2014 is the year my hair turns gray. It’s an
excuse to shave daily, to keep my sides cleanly cut. Staring in the
mirror one recent morning with a few days of growth loosely littering my face
revealed a snow streak across my once proud jaw line. A few more moments
of studying and I was able to pinch and pull a strand or two (or three) of
white from the sides of my head. So either it’s time to expand the barber
shop budget or break-out the trusty clippers. Or the alternative - just fucking
deal with it and stop complaining. I’ve got hair after all! As well as, my
family, my health and my records. The latter being a living, breathing,
ever-expanding entity. While I add new bands to the roster as often as
possible, I also have obsessive-completist tendencies for the bands I
love. And that, my friends, brings us full circle to today’s topic…
In addition to the encroachment of gray across my noggin,
a frequently sore back, and the catastrophic loss of my ability to sleep past
8:00 am, my advancing age can be rightly assessed by how far down the bench my
record collection goes on a particular band. To put it bluntly, I’m
listening to more bad records by great bands with old age.
I like a lot of The Damned’s records now. I used to
like one. Damned, Damned, Damned
was once all you needed to rage. But it didn’t take long for someone (I
believe, Chris Strunk) to put Machine Gun Etiquette on my radar. And that is a flawless record. Not
a bad note on that album. I’ll even take “These are the hands of a
demented circus clown…” The album is perfect. It sustained me for
years. And that’s why it was years later that I decided to give the
much-maligned second LP a spin. Music For Pleasure. It’s not half-bad. Yeah, the sophomore slump
and all, but it’s still by and large a very listenable record with some
legitimate winners. Then comes the Black Album in all its effort and ambition. The Damned try
to be The Who. Big production, big ideas, big songs. It took me
almost 10 years to get to this one – I was well into my 30s – and it’s fucking
phenomenal. What a great, great record! Would young 20s me agree or
would he roll his eyes? Young 30s me thinks young 20s me is out-of-his
mind for passing on this one.
Before my split-personalities take me off to alternate
realities, let’s stay with first-gen British punk and delve into one of the
most lividly debated catalogs in all of rock-n-roll. I’m speaking, of
course, of The Clash. That first LP is unstoppable. Me in my mid-20s
dashing off to Europe with a middle-finger held high towards Bush II, couldn’t
get enough of “I’m So Bored With the USA.” Three years later, I just had
to pick up London Calling, the double LP
that the entire world appears to enjoy. Well duh. It rules.
The punk, the ska, the funk, the rock-n-roll. That dude I used to see at
the mall when I was a kid with a T-shirt that boldly declared that The Clash
are “the only band that matters,” upon reflection, appears sagely and wise. But
wait, if that’s true, why did “Rock the Casbah” annoy the shit out of me
still? So I reached back in time and got my hands on Give ‘Em
Enough Rope (hat tip, Graham Vanderveen)
and eventually the EP turned compilation (Super) Black Market Clash. Mostly listenable and often great. I
didn’t need anything else…did I?
More than a decade later yours truly picked up Combat
Rock. I just turned to my old iPod to
see how many songs from this way-too-famous, totally uneven LP made the cut and
I actually had to fish my current iPhone out of my jeans to complete to
task. That’s how recent an investment this is. The answer is 8 of
12. 8 tracks! Am I crazy? It’s not just “Know Your Rights”
and “Should I Stay or Should I Go Now.” It’s “Atom Tan,” “Innoculated
City,” and (gulp) “Rock the Casbah.” Young me just trashed his Fred Perry and
bought a tie.
When Eric Yu first played Husker Du for me I didn’t get it
at all. Sloppy, noisy and god-awful production values. Eric went on
and on about the heart and suffering that lay underneath it all. It took
a full six years of false starts to finally understand. It took me going
through a divorce and hitting a temporary low to appreciate Zen Arcade or that second verse in “I Apologize.” Armed
with those and the full speed ahead of Everything Falls Apart, I felt confident that I had what I needed from Bob
Mould. Wrong again. In my early-mid 30s I went on a Bob-binge
soaking up everything I could. Got all the Husker Du’s, the Sugar’s, the
solo records. Stood outside last year in the pre-dawn hours for the
Record Store Day version of the Amusement/Statues single. What a guy will do for a double 7” in
gatefold sleeve with an unreleased song! Yeah, I even got one of his
electronica, um, experiments (LoudBomb, Long Playing Grooves). To be fair they were giving it away at the
merch table at his Irving Plaza gig. I appreciated (at the very least)
most of the dedicated shelf in my record collection of his mournful vocals and
fuzzy guitars. I rooted out the redeemable tracks on Hubcap, I cringed-through, but understood the auto-tune on Body
of Song, I got a handle on the
amphetamine-induced wall of noise that is Land Speed Record, and hey, in weird way, I dug the fact that the
Huskers’ first major label offering had an equally bad recording as their SST
efforts. Though I found some of my favorite Mould on Last Dog and
Pony Show, I won’t kid you, Zen
Arcade, New Day Rising, Workbook and Copper
Blue are the high water marks. Each
of these, early efforts for their respective musical incarnations. Side A
of New Day Rising is music
perfected. These are my go-to releases. Not Warehouse: Songs
and Stories or Modulate.
So why did I torture myself with the later work?
What in my old age is causing me to do this? Is it a more (ahem)
sophisticated palette? Surely not. Yet, there I go again picking up X releases not
produced by Ray Manzerak. Another
taste creditability test: how many tracks off of Ain’t Love Grand are on my iPod? Answer: 7. Seven. IIII II.
Perhaps this is linked to the same thing that now allows
me to tolerate Bad Brains’ reggae songs; why I now find Jello Biafra’s voice
less irritating than Ray Cappo’s; why I now own Patti Smith records; ditto Meat
Puppets. I’m still as excited about punk and hardcore as I’ve ever been
and I’m definitely not hip enough to like music out of sheer irony alone.
My love for all the bands mentioned here is still
paramount. In fact, that may actually be the root cause – loyalty spurred
on by love. The question I should be asking myself is, why wouldn’t I
want to listen to every fucking note put to tape by my favorite bands? Why
should I ignore albums just ‘cuz they aren’t the best one? Yeah there are
warts aplenty in most cases, but there are jewels among them (apologies for
mixing metaphors). And the uneven output makes me appreciate those golden
releases where every second is a gem.
Despite what my younger, angrier, more finicky self
thinks, this has always been manifest. I own, love and listen to more Kiss than I should. I have been a
fan since my 5th birthday. Of those already questionable releases,
the embarrassing Music From The Elder
gets far too much attention from me. Those of you in the know when it comes to
Kiss will understand what a confession this is; equally as it is
blasphemous. It does prove my point though.
Circling back to The Damned and The Clash, I have never
listened to Phantasmagoria or Anything. Not one lick. I have also owned Cut
The Crap for more than 20 years; even
before I was in to punk. It came with plenty of strange bedfellows in box
of forgotten, discarded records given to me years and years back. It’s
sat on my shelf ever since. I only held on to it because it was The
Clash. It has never, ever made a single revolution on my turntable.
Perhaps I’m saving something for the retirement home.
