the five-year plan: a review of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire by Will Hermes

 

New York music doesn't lack for good books. Nor does the history of 1970s New York. The intersection of these two subjects has been so worked over in the past ten years, it would seem any worthwhile new title would have to move on to fresher fields. So it's utterly remarkable how Will Hermes' book Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever (Faber & Faber, 2011) has made NYC music circa 1973-77 seem quite fresh again. In so doing, the book joins the ranks of beloved titles on New York music like Please Kill Me, Can't Stop Won't Stop and Love Saves the Day.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is such an enjoyable and engaging read in large part because of the particular methods used by Hermes, a long-time music journalist and Queens native:

First, Hermes pulls back from the usual focus on punk, hip hop, and disco for a wider angle on New York music of the era, giving equal attention to the city's loft jazz, salsa, and avant-garde composers. Hermes also covers some unexpected musical figures, most notably Bruce Springsteen; Hermes' account of how Springsteen's E Street Band line-up and breakthrough albums came together in NYC puts a new twist on the Boss's traditional association with New Jersey .

Second, Hermes sequences the many threads on various scenes and musicians are with a straightforward chronological sequence. Literally, Chapter 1 begins on January 1, 1973 (a New York Doll's concert at the Mercer Arts Center), and Chapter 5 ends on December 31, 1977 (a gig by saxophonist David Murray at the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club). Pre-1973 back stories are kept to a minimum, and then largely to motivate the NYC moment in question, not to illuminate particular biographies.

Third, he puncutates the five-year narrative with additional NYC events and backdrops. The reader will anticipate many of these; the NY Post's "Ford to City: Drop Dead" headline, the serial murders of Son of Sam, and the 1977 blackout are all here. However, Hermes has a native's intuition for including lesser-known events that conveys an authentic slice of life:

        At the Emotional Outlet, a clothing store on Sixteenth Street off Seventh Avenue, a customer inexplicably punched a salesgirl in the face. And in October [1975], in a bizarre case of live imitating art imitating life, a burnout named Ray "Cat" Olsen held up the Bankers Trust on Sixth Avenue with a rilfe, taking hostages à la Al Pacino in the current hit film Dog Day AFternoon (itself based on a crazy New York City bank robberty from the summer of '72). Declaring himself a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, Olsend demanded the release of Patty Hearst, who'd just been arrested in San Francisco. 

       "On any night, the Grateful Dead are the best fuckin' rock 'n' roll band in the world," Olsen told a live radio audience via phone over his favorite radio station, WNEW-FM, which fed his voice of the airwaves while his gun was trained on ten hostages. "I want to thank Jerry Garcia. I want to thank Phil Lesh . . . They have made me high over the years. I'm psychedelic." He spoke with Scott Muni, who played Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mibole" for him and then went down to the bank to try to talk him down. The gunman was finally arrested after trading two hostages for a six-pack, and then passing out (pg. 148).

        New York was especially high-strung that spring and summer [of 1976]. This was partly due to the Great Dope Famine—or, as it was known in our neighborhood, simply the Drought. There was no weed to be had anywhere. It's hard to remember, in these days of cell-phone-delivery-service characters who come to your apartment 24/7 with suitcases full of jewel-boxed hydroponic buds grown domestically, that in the '70s quality marijuana had to be imported. 

       The Soho News ran a cover story about the weed famine in its Fourth of July Issue. "Stockbrokers ahve lost their radar," Frank Lauria wrote. "Creative Directors can't find the hook. Disc Jockeys are at a loss for words, and Television Executives can no longer sense the pulse of the public. Manhattan's artistic turbine is sputtering lamely on stems and seeds . . . There is simply no grass to be had in fun city" (pg. 186).

Fourth, Hermes liberally adds his own story to the narrative. A middle-class white kid in Queens socially predisposed toward Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead, his life is changed by a 1976 Springsteen concert. Otherwise, "What was happening in Manhattan, I had no idea" (pg. 41). As suggested by the book's title, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is Hermes' opportunity to rectify the opportunities he missed to witness these musical flourishings at firsthand. Nonetheless, he effectively exploits his Queens positionality to illuminate the diffusion of multicultural fusions, subcultural styles, urban unrest, and generational change emanating out of the numbered-streets grid in Manhattan and the South Bronx:

At Goose Pond Park next to Jamaica High School in Queens, as the winter [of 1976-77] thawed, the white kids would sit on one side of the pond smoking cigarettes and joines while, across the way, the black kids with their boom boxes did the same. They'd blast WBLS, or cassette tapes of funk, disco, and fusion jams. Across the divide, all heads nodded to the beats (pg. 258).

Fifth, Hermes avoids letting these concurrent narratives merely accumulate by looking for the mutual influences and back-stage connections across the many scenes and musicians divided by idiom, milieu, and even language. Thus, we learn how David Byrne was at the 1976 Metropolitan Opera premiere of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's Einstein at the Beach, and how minimalist Rhys Chatham found his musical voice while attending a Ramones gig at CBGBs with his former roommate Arthur Russell.

These five formal methods yield a lot of material that Hermes skillfully develops into an exciting narrative that works best at the level of historical description. Not that the reader has to wade through dry, "objective" account—the following passage illustrate how Hermes' personal voice drives the detailed and occasionally quantitative enumeration of facts:

And then there were the subways. Height similarities notwithstanding, [mayor Abraham] Beame was no Mussolini, and the trains did not run on time. Wild delays were the norm, and rarely announced. Trains were often shortened, meaning you might sprint down the stairs to find the train doors closing on the end car halfway down the platform. There were 2,971 purses snatched in the subways in '76, 5 rapes, 5 homicides, 145 felonious assaults. Operating hours for booths were shortened, and lines long, so you had to stock up on tokens, fifty cents each. Stations stank of garbage. People smoked freely and flicked their butts onto the tracks; tunnel fires were common. The trains were old, maintenance was sketchy. At its best, graffiti actually helped more than hurt (pg. 228).

In recent interviews promoting the book, Hermes has been asked the predictable questions of why this musical explosion happened in New York City at this time, and he's given some predictable answers: "cheap rent," for instance. No doubt that's a factor. Probably so, too, are the "melting pot culture" (pg. 24) and self-conscious "historical perspective" (pg. 140) that characterized NYC's music scenes. But the analytical strength of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is precisely how it devotes little space for the author's speculations. For one reason, Hermes adheres to the writer's rule of "show don't tell"; better to recount, for example, how Rashied Ali paid $200/month rent in 1973 to open his two-story jazz venue Ali's Alley ("at 77 Greene Street, just off Spring") than to pontificate about the generalized importance of cheap rent for music scenes.

But if I correctly detect from Love Goes to Buildings on Fire that Hermes is hedging his bets—that he betrays a self-doubt that he's not well suited to enter into academic and planning debates about what's more important, cheap rent or multiculturalism (or some other factor—I think cultural scholars can learn a lot from Hermes' fidelity to more or less thick description. As ethnographer Howard Becker argues in Tricks of the Trade (University of Chicago Press, 1998): 

Social scientists... ordinarily expect to be given such interpretations in what they read and to rely on them in what they write. They think of the details fo their work as the basis for generalizations, as samples whose interest lies in their generalizability, in the interpretations that explain what those details stand for. But perhaps these interpretations aren't as necessary as we think. We can get a lot from simpler, less analyzed observations. The appropriate ratio of description to interpretation is a real problem every describer of the social world has to solve or come to terms with (pg. 79).

Look to Hermes' inevitable citations in hundreds of future scholarly publications on this era in New York City (musical and otherwise) for proof of this book's archival and methodological value. In the meantime, set aside a weekend or extended plane/train ride to acquaint yourself with its more immediate pleasures.

between champagne & eviction: more new wave rent party

My last post introduced an imaginary sub-genre that I call new wave rent party and covered the basics of its aesthetic principles and historic urban context. Here, I continue that discussion with some more material from 1977-81 era. Well, maybe a couple of years further on as well—the sub-genre went on a few more years past its historic sell-by date.

New York

New Wave Vaudeville

I’m thinking a whole article could be written about the underappreciated signficance of those self-consciously arty, goofy, and amateurish performance spaces that flourished under the umbrella of new wave. Did these new wave theaters/cabarets/vaudevilles evolve into new form after the genre declined? Do we see them in today’s open-mic nights, poetry slams, theater marathons, something else?

In the last essay I cited Klaus Nomi and Ann Magnuson as examples of artists who broke out of the new wave vaudeville circuit. Behind that statement, I had in mind “The Nomi Song,” the 2004 documentary directed by Andrew Horn. This clip, which focuses on Nomi's debut at the 1978 "New Wave Vaudeville" in NYC's Irving Plaza, conveys the peculiar combination of urban cynicism and hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show guilelessness of the form better than anything I could write.

Needless to say, Klaus Nomi could fit comfortably under the category of new wave dance party. Although (so far as I can tell) his act involves only men, the performative play with gender is obviously there. So, too, is the urban oasis of culture and “the finer things” that a cohort of 20-somethings sought to create for themselves after the emancipation of punk and the disturbances of the urban crisis. If Klaus Nomi seems far more aesthetically sophisticated compared to, say, Martha & the Muffins, I think this reflects, first, the remarkable way in which his art emerged fully formed from the get-go (the whole point of the clip above). Second, the rent parties Klaus Nomi attendered were, shall we say, a hell of a lot more fabulous than your rent parties! Drawing a gay and multinational population with its foot in high fashion and high art (he was even pursued by David Bowie!), he underscores the general straightness, whiteness, American and suburban origins that characterized new wave rent party as a general rule.

Ze Records

This last point also holds true for the stable of musicians, entrepreneurs and bon vivants associated with Ze Records, the NYC-based label whose initial burst of activity between 1978-84 overlaps largely with the heyday of new wave rent party. It’s no accident that the Waitresses (whom I discussed in the last post) signed to Ze Records. True, any label that has August Darnell as a house producer has nothing amateurish about it, and any label that draws on the art worlds of Europe, Detroit, No Wave, and the Paradise Garage for its “mutant disco” vibe has broader horizons than the narrow generic domains of so many new wave rent party groups. But then, if an artist like Cristina doesn’t embody the romantic dream of champagne and urban decadence that drew more than one girl to find her future across the bridge-and-tunnel, then no one does.

The Feelies

These Hoboken legends operated in the aesthetic wake of Talking Heads, the Modern Lovers, and a variety of other familiar new wave sources to come up with something subtle and ineffable yet clearly original. They're often lauded for the 1980 debut album, Crazy Rhythms, but I think this originality is best captured in their subsequent recordings and their various side projects (the Trypes, Yung Wu, the Willies): an eyes-closed surrender to percussive, strummed-guitar rock that's often quite danceable.

Just for kicks, here's their appearance (credited to the Willies) in the high school reunion scene from Jonathan Demme's 1986 film, "Something Wild".

The Shirts

From Park Slope, Brooklyn, the Shirts had the good fortune of becoming regulars CBGBs back in 1975, when the club first made its unexpected splash on NYC and rock music at large. They played an early string of dates opening for Television, and they were counted among the "Top 40 New York Unrecorded Rock TALENT" that advertised CBGBs' first Summer Rock Festival. God knows how they managed that company, based on the chirpy pop-rock they recorded that survives on Youtube.

In Love Goes to Buildings on Fire (Faber and Faber, 2011), Will Hermes describes the Shirts as "an amiable bunch of rockers with catchy songs and a strong-voiced, Little Rascals-style frontwoman, Annie Golden" (pg. 140). Annie also pursued a career on stage, and she landed major roles in "Hair," the 1977 Broadway revival and subsequent 1979 film adaptation by Milos Forman. Her charisma takes the band far — maybe far enough to distract you from the band's trite gestures of "rocking" and "entertaining."

San Francisco

There must have been something in the water in San Francisco to make it an especially fertile city for new wave. San Francisco’s punk and new wave bands and clubs did their best not to live under the shadow of New York and Los Angeles; certainly they succeeded in overshadowing whatever comparable was going on in Chicago at the time. If the San Francisco scene never gained quite the prominence it deserved, we can still marvel over the great local bands that played punk (Crime, the Avengers, the Offs), hardcore (Dead Kennedys, Flipper), and whatever category one feels like assigning to pre-punk heroes like the Residents and Chrome.

The Nuns

In terms of new wave up through 1983, Romeo Void (discussed in my last post) and Translator were probably San Francisco’s best known groups. And then there’s the Nuns, whom I really don’t know what to do with because they split the difference between punk and new wave so closely. Probably best known today as Alejandro Escovedo’s first band, they came out of the first wave of San Francisco punk and had the good fortune of opening (along with the Avengers) for the Sex Pistols’ final gig at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in January 1978. By their 1980 debut album, they’ve become like a tough but tight rock band behind Jennifer Miro’s vampy vocals. Presumably the Nuns’ future success was predicted on the basis of their generic resemblance to Blondie, but the music they made on this album sounds closer to Pat Benatar, and their “punk” background appears largely in their shock-value titles like “Decadent Jew” and “Child Molester.”

Pearl Harbor & the Explosions

Now we’re getting back into the center of San Francisco’s new wave dance party — its goofy, antiquated center. My 3rd edition of The New Trouser Press Record Guide calls Pearl Harbor & the Explosions “danceably forgettable.” The music doesn’t hold up that well, but these clips from San Francisco’s public access show “Girl George and the Supperstars of the Future” reveal a couple of interesting facts about the band. First, they opened for Iggy Pop at the Fillmore Theater in 1980 alongside the Police (yes, the Police opened for Iggy Pop!). Second, they had some remarkable things going on in the sartorial and choreographic departments — see for yourself.

Los Microwaves

Whatever happened to Los Microwaves, one of the city’s earlier synth-based combos? (They morphed into the equally forgotten Baby Buddha, that’s what.) The influences of the Residents and Devo are rather apparent. This whole strain of new wave used to be lumped under one word: quirky.

Los Angeles

The Motels

I’m torn about whether the Motels are new wave rent party. Originally from Berkeley, Martha Davis had been kicking around an incarnation of the Motels since the early 70s, and her pluck got the band placed in credible new wave settings in L.A. (the Rodney Bingenheimer show, new wave nightclub Madame Wong’s, a rehearsal space at the Masque that they shared with the Go-Go’s) before they made the big-time. Their 1979 self-titled debut album is inconsistent and schizophrenic in a pleasing way; “No Control” (their first commercial success, albeit overseas) already points the way to their MOR future, but there’s also some stranger tracks with that resonate with the new wave theater/vaudeville/cabaret vibe. Yet the Motels were always professional in their career determination and technical ability, and Martha Davis didn’t so much challenge the conventions of what a woman could do in front of a band, so much as use new wave’s retro umbrella as artistic license to revive an iconic torch-singer style.

I say, enjoy the Motels’ big hits “Only the Lonely” and “Suddenly Last Summer” (both of which deserve their heavy rotation as 80s oldies), and as you watch this video, try to think back to an earlier period when new wave and punk were a convenient step on the way to bigger things.

Slow Children

Originally from Los Angeles , Slow Children also had the quirky thing going on in Pal Shazar’s vocal styles. Some KROQ airplay, a single released in England—it seems like it never quite came together for Slow Children, who juggled a hodge-podge of 80s aesthetics and relocated to London without much to show for it.

...and then the South

The Graphic

A North Carolina group fronted by Treva Spontaine, the Graphic illustrated the “new south” that enthralled college radio for much of the 80s. The association with Don Dixon (who produced their album) and Mitch Easter (who played on a solo record by Treva) underscores the Graphic’s jangle-pop bona fides: we’re talking the same territory as the dB’s, R.E.M., and Let’s Active, just a little less distinguished. The sprinkling of 60s folk-rock and power-pop influences also brings to mind Katrina and the Waves.

How does this mild pop-rock qualify as new wave rent party? I think it’s not so much the music but the social precedent that Treva Spontaine set locally. She’s a far cry from the iconoclastic frontwomen exemplified by Kate and Cindy of the B-52s and Vanessa Briscoe of Pylon, but then the college towns of North Carolina don’t exactly have the same subcultural edge as Atlanta. For most of the south, Treva’s commitment to making rock music independently and outside the norms of Southern rock had to be pretty inspirational.

Ultimately, new wave rent party declined as an aesthetic moment alongside the broader new wave genre. The brief window for formal, sonic and (most relevant to this sub-genre) performative innovation became incorporated into "new rock of the 80s" and a more mannered, professional mode of performance suitable for MTV. And, as the cultural response of a largely middle class suburban cohort to the opportunities for personal freedom, nightlife pleasures, and self-expression found in North American cities of the late 70s/early 80s, new wave rent was submerged under the tides of the neoliberal urbanization. Wealth streamed back into the city in more pronounced and uneven ways, as epitomized by the new talk of "yuppies" and gentrification in the Reagan era.

The college graduate demographic that typified the new wave rent party generation was always implicated in this uneven urban development, but by the mid-80s, as these kids entered their 30s, it must have felt like time to shit or get off the pot for many of them. The music of new wave rent party, which was really about fun and dancing and the thrills of urban nightlife that young people (particularly women) might enjoy amidst the urban crisis, was no longer as innocent or credible as it once seemed. Hip hop exploded, the urban economy of art and creativity heated up, the downtown musical underground abandoned groove for noise—as the 80s progrssed, the lines between urban accomodation and urban revolt were drawn in increasingly bold strokes.

One hypothesis, maybe too tidy, about what happened to new wave rent party was that the music moved to the South. Or to college towns. Or, better yet, to college towns in the South, where the networks to the art/culture/entertainment economies of big cities weren't so well established as to incorporate the aimless, jaded pursuit of musical kicks. The mid- to late 1980s were the era in which Austin, Athens, and Chapel Hill were ascendant; the era gave us R.E.M., the new South, and the film "Slacker" (the latter in 1991, technically). In the South, where patriarchal values of honoring "daddy," family, and heritage still prevail, young middle-class kids, especially women, could experience the pleasures of personal autonomy and artistic self-expression as something new and genuine, much like it was for their counterparts in big North American cities 5-10 years before.

Postscript

In the five days between my last post and this one, news came that Laura Kennedy, bassist for the Bush Tetras (discussed in my last essay), passed away. The blog Dangerous Minds posted a touching obituary, including this quote from Kennedy, which nicely evokes the aspirations and worldview of new wave rent party:

Us New York City kids from the ‘80s, often transplanted from other cities, other countries, occasionally other planets (take a wild guess who I’m talking about) - we’ve kicked ass. We’ve taken names, too - and a good many of us have not only lived to tell, but are rockin’ the telling and rollin’ the living in a way that’s inspirational… We keep going, and going and going. I defy you to tell me that all of us weren’t defined by that moment in time that we shared. This has been apparent to me for a while, but more so now that we’re a decade into the oughts. We were blessed to come together in this life at a time that defined the End of a Century.

living the urban crisis at the new wave rent party

I recently downloaded the reissued Human Switchboard album, Who's Landing in my Hangar? Anthology 1977-1984, which set me off again obsessing about a subgenre of new wave that I've never really seen recognized.  I don't even know how best to name this subgenre, although I'm convinced it has a musical coherence.  I'll call it new wave rent party to evoke an emblematic scene for this music: 

1979, Manhattan, a 5th-floor walk-up on 2nd Avenue between 28th and 29th. Carla, 26, and Michelle, 25, college friends from Rutgers University, moved to The City three years ago to the horror of their parents, who are waiting for the phone call from the NYPD informing them that their daughters were raped and stabbed on their way from home.  Neither of the girls can exactly allay their parents' fears, but they felt they had to leave New Jersey because New York could give them three things: 

1. real jobs that will give them a chance to use their degrees 
2. a chance to fool around with guys who don't want to stay in New Jersey, inherit their fathers' accounting firms, and expect their wives to have kids
3. bars, clubs, movies, 24-hour restaurants, theater... the NIGHTLIFE! 

The girls' roommate, a SVA student from Japan named Sukiko, moved back to Japan on last-minute notice, leaving Carla and Michelle behind in rent.  It looks like this guy Marshall, a gay friend of Carla's (can't WAIT to tell the parents about that situation), can move in next month, but their shady Greek landlord (who's NEVER around to fix the hall light or replace the moldy shower unit) is threatening to evict them unless they can come up with the $250 rent.  It's not like there aren't other places to live, but Manhattan can be really HAIRY in a lot of places, and the girls have spent too much time learning the lay of the land in this neighborhood to leave.  

So they've decided to throw a rent party to make up this month's rent.  Carla knows this other girl from the gallery she works at who's in some kind of new wave band.  It's not exactly their kind of music—they've had fun dancing at Hurrah's before, but that New Wave Vaudeville at Irving Plaza was so dull!—but this girl Nina is really cool (does Carla have a CRUSH on her?), and she promises the band will draw at least 50 of their own friends and get people dancing.

Friday night comes, and the band arrives at the girls' loft apartment at 10:30.  Nina, another girl with a really short bob, and three guys (wearing button-down shirts that already show the sweat under their arms) bring in their gear: guitars, amps, keyboards, drums, sax, microphones, and a ton of cords.  What, they need grounded plugs?  Uh oh, hope these adapters don't blow up the place.  Then the band leaves (Carla looks a little crestfallen) while guests start showing up.  

Ugh, Michelle's brother Ricky from New Jersey is here!  But he and his friends roll in a couple of kegs; they can stay just as long as they don't go making fag jokes.  Then Aaron from the law firm where Michelle paralegals is making a mess at the kitchen, whipping up margaritas: "here, Michelle, try these!"  "Ugh, needs more mix!"  And suddenly the apartment's really crowded and REALLY LOUD, and Michelle needs to use the bathroom (better just sit still for a minute before the line outside gets too long), and then they're having a BLAST, exactly the reason why they left New Jersey for The City, let's just not think about the clean-up tomorrow, and is that Nina and her band now?  It is!  They're gonna play! 

Musically, new wave rent party is the style of new wave in its early, pre-synthpop years that reveals a line from 60s garage bands to the Velvets through the Modern Lovers on to many, mostly unsung groups circa 1977-81 who played danceable garage rock.  The foundation of musical influences in this subgenre isn't all that important; what's more distinctive is how new wave rent party reflects an interesting moment of change in the practice and aesthetics of the rock ensemble.  Quintessentially, new wave rent party is a mixed gender affair.  The greater visibility in new wave of female musicians, singers and composers signaled a gain of liberation and freedom in rock music overall, but for this subgenre it's in the internal dynamics within each band that the most significant ideas, values, and pleasures of performance emerge.

To illustrate, look at the B-52s, probably the greatest of the new wave rent party bands: two girls, three guys, a then-uncommon mix of thrift-store signifiers and camp aesthetics, and a genius for danceable rock music.  More than 30 years into their career, the joy these musicians have in playing together and dancing onstage is still contagious, but it's perhaps best captured in the final half of "Rock Lobster," which to my thinking is one of the great moments of pop music.  

[A few weeks ago, I was in line at Michael's arts and crafts store in Manhattan, waiting in line with my daughter to return some cupcake decorations, when I heard a BLOOD CURDLING scream over the store speakers.  "What," I thought to myself, "did no one else hear that?!  Oh... it's just the end of 'Rock Lobster'."]

In this song chock full of fantastic moments, the call-and-response vocals particularl rips open the staid conventions of rock music, as the singers commit themselves to an new extremes of offbeat vocals.  (Fred: "There goes the norwhal! Kate: Eeee-oooo-eeee-oooh! Fred: HERE COMES A BIKINI WHALE!! Cindy: EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKK!)  In Are We Not New Wave? Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s (University of Michegan Press, 2011), Theo Cateforis writes:

As Rolling Stone's Anthony DeCurtis aptly described, [Fred] Schneider approached the band's lyrics quizzically, "as if he hoped that by singing them, he might be able to figure out their meaning."  DeCurtis reacts here to the doubleness in Schneider's singing; on the one hand we hear the dynamism of his surface affectations, but on the other hand it is difficult to read in his voice any direct emotional underpinning.  Like the camp of the drag queen, Schneider's singing comes across as deliberate role-playing.  But the quesiton remains, what exactly was he camping? (pg. 118)

Cateforis goes on to analyze Schneider's "camp play on male whiteness" persuasively, although by doing so he ignores the B-52s' secret weapons, vocalists Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson.  Nevertheless, irrespective of the group's semiotics, what comes across in the best B-52s' music is their discovery of a new performative syntax.  This discovery still sounds as much of a shock to the band members as it was to listeners the first time they heard the B-52s, which is why for me their music always brings to mind the interpersonal dynamics and back-and-forth within the group. 

I'm being generous in claiming that a small handful of groups from the new wave rent party sub-genre were nearly as great or important as the B-52s.  Most of them almost certainly weren't, and listening to their music today, you can see the reasons why many of them have been forgotten.   Still, reviewing the other groups sheds light on other dimensions of this sub-genre and provide further historical context to this transitional moment.  So, in declining order of their greatness (in my humble opinion)... 

Martha & the Muffins 
Rush may be the greatest Canadian rock group, but Martha & the Muffins are definitely my favorite.  Based in Toronto, this new wave unit led by singer Martha Johnson and guitarist Mark Gane evolved over its first five or six albums in remarkable tandem with Talking Heads' aesthetic arc, but their prime years in the new wave rent party corresponds early years leading up to their first two LPs, particularly their ageless debut album Metro Music (1979).  This record features a classic new wave rent party format: two women, keyboards, guitar, saxophone, bass and drums.  Saxophone is a particularly vintage new wave instrument; after the so-called second British invasion made synthesizers the sound of new wave, the sax almost immediately became an archaic instrument linked inextricably to the "retro" 50s/60s rock and R&B styles that originally inspired new wave just a few years before.  The same holds for cheap keyboards: Farfisa, Vox or, in the case of Martha & the Muffins, the Ace Tone that dominates their biggest hit "Echo Beach."

Furthermore, at this point in rock music (and perhaps on into the present day) saxophones and cheap keyboards weren't regarded as the basis for "new sounds" and studio exploration, two hallmarks of most new wave bands whose influence survived past the early 80s.  This might be a shortcoming of early new wave, but I think it once again calls to our attention the real-time performance setting of this music: bands playing before a audience, but also members' musical interactions as captured (or asynchronously refashioned) on recording.  All of this is to say, I don't listen to new wave rent party to take a headphone-assisted flight into fantastic landscapes of my mind.  I crank it up as loud as needed to recreate the presence of a band playing live.  And while Martha & the Muffins hit their stride as a studio band with their third and fourth albums (1981's This is the Ice Age and 1983's Danceparc, both highly recommended), it's on those first two albums where you can hear the band's internal rapport.  On tracks like "Revenge (Against The World)," I imagine the original six-piece band playing to each other in a circle (not lined up facing the fourth wall, as in concert or video) as the twin vocals of Martha Johnson and Martha Ladly (two Marthas! how cool is that?) carry out a private conversation within the band.  

Martha and the Muffins' Canadian origins also highlight how new wave rent party is almost entirely a North American sub-genre.  Certainly there were contemporaneous groups in Britain, Ireland and Europe playing new wave styles and sounds not all that different from the groups reviewed here, but they did so in a different context due to the undeniable impact of punk rock.  When the Sex Pistols have reached the top of the charts in your country a year or two earlier and changed the game of pop music entirely, the choice to play a kind of music that's just fun, danceable and poppy wouldn't be as innocent as it would in North America; more likely it would represent an artistic timidity ("nothing too extreme to keep us off the charts!") or an acknowledgement of conventional popstar ambitions.  In North America, by contrast, the dominance of corporate rock by Led Zeppelin, the Eagles et al. would give music that's "fun, danceable and poppy" a more transgressive charge.  And in an era before MTV, the vast geography between still fairly distinct musical regions meant bands undertook new wave music without the media echo chamber fostered by Britain's music-weekly saturated pop culture.   

The Waitresses 

The stretch of Ohio between Cleveland and Akron was an especially fertile crescent for vintage new wave, and out of it came the Waitresses.  Under the musical directorship of guitarist Chris Butler, the group started out in Akron more as a studio project with an evident taste for Beefheart and Pere Ubu (which was even more pronounced in another band that Butler played in, Tin Huey).  Butler relocated to New York City, reformed the Waitresses with NYC musicians (such ex-Television drummer Billy Ficca), and let original singer Patty Donahue assume all the vocal duties.  And of course it's Patty's voice that has become the Waitresses' signature; singing lyrics written by Butler, she developed a talking style of vocals that managed to convey both feminine sass and urban stress.  I can't say it better than Jim Green did in The New Trouser Press Record Guide (3rd edition, 1989):

Furthermore, Donahue's persona — she doesn't sing so much as carry a simultaneous conversation and tune — has been developed into the archetypal young, white, middle-class woman trying to sort out her identity while beset with standard societal conditioning on one hand and specious, voguish "alternatives" (the Sexual Revolution, the Me Generation) on the other.  The Waitresses' combination of musical aplomb and lyrical acuity makes the first LP [Wasn't Tomorrow Wonderful?] at once funny, sad and universally true (pg. 621).

As this passage suggests, new wave rent party is a very self-consciously middle-class music.  If this seems uncool or uncomfortable for those inclined to look for rebellion or (in the language of cultural studies) "resistance" in their pop music, I think the historical context reveals its signficance.  New wave rent party is the sound of young, college educated women and men moving to the city at a time when the urban crisis was raging with no apparent end in sight.  Maybe some of these kids moved "downtown," i.e., to the emblematic zones of punk rock (and, in New York City's case, no wave).  However, the statistics suggest many others settled into less destabilized urban neighborhoods where, frankly, you could still get mugged or worse if you were careless or unlucky.  Perhaps these kids hedged their bets geographically and musically, although if they really wanted to play it safe, it would be easier to stay, like most of their contemporaries did, in the suburbs where their parents (quite likely themselves of the generation born and raised in cities) lived.  

Thinking About Sex Again

For young women at this time, the urban context was perhaps most alarmingly represented in the 1977 film Looking for Mr. Goodbar.  To acknowledge the pleasure in "thinking about sex again" (to cite another title from the Waitresses' first album) might be a privilege of the "archetypal young, white, middle-class woman," but it was also an achievement with its own risks. 

Romeo Void 
Hence the gender revolt signified by Romeo Void, one of San Francisco's most successful new wave groups.  In the early 1980s, generations of virginal teenagers had their libidos tantalized on the dancefloor as they heard singer Debora Iyall's croon the chorus of "Never Say Never": I might like you better if we slept together.  Those who saw the band on MTV would likely have had their minds blown to boot, as they watched a charismatic, overweight woman of Native American descent command the stage like Pat Benatar never could.

Musically, Romeo Void were a mixed bag.  On the one hand, their taut rhythms, jagged guitar (for me, "Never Say Never" was a musical gateway drug to Gang of Four), and muscular saxophone were appealing enough.  On the other, the songs weren't really there as a rule, and the band's cheesy gestures of "rocking" and mugging for the camera were probably as hard to stomach then as they are thirty years later.

Romeo Void exemplifies how across the generic border of new wave rent party lies the traditional rock stardom that most musicians in this sub-genre uncritically aspired to. "Do it yourself" prodded Romeo Void and others of their ilk to get up on stage, no matter how unlikely a rockstar they might seem, but in general these groups didn't have the independent ethos that might commit them or their audiences to sustaining the urban nightclubs and regional independent labels from which these groups typically launched.  Of course, almost no one had this ethos in these days; their inconsistency was true for new wave in general, as well as much of early punk in New York City and Britain.  Maybe what new wave rent party added was a visibly gendered component, as illustrated by Romeo Void, in which a subversive female performance shared the stage with the macho posturing of "real" (i.e., male) rock musicians. 

Pylon 

Across the other generic border lies post-punk, which brings its own set of contradictions that new wave rent party negotiates.  While it takes obvious inspiration from postpunk's "rip it up and start again" aesthetic (to cite Simon Reynolds' canonical book on the subject, which in turn invokes the Orange Juice lyric), it stops short of the radical modernism that motivated Wire, PiL, the Raincoats, and other postpunk groups to create new musical forms.  On the whole, new wave rent party is formally conservative, operating out of fairly established generic traditions (i.e., that line from 60s garage bands to the Velvets through the Modern Lovers); its aesthetic innovations appear primarily in the domain of performance.

For this reason, the Athens GA group Pylon squeaks through into the subgenre.  Formally, they fall squarely within the postpunk genre, but it's Vanessa Briscoe's musical and performative reinvention of the "girl singer" for which they're probably most remembered, and which qualifies them for new wave rent party.  One might even go so far as to say Vanessa upholds an emerging Southern tradition of iconoclastic female frontwomen that Kate and Cindy of the B-52s established, and which Hope Nicholls of mid-80s college-radio band Fetchin Bones (from North Carolina) next embodied.  In any case, I do think it's significant that Pylon weren't from New York or Los Angeles.  The absence of major punk scenes in their environs seems to have inspired the group to forge an idiosyncratic performative grammar, something characteristic of new wave rent party's most important contributions to pop culture. 

The Bush Tetras 

For similar reasons, I think New York City's Bush Tetras also squeak into new wave rent party.  The group had an impeccable no wave pedigree, particularly via the Contortions.  So why doesn't new wave rent party overlap with no wave, considering how the latter yielded so many iconic mixed-gender groups?  For one reason, you generally couldn't dance to no wave; artists like James Chance might have toyed with (or, to be more accurate, took delight in torturing) dance music, but others like Lydia Lunch would just as likely want to eradicate dance music altogether.  Furthermore, no wave's continuity with New York's confrontational high art traditions made playing music too much of a serious undertaking.  In obvious yet significant ways, new wave rent party isn't all that serious; it's less about art and more about fun and pleasure.  Listening now 30 years after the fact, these distinctions might not be all that evident.  I suspect they would be much starker on the ground, since historically the two genres drew support from different neighborhoods, different nightclubs, different drugs, and different lifestyles.

The Bush Tetras, by contrast, were a dance band in the percussive, hypnotic postpunk styles of Gang of Four and Talking Heads.  Which in turn raises another question: why haven't I mentioned pioneering new wave groups like Talking Heads, Blondie, and the Patti Smith Group?  The reason is historical; new wave rent party represents the next generation of bands, the ones who took their cue from these CBGBs icons.  With the exception of the B-52s, none of them attained the commercial success of their NYC role models.  That's largely why this subgenre was soon eclipsed by synthpop and the second British invasion, but for a few years this commercial obscurity gave these groups a relatively autonomous space (not that many of them wanted it!) to do their own thing and explore the dynamics of the mixed-gender rock ensemble away from the media spotlight. 

The Fibonaccis 

A Los Angeles band who recorded between 1981-87, the Fibonaccis outlived the heyday of new wave rent party, evidently with diminishing returns until they broke up in obscurity.  By that time, Los Angeles seemed to have moved light years past the creative peak of vintage new wave, which unfortunately would almost always be associated in L.A. with the Knack.  Hardcore, roots rock, the paisley underground, death rock, and hair metal would have come and most likely gone by 1987, and the metal-funk hybrids of Janes Addiction, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fishbone and Thelonious Monster would be in ascent.  Just as importantly, the promotional music video would have become an inescapable fact of the music industry by this time, a format that too many new wave rent party groups found themselves unprepared or unsuited for.  Artistically the Fibonaccis did okay on that front, making a great, crazy video in 1984 for their great, crazy cover of "Purple Haze," but one look at the results should make clear why MTV wouldn't want to touch it.

The Fibonacci's connection to new wave rent party comes from their obvious "artiness" as well as the influence they took from sources left in the alternative-music wilderness: Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, the chamber-music textures of Henry Cow.  There used to be a place in some cities where these traditions found a home: the new wave vaudeville, new wave cabaret, new wave theater, etc found in willing nightclubs and on late-night public access TV.  Klaus Nomi and Anne Magnuson got their start at the New Wave Vaudeville in Manhattan's Irving Plaza.  This video captures the Fibonacci's big moment on L.A.'s New Wave Theater. 

As I've argued before, higher education remains a key social element to the independent or underground rock music scenes thriving in many cities today.  Arguably, new wave rent party represents a beginning of that tradition, as college kids, art students, and autodidactic oddballs appropriated new wave music for their own ends.  It's a fascinating question how the value and uses of their education have changed over 30 years of musical development. Certainly, it's rare to find today such an overt display of art and culture learning of the kind found in the new wave theaters/vaudevilles/cabarets, which from the likes of these video documents look like they were excuses for drunken parties by art history grad students.

So whatever happened to this generation of new wave rent party musicians, once the bands eventually broke up?  Some became art professors.  One or two may have even become big-time record executives.  Today reunion concerts and album reissues have rekindled many of their careers; some of them may have kept musically active in the three decade interim.  And no doubt some went on to obscure lives of substance abuse and ignoble ends of the kinds that we might expect for rock musicians, but I suspect that's not the norm. 

New wave rent party represents the first cohort of the young urban professional, a.k.a. the yuppie, as that term first appeared in the early 1980s.  However, with few exceptions these girls and guys weren't the monied Wall Street or successful professionals originally designated by that term.  I suspect that currently many of them, maybe most, enjoy the familial and career situations that they find themselves in.  They're middle class, after all, and they're armed with a backstory and a cultural capital that would be the envy of many a 20-something today.  But the path to where they find themselves today hasn't been clear because, with few exceptions, they failed at their first significant vocation. 

To the extent that they still live in the city, we can recognize them as the so-called urban pioneers of urban gentrification.  It's easy to cluck about that in hindsight, but at least we shouldn't forget the uncertainty and risk of their urban existences back in the late 70s and early 80s.  This was hardly an era in which people moved to cities because homeownership was a safe bet; they were drawn by other opportunities for lifestyle, self-expression, and self-actualization.  To the extent that cities today have become safe playgrounds for hipsters, we could look further at the new wave rent party to how that unanticipated development came to be.

[For more on new wave rent party, see my next post.]

remembering the serious triviality of pop music

Something left unelaborated in my review of Echotone (from the last two posts: here and here) is a larger uneasiness with the instrumentalization of independent or underground music — the reduction of pop music culture from an end in itself to a means for other ends.  Although this isn't a new critique of post-punk music (i.e., music groups inspired by the DIY ethos of recording and distribution and/or the modernist impulse to push the envelope artistically and expressively), Echotone specifically highlights a quite contemporary context: indie-rock groups' affinity with "creative city" economic development schemes. 

But there's another context, also related to the so-called creative economy, and also urban in its manifestation, but maybe more pervasive across pop music culture and the generational zeitgeist.  It can be gleaned by comparing Echotone with another recent film about an urban music scene: The Beat is the Law, a 2011 documentary directed by Eve Wood about Sheffield, England. 

The Beat is the Law is the sequel to Wood's 2001 documentary Made in Sheffield.  Whereas the latter documents Sheffield circa 1978-83, focusing on post-punk (in the narrower, generic sense) groups such as the Human League, Cabaret Voltaire, Vice Versa (who went on to form New Pop icons ABC) and the sadly forgotten Artery, The Beat is the Law picks up around 1984 to tell the story of the Cabaret Voltaire-inspired groups like Clock DVA and Chakk; the acid house crews centered around FON Studios and Warp Records; and on into the mid-90s Britpop era with local heroes Pulp and the Longpigs.  This period specifically reflects the dismal depths of the Thatcher era, when the Miners' Strike tore Sheffield apart, and the effervescence of the New Romantics and the New Pop gave way to the kitchen-sink non-glamour of the Smiths and the C86 indie-pop shift.  The contrast to the subsequent euphoria of British acid house and then New Labour's electoral victories is stark, and it gives The Beat is the Law an emotional arc that its highly worthy prequel maybe lacked.

Watching the documentary, I was struck by a peculiar juxtaposition of sentiments concerning the role and value of music as recalled retroactively by various Sheffield musicians.  On the one hand, they refer to "all these dark, intense people making music in nightclubs" (to quote Pulp's Russell Senior) during 1980s Sheffield.  To some extent, this conveys the proto-industrial aesthetic of groups like Chakk, with their early attempts at "found percussion" (used more successfully by contemporaries like Test Department and Einsturzende Neubauten) and an earnestness toward their art that precludes crass rockstar ambitions (of the kind observed, say, in Liverpool groups like Echo & the Bunnymen or The Mighty Wah!).  Sure, such seriousness could also just be another word for youthful pretensions.  After all, take away the artistic adventure found in Cabaret Voltaire and its ilk, and you may be left with a lot of dour young men in their 20s expressing their dourness to other dour young men (and women!) in their 20s.  However, The Beat is the Law suggests this attitude is of a piece with the cultural climate in Sheffield at the time, particularly its tradition of labor militancy and its wide local support for a socialist welfare state.  This is a seriousness that draws on longstanding modernist impulses, found within art and politics, to cast out the old and usher in the new.

On the other hand, Jarvis Cocker remembers how Thatcher's neoliberal government and the sober Victorian ethos which it sought to resurrect viewed musicians at the time: "To be in a band in the mid-80s was, I guess because most people were on the dole, you just should have had 'loser' tattooed on your head, you know.  There was no respect."  This official dismissiveness suggests the limits of the seriousness described earlier could go.  Playing in a band is a trivial hobby, properly confined to leisurely pursuits and abandoned once work and duty call.  And Thatcher made the call for work and duty very loudly and clearly as she sought to eradicate the permissive "dole culture" and compel Britons to fend for themselves as individuals in the neoliberal labor market. 

I'm struck by how the serious triviality that Sheffield musicians understood their art to represent during Thatcher's England contrasts powerfully with the trivial seriousness that pop music seems to embody in the present day.  In 1980s Sheffield, the idea that music could be a dignified calling, much less a foundation for economic development, is completely absent.  And if punk and other underground musical expressions rejected the restrictive dictates of traditional authority, it's not clear that they necessarily challenged the limits between work and leisure that Thatcher emphasized; if anything, they sought to extend the boundaries of leisure over the domain of work in an undefined and, admittedly, not always thought-out way.

Chalk this contradiction up to the inconsistencies of youth if you want, but other musical forms have also asserted the centrality of everyday life (into which 'leisure' can be fit, although doing so highlights the fact of alienation along the way) over the demands of work and duty.  Think of folk music in the sense of people's music, or performers of religious music.  Composing and performing music can be the basis of a sustainable livelihood in these and other musical traditions, but rarely do they constitute the relations of production for an ascendant economic class as they do in the creative economy today.

And so we come upon the greater context for the instrumentalization of independent or underground music today.  Sheffield of the 1980s was very much part of an industrial economy.  Austin today, by contrast, is very much part of a creative economy — or, if you're skeptical about the spirit of empowerment that the term implies, then an economy in which the production of entertainment, design, and services are the chief value-added activities in highly developed nations, regions and cities.  Music has been swept up in this economic shift, with little critical awareness or effective response by musicians on the whole.  Indeed, indie rock musicians have especially let the 'serious' task of making a living colonize their music, lifestyles, their generational references, even their affective repertoire (melancholy, irony, nightlife exuberance, etc.).

It's in this context that we should be troubled by the otherwise sensible priorities of many musicians today to make musical creativity their full-time job, for instance, or to protect their intellectual property from piracy.  Not to keep the finger pointed solely at musicians, of course.  To return to a conclusion from my last post, so long as the entertainment industry and other sectors extract surplus value from musicians' creative activity, such priorities can make sense in some circumstances — they can even have the whiff of "fighting back against the corporate machine" about them.

It's an axiom in economic geography that, in their form as material, empirical activities, economies don't magically encompass the whole of a nation-state; economies are always unevenly developed, which among other things opens the door for talking about regional and urban economies.  To extend the example I used earlier, if Sheffield of the 1980s was very much part of an industrial economy, London at the same time was already part of an emergent symbolic economy.  Of course, the production of culture has always been a key role for cities, like London, so prominent as to be deemed cultural capitals.  By the 1980s, London's music sector had already been well integrated into a broader industrial commodity-producing economy, a point that's evoked in Paul Morley's response to a question by Simon Reynolds (in the latter's 2010 volume, Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews).

OK, Paul, now you have to explain to me that Manchester jingoism thing you all go in for, the absolute contempt for London!

London is a metaphor.  It represents everything that's conservative about that business approach to culture and art and entertainment.  A laziness.  Back then it was so pronounced, you really felt like the country was slanted, physically slanted at a gradient, so that everything slid down to London.  You did feel annoyed about it.  I've never been as vociferous about it as Tony Wilson.  I wasn't so much pro-Manchester as anti-London.  I often say, 'No great band has come from London,' and then people say, 'The Stones and The Who.' But I say, 'Since then...'  And it's sort of true, when you think of the bands that came out of London, like Spandau Ballet.

There was something about the favouritism too.  You felt like if a band came out of London, they'd be signed.  In Manchester, the sense that you could do it yourself led to a greater amount of independence.  The Buzzcocks doing Spiral Scratch on their own label New Hormones was quite a stalwart thing—you thought, 'My God, what an astounding thought' (pp. 326-7).

This suggests the setting in which musicians might challenge the economic overdetermination of their art could be urban in nature, pursued in the geographic pockets left behind by the creative economy.  These spaces and communities can be found all over, albeit beneath the global complex created by musicians selling music (which conceivably can be "made anywhere") in the global commodity market.  All of this is to say, musicians creating in these places probably won't make a living off their art.  

But is that such a bad thing?  In the era of Occupy Wall Street, should we direct music to the 'serious' undertaking of careerism?  Will the solidarities needed to mobilize against unfettered financial capital and growing social inequalities necessarily originate out of the trivial commonalities of lifestyle and sensibility?  Perhaps we can commit art once again to express and inspire the particular experience of life — as it did in Sheffield 1980s and, obviously, so many other places — rather than heed the call of value-adding and economic development in a creative economy.