WWYD Redux
Thought about it a little today after lunch. Remember last time? Here goes:
While the Moving Sidewalks and the rest of Texas are swimming in free mushrooms and cheap acid, you start a band unlike most anything else out there during the cultural implosion of the mid-1960’s, singlehandedly giving a kick in the ass to American rock that it desperately needed to differentiate something, anything, from bands that could house frat-geeks like John Kerry under the garage/surf tag. The unorthodox instrumentation of the electrified jug sound, twin-firing Fender Howitzers, and the wildman persona of Roky Erickson get you on the Bandstand and get you noticed, prompting the amazing exchange with Dick Clark (“Who’s the head of the group?” … “We’re all heads.”) and your tunes are all smoking pieces of reverb-drenched swirling sounds that dilute your spinal fluid with liquid sunshine exploration and pump some much needed desperation into the mix through the tortured howls of a man unhinged. However, since the drummer never smiles and everyone is continually “havin’ a bad time here, maaan”, heroin steps in with its ever-widening grin and sensuous Opium War allure to isolate a true songwriting genius from his band, family, and friends. Add in mental instability exacerbated by allegedly doing every single show and recording session while tripping one’s balls off and you have a mixture rife with sensory highs and lows that are able to muddle the thinking enough to convince your singer to plead insanity to an admittedly trumped-up marijuana possession charge and get locked away at the Rusk Institute for the Criminally Insane, effectively ending the band’s career. Despite the profound creative influence you have spread throughout the world over the past thirty years, you really didn’t make any money and got to sit and watch while Roky emerged *reasonably* unscathed from schizophrenia, the wimpiest brother of all time (thanks, Mt. Washington), and the creepiest mother of all time who started all this in the first place by sending him off for electroshock for coming home tripping when she should have just given him orange slices and a Magic Eye painting to look at like any other reasonable mother would. Couple that with the fact that the songwriting credits didn’t have your name on them and you get to read blogs telling you all about RE reaping the tongue bathing of WFMU with significant spaced-out aplomb. So maybe the 60’s were fun, but you’re still selling lawn tractors at the end of the day in Odessa. Sorry ’boutcha.
2) BADFINGER
Despite having the misfortune of not only closely resembling a less-sequined/platformed Slade, but also retaining some lingering Rocky Dennis chromosomal damage facial features and further showcasing the cold hard hand of fate’s death grip on the assorted visages of the English rock community, you would think these guys were hardy enough to let nothing stop them. Unfortunately, despite BF’s penchant for pop tunesmithery so immediate and ear-bending that they were due to be placed in roughly the same spot as the Fab Four a few years earlier, including a deal with Apple Records, a big US tour, and all the trappings of being “down” with the Beatles, naturally everything went wrong. Signing a business management deal with Stan Polley effectively froze the band’s assets after he bilked them out of all mechanicals and tour earnings, prompting Jeff Ham to kill himself. After the band dissolves and members form scab groups to get by, the even uglier face of band squabbles over money prompts Tom Evans to follow suit and yoke himself up as well. So now both songwriters are dead, Stan Polley has been cursed in a suicide note and awaits his ultimate reward, which would definitely ruin one’s weekend, and you’ve never gotten any money from “Without You”, so you’re stuck insulating pipes with the rest of these terribly unlucky few. Even the bands that ripped off your riffs thirty years later like the Exploding Hearts meet their untimely demise, perpetuating the idea of Badfinger being the unluckiest band of all time. Bad scene.
3) CRO-MAGS
After scrabbling up from the harsh streets of a post-Death Wish New York City, somehow you and a group of street kids more concerned with hitting people with 2×4″s and mugging Bridge and Tunnel trash formed the scariest hardcore band of all time. With that came an influx of mind-boggling violence, drug-drenched Euro tours, shady NYC Hare Krishna vibes, and a complete lack of girls at your shows. Despite opening up for Motorhead on tour and wrecking anyone in your path, you still have to be on a tour bus with two of the world’s toughest babies and an Uptown yutz who grew out his hair and squabbled alongside the rest of you for completely imagined reasons before all three begin the development of three different “Official” Cro-Mags webpages, complete with email flame wars and just about anything else internet-related that could detract from the ferocity of this picture. With the reunion money flowing like a broken faucet, you can feel free to traipse the continents with whatever incarnation is currently pissing on your legacy that week. Soon, everyone has a solo project, a book, and in one case, a Steadi-Cam to fall back on when proto-metalcore ain’t paying the bills. You can never bring any of this up for fear of being eviscerated by Harley when he hasn’t had any ghee that morning.
4) THE JABBERS
When you hook up with these New Hampshire proto-punk slobs there is a charismatic frontman who is more than willing to roll through broken glass, grabbing comely attendees in the crowd and hoovering up rails that would make Belushi’s nose run. His name is THE GEEGE. But eventually, after cutting a few legitimately perfect snotty punk-pop singles that add up to a killer album, GG’s budding insanity causes him to ditch you for any number of other outfits to back his deranged ramblings. So while you may have a bit better name recognition than the The AIDS Brigade or Bulge, your records were out of print anyway, so no one could buy them. After he levels up and begins eating his own shit, you’re in New Hampshire getting drunk and freezing your ass off for twenty years. Flash forward to the late-90’s and you’ve regrouped, picked up a new singer with some name cache (Wimpy from the original lineup of The Queers), no one wanting to put out your record, songs called “High on Drugs” and a ten-song Queers cover set for the end of your marathon wankfest and you’re getting paid to play podunk festivals and sit around being fat and right back at the coke plate, hitting on underage Asians with impunity and trying to find out who’s got the smack in Cleveland. And for those who get a laugh out of these posts from time to time, I will stake my honor on this last recollection being 100% real and not imagined by the author. Yikes. Also, the Murder Junkies make more for being a dead guy’s backup band than you ever did. No thanks.
5) BLITZ
After being championed as the 1/2 skin, 1/2 punk band capable of pounding out relentless driving anthems for the lads and lasses in the streets, you’re selling 30,000 copies of 7″s all over the UK. All the vinyl run-ups to your first LP stand loud and proud in the UK punk lexicon, and the LP is jammed full of hits, prompting it to go to #27 on the UK Indie charts with little to no promotion. However, touring on it with GBH and Abrasive Wheels sounds the death knell for the band and you break up. Funny how sending twenty-plus nogoodniks on the road would be problematic, but that is why promoters and managers are always, always, smarter than you are and always end up with their pockets lined and yours with only a hole in them to jerk off through. The guitar player starts a wack new combo and two of the others spread your name through the mud playing and releasing records that fit the “New Romantic” pastiche of being a whiny pussy to a T. In the 90’s, you’re all fired as the guitarist resurrects your corpse to cash in on what the Casualties are selling and you play oi fests for fat guys until he gets shut down by a car while running drunk onto a Texas freeway. Dream over, but the nightmare never ends.
And this month’s winner…
Say what you will. These guys won. In addition to living rent free in San Francisco throughout the 60’s, rolling around in group gropes with free-lovin’ ladies in the sunshine in Golden Gate Park, ingesting psychedelics like wheezing hogs, and chomping on burritos all day long, you also get to go onstage every night to a pulsing surging mob of people that just want to make a connection to something through your jams. After a few years, you’re huge and rich and jamming at Woodstock and everyone wants to toss you joints and teach you yoga just because you were able to hang onto your guitar long enough to play a fifteen minute solo. You can play literally any type of rock n’ roll you would like, and once you’ve locked into a groove, you take on Sun Ra/John Coltrane interstellar exploration levels of musical travel. While every other band gets wacked out on coke or smack and breaks up in the 70’s, you can continue to do drugs and keep going. Eventually the train comes to an end in the mid-90’s when your obese, diabetic dragon-chasing de facto leader finally has enough of his intense bouts of excess and kicks the bucket, but that’s after a pretty darn long career rife with band-supported cassette tape bootlegs and a documented record of what you did almost every day of your life. So while it may take awhile to open up to it, you have to admit, this is one time where the hippies actually got something right.
