before that article, ever heard anyone describe what the Brits called “moshing” as “slamming” (people slammed heroin, y’know?) but — hey, there it was in the Times.

And, for awhile, particularly among the newly buzzed and mohawked suburban converts, the term actually stuck.

Which provoked near endless amusement among me and some of my friends… what had once been so fresh and genuine and interesting was now just the latest prepackaged plop on the big conveyor belt of American pop commercial culture.

The original version of The Slam by my band, Machine Dog, didn’t sound much like this acoustic version, below, lemme tell ya.

The Slam

Went to the Whisky just the other night
did a little dance that I learned in the Times
Beach punk made a grab for my date
smashed by beer bottle right in his face

La La La La La La

Aint it great how the media
regulate your culture — tell you just who you are
10,000 kids and they just found themselves
cause they saw the punk report on the Evening News

La La La La La La

They threw me out on my face but that didn’t phase me
cause The Dance is Art and Art ain’t free
Well, I’m proud to be a Punk and I proved that’s true
when I pogo’ed through the window of the Emergency Room

La La La La La La

Fall 1980
(C)1980, TK Major

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