weird scenes from the 5 and the TCH: metropolitan structure and rock in Canada

It was November 1977, and it was the first time any of us had traversed our home and native land. We soon found out what a big-ass country Canada is. The ground in Saskatchewan was covered with snow, and it was so fucking flat that you could see a grain elevator miles away. It looked like the earth had been run over by a giant bulldozer! Let's just say the beauty of the heartland is an acquired taste. The road was like a skating rink through eastern Manitoba. I drove through a flotilla of cop cars and tow trucks, my knuckles white from grippin' the wheel.

- Joey Keithley, I, Shithead: A Life in Punk (pg. 39).

This passage from the autobiography of D.O.A. frontman and Canadian punk pioneer Joey Keithley, a.k.a. Joey Shithead, conveys a fact of life known to all Canadians: theirs is a huge country with a fairly small population. Consider this: in 2011, Canada had a population of 33,476,688 residents within its 3,855,103 square miles (9,984,670 square kilometers). That gives the country a population density of 8.7 people/square miles (3.4 people/square kilometers). By contrast, in 2010 the U.S. had a population density of 83.0 people/square miles (32.1 people/square kilometers), while the U.K. had the respective figures of 661.8 people/square miles (225.5 people/square kilometers).

Of course, most of Canada is undeveloped or inhospitable by "modern" standards (scare quotes to give the country's indigenous First Nations inhabitants their due). Thus, its population is geographically concentrated within a relative handful of cities close to the U.S. border. Canada's statistics office reports that in 2006, 80.2 percent of its national population lived in "urban areas." (I couldn't find the most recent 2011 figures for urban population.) The census metropolitan areas for Canada's three biggest cities alone — Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver — account for 42.3 percent of this urban population, or 34.4 percent of the entire population. As a point of comparison, you would have to sum up the 17 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the U.S., from NYC to San Diego, before you reached a comparable proportion of the national population.

It might seem that Canadians with an inkling to visit the big cities would have an easy time of it, considering how few of these major metropoles their country has to offer, but the vast distances separating the three cities can raise a significant obstacle. This point was illustrated to me when I met up recently with a recent graduate from Vassar College who hailed from Victoria, a charming little coastal British Columbian city some 70 miles (114 km) and a ferry ride away from Vancouver. A bright, intellectually curious student, this individual is very much what I'd call an urbanist by disposition. Just last summer, she bicycled across the U.S. with a team raising funds for Habitats for Humanity. And yet... she had never visited Toronto or Montreal, Canada's two biggest cities.

Although I have no idea how typical her experience is for Canadians living on the West Coast, I'll bet it isn't all that out of the ordinary. U.S. citizens wouldn't necessarily expect all Seattleites to have visited Chicago or New York City. Why should we expect Canadians living just across the border to have spanned similar distances? Well, speaking from an American point of view, we do it because Canadians have so few big cities in Canada to choose from than we do. Essentially, if you're looking for the cosmopolitanism, diversity, amenities and cultural developments (including architecture) that we associate with 'great cities', there's really only three places in Canada to choose from. Why wouldn't a self-conscious urbanist take the time to visit these places?

Perhaps the construct of national borders blinds us to the more relevant metropolitan structure. To return to my example, this individual did have a repertoire of cities that she was intimately familiar with growing up in Victoria. They were situated along the Pacific West Coast and U.S. Interstate 5 ("the 5," in regional parlance): Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego. Indeed, Washington state's San Juan Islands stared at her and other Victorians any time they took the ferry, while her story of the family roadtrip to Disneyland could be substituted for any U.S. resident's experience, except for the added element of passports.

These features of Canada's metropolitan structure, particularly the vast distance separating Vancouver from the country's bigger cities along and off the Trans-Canada Highway, have exerted an overlooked influenced on the development of pop music — in Canada, the rest of North America, maybe even further. Here now, three vignettes from the North America's highway vector, along the 5 and the TCH.

The Collectors

I recently watched "Shakin' All Over: Canadian Pop Music in the 1960s," a CBC documentary from 2006 based on Nicholas Jennings' book Before the Gold Rush: Peace, Love, and the Dawn of the Canadian Sound. The doc moves quickly through the usual suspects (Neil Young, Joni Mitchell) to focus on the national groups who had hits and played gigs within Canada. As for the ascent of bona fide 60s rock played by and for countercultural freaks is concerned, the doc assigns Vancouver a key role in the story (at about 14:00 into this clip).

The Canadian music scene continues to thrive locally in the mid-1960s, but without any national music infrastructure. There is no cross-country radio airplay or touring circuits, so West Coast musicians look south to the psychedelic sounds of California. Like San Francisco's Haight Ashbury, Vancouver's music scene is based in incense-filled clubs like the Afterthought and the Retinal Circus. Dozens of adventurous bands spring up with their own mind-expanding lightshows and groovy poster art.

The first significant group in this story is the Collectors, flower-punk pioneers from Vancouver who morphs into a Haight Ashbury folk-rock group, Chilliwack. Tapping into the West Coast connection wasn't merely a matter of musical influences for the Collectors; it was also a matter of career practicality.

It was easier for us to travel 1500 miles to L.A., and there was a great center of music there, than it was for us to go 3000 to Toronto or New York.

- Bill Henderson, The Collectors

In turn, the geographical shift of countercultural musical energy to the West Coast between 1967-69, the key years for the Collectors, gave Vancouver groups special access to the central influences, markets and industry feeding the baby boom rock generation. This was a not-inconsiderable advantage that groups from Toronto and Montreal would be hard pressed to match. 

The Deviants

The West Coast urban chain is also the setting for the final burnout of London's late-60s underground legends the Deviants. Led by Mick Farren, a writer for the underground publication International Times, the Deviants recorded three albums between 1967 and 69 that never quite met the musical standards set by their inspiration, Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, but nonetheless capture the anger and anarchy of the freak community residing in London's Landbroke Grove neigborhood. By the third album, the group took on Vancouver guitarist Paul Rudolph, whose hometown connections lay the basis for a brief Autumn 1969 sojourn to Vancouver. Deviants manager Jamie Mendelkau explained the idea in Rich Deakin's Keep it Together! Cosmic Boogies with the Deviants and the Pink Fairies:

In simplest terms, the gig was arranged via Paul Rudolph and his pal who owned the Colonial, and it was seen as a great way to reopen the place. I don't know if he had ever listened to any Deviants albums at this time. Paul Rudolph was well known enough in Vancouver music circles to pull a crowd (pp. 132-3).

These gigs at the Colonial were disastrous. Few people showed up at first, and when they finally did, they received an abusive earful from Farren:

THIS IS BRITISH AMPHETAMINE PSYCHOSIS MUSIC AND IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT, YOU CAN FUCK OFF AND LISTEN TO YOUR IRON BUTTERFLY ALBUMS!

Farren's aggravated state ("They were actually seeing a human being in neural disintegration, right onstage, without hesitation and shame," he recalled) burned the final bridge to his bandmates. Rudolph, bassist Duncan Sanderson, and drummer Russell Hunter sacked Farren from his own band and, stranded in the U.S. without return airfare, obtained a week-long residency at Seattle's Trolley Club opening for... the Collectors.

From their they made a pilgramage to San Francisco, where they played a few poorly attended shows, crashed at various communes (including Chet Helms' Family Dog; see the photo below, with Rudolph sitting to the left of a pontificating Helms), and caught gigs by the Grateful Dead, Jeferson Airplane, Steve Miller, It's a Beautiful Day, as well as touring performances by the Velvet Underground and Crosby Stills & Nash. Rudolph and Deviants Roadie Boss Goodman even made it to Altamont; in exchange for help setting up the stage, they had backstage view to "loads of little magic moments" and "some of the most atrocious sights you'd ever seen" (in Goodman's words; pp. 148-9).

Perhaps most importantly, it was in the music room of an Oak Street commune belonging to one "weird hippy religous sect" that the three remaining Deviants put together a new set of material, including an epic new jam, "Uncle Harry's Last Freakout." After a final sojourn into Canada for a series of gigs at Montreal's McGill University, the band finally made it back to England. By the end of 1969, the three Deviants convened with psychedelic musician Twink — ex-Tomorrow, ex-Pretty Things, and creator of the Farren-produced/Deviants-supported solo album Think Pink — to form the Pink Fairies.

DIY in the age of CanCon

In 1971, the Canadian Parliament legislated the recommendations of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission that radio and TV begin broadcasting a fixed minimum percentage of content that is in some way written, produced, presented, or otherwise contributed to by Canadian citizens. Known as the CanCon requirements, the law responded to longstanding concerns about the Americanization of content broadcast on Canadian airwaves. CanCon's impact on creating awareness among Canadians of their own popular culture is immeasurable. Furthermore, as intended, CanCon gave a massive boost to the economic sectors associated with Canadian television and music. In the case of music, Canadian bands now could expect that national record labels might give them a serious lookover — at least in the aggregate.

(Famously, Canadian rockers Rush was totally ignored by Canadian labels, and they had to independently release their self-titled 1974 debut album. It took the surprise breakout of the album's single "Working Man" from a Cleveland rock radio station to get them signed by a major label: the U.S. wing of Mercury Records. The whole situation was "pretty pathetic when you think about us being the biggest band Canada has produced," Neil Peart told Sounds in 1980. "It makes you a little bit cynical about the [Canadian music industry].")

Still, Canadian radio formats remained wed to the generic designations promoted U.S. radio consultants (see Line Grenier's 1990 article, "Radio Broadcasting in Canada: The Case of 'Transformat' Radio," published in the academic journal Popular Music). A punk-rock band in Canada could no more make headway into mainstream radio or the bars venues booking pop and rock acts than it could in the U.S. at this time. Thus the predicament facing Joey Shithead and other punks: they would have to do it themselves. As described in the opening quotation of this essay, Shithead took his first band the Skulls east to Toronto, where a lively punk scene had emerged in 1977. Still, it was fairly tough going at this time, as he recalls in his autobiography:

In one sense Toronto was like Vancouver: there were very few places to play. We had heard about the Crash'n'Burn, a place the Diodes had helped make famous, but it was closed by the time we arrived. We did go to to a couple of parties the Diodes threw, but they came across as art school posers to me.

Perhaps one incentive for the Skulls to make the daunting drive east (during a cold Canadian November no less) was that the trip was always meant to be one-way; after making a name for themselves in Toronto, the Skulls had aspirations to move to London. After their ignominous failure in Toronto broke up the band, Shithead returned to Vancouver and formed D.O.A. Significantly, this band found like-minded groups and made a name for itself largely via travels across the border and along the 5. Jello Biafra was a particular champion after D.O.A. shared several bills with the Dead Kennedys; he included the D.O.A. track "The Prisoner" on the seminal hardcore compilation Let Them Eat Jellybeans! (1981), and his Alternative Tentacles label would periodically release subsequent D.O.A. recordings. Through such support, the band went on to become legends of hardcore punk, opening up smaller cities and towns throughout North America to the punk-rock circuit that in turn laid the foundation for "alternative music's" hegemony by the 1990s.

Another hardcore band that was committed during this period to playing "secondary and tertiary markets" (as Henry Rollins sarcastically calls these overlooked places, above) was Hüsker Dü from Minneapolis. "D.O.A. and Dead Kennedys were the two bands that were the most instrumental in getting Hüsker Dü to the West Coast," Bob Mould writes in his autobiography See a Little Light (pg. 48). In turn, Hüsker Dü laid important ground for punk rock along the Trans-Canada Highway. Mould describes the inaugural dates of Hüsker Dü's first North American tour (1981) in Calgary at the Calgarian Hotel ("a flophouse with a bar and lounge on the ground floor"). A real baptism by fire for the band, the event also provides a view onto the conditions for punk rock in Calgary, then a city of 591,857 people.

       I'd sat next to bleeding unconscious people in bus terminals, I'd watched Johnny Thunders shoot up, and I'd watched drunk women attempt to vandalize our musical equipment; I'd experienced sketchy before. But this was a whole new level of sketchy. One woman who was a regular at the Calgarian was stabbed on Monday night, and then stabbed again that Wednesday. It was that kind of place.
       Early in the week, we were playing our first set while a handful of local Native Americans were getting drunk. During the second set, some ranchers started showing up. Then the two groups started going back and forth at each other. A fair amount of fighting happened around the pool table between the cowboys and the Indians — those are crass stereotypes, but it was the reality. We would fire the music back up, and they would stop what they were doing and say, "What the fuck is this punk rock? This band sucks!" So now the cowboys and Indians were putting their beef on hold and uniting against the punk rock; not ony against us, but also the punks in the audience. Of the fifty or so people in the bar, there would be a dozen cowboys and a handful of Indians, but the majority were the punks. You might that that ratio would have discouraged the cowboys and Indians, but it didn't. We'd finish a set, get off the stage, leave the drums and amps behind, run upstairs, go back to the rooms they gave us for free, and just sit there and say to one another, "We have to go back down there?" Fights were pouring out into the street, and since our room was in the front of the hotel, we saw everything. It was like a barroom brawl straight out of an old western movie.
       This continued for six straight days. By the end of the week, we'd not only managed to keep ourselves out of harm, trouble, and jail, but we'd also become acquainted with several folks in the Calgary punk rock community. It was a hell of a way to start a tour (pg. 50).

As this passage suggests, there was already a small punk rock community in Calgary whose flames Hüsker Dü only had to fan. One wonders if the band didn't have a special affinity, coming from the U.S. nothern midwest themselves, for punk rockers stranded in the Canadian plains, hundreds of miles away from the next outpost of good music.

Poughkeepsie and America's musical hinterlands as seen from British eyes

Thanks to the Slicing Up Eyeballs blog, I've discovered a new BBC Four music documentary, "How the Brits Rocked America: Go West," about the three generations of British musicians, from the Beatles to Duran Duran, who scaled the walls of American pop culture. Some of them made their fortunes, many more failed, and a few just wanted to see what it was all about. Their collected observations and experiences make for endless analysis and speculation, and I highly recommend you find the three-part series on Youtube.

So far I've only viewed the final episode, "The Kids in America," about the British punk and new wave era. This generation of musicians is especially interesting because of all the various British invasions, their music was probably the most British—the least invested in reinventing and repackaging American forms, as was the case for British beat bands and blues rockers. Perhaps because it was also the most ideological (if not principled) of British music forms, punk and new wave gave this generation of British musicians a huge sense of superiority that made for quite a shock. The documentary especially plays up this last aspect with references to U.S. "mainstream radio's obsession with long-haired rock and its indifference to new music" and declarations that the "new generation of bands didn't want to be arena rockstars. Instead, they were malcontents presenting pearls before very few swine."

JOHN LYDON: We went to America because it was... the fatal attraction! It was the big boil on the backside of the world, that one. Absolute—that's a nuthouse. Gots to get there, gots to see what that place is about.

This episode especially addresses the obstacles posed by the United States' cultural geography, at least before MTV (and, not mentioned here, corporate radio consulting firms) consoldated a single national channel for music broadcast. If British musicians really wanted to make an impact, they had reach out to the still-regional radio markets and fanbases. This meant leaving the agreeable oasis of NYC, typically the first stop for a transatlantic tour, and making their way into the country's vast commercial and cultural hinterlands—"the unglamourous underbelly of America," the narrator helpfully explains. The stories of these travels are especially memorable, as this recollection from Simple Minds' Jim Kerr illustrates.

JIM KERR: It was like walking into a clichéd dream of New York. We played that night [at Hurrah's in 1979], and in the audience Iggy Pop was heckling us, and Lou Reed was being moody off in the corner. It was exciting beyond belief, and it was also very intimidating. Then came the reality. You drive an hour and a half to Buffalo, and there's two men and a dog there. And it's like, I thought we were stars last night; I thought Lou Reed and Iggy Pop were here, and Debby Harry was there. Why would they need us? Why would they need some movement from the U.K.? But of course, like anywhere, there were teenagers who were hungry for something that was different and exotic.

An hour and a half drive to Buffalo?! Clearly those days are a blur to Jim Kerr now; on the best of drives, Buffalo is a good six or seven hours away from NYC. There's no discussion here about who those hungry teenagers were, what their cities and towns were like, and how these kids responded to the sounds of British new wave. But the secret to cracking the American market is revealed via the crucial figures of the Police, the first British band of the punk/new wave era to top the U.S. charts and fill stadiums across the country. MTV was certainly an asset in their campaign, but the basis of their success was set earlier, as their manager (and brother to the drummer) explains.

MILES COPELAND: The secret of the Police was that it was affordable. With only three guys and a roadie, we could literally say, You know what? We don't need the radio. We don't need that big support system. We don't need the tour support of the big record company and all that stuff. We don't need the big touring bus. We can get in a station wagon, you know, and we can go play a 300-seat club. And you know what, with two hotel rooms, because we'd have one roadie, and the guys would double up, and we'd get a rollaway bed, we could actually go out in the market. So we could get back to the people. And in the end, it's the fans that can make it happen or not.

Predictably, I about fell off my seat when Andy Summers cited my city Poughkeepsie (which really is an hour and a half drive from NYC) as the beachhead in the Police's campaign to win over America.

ANDY SUMNER: We did play in Poughkeepsie on that tour, and it has sort of in time become legendary. We were at this place called the Last Chance Saloon, aptly named, and there were only four people there. And it was like, well, not really worth bothering. But we had the spirit at the time; we thought, well, you know, we've got paying customers—all four of them. We did the show, and everybody absolutely loved it, all four of them. They all came back in the dressing room!

Just for kicks, I asked John Barry, the music reporter at the Poughkeepsie Journal, if he knew about this show.

In sum, "How the Brits Rocked America" is highly entertaining documentary chock full of great interviews and detailed observations of British musicians' encounter with American geography. But I confess that watching my favorite British musicians describe how backward and weird my country was, hearing no voices of their American fans, and learning the "secret" to conquering the U.S., I had an uncommon thought for an American: so this is what colonialism feels like on the receiving end.

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.

creatively exploiting the Austin scene: a review of "Echotone" (pt. 2)

[This is the second part of my review of the documentary "Echotone" (2010, dir. Nathan Christ).  For the first part, go here.]

Technically, no one in Echotone ever says the phrase “creative class.”  However, the filmmaker’s marketing materials invoke it regularly, starting with the DVD’s back-cover description: “Echotone is a cultural portrait of the modern American city examined through the lyrics and lens of its creative class.”

Of course, the creative class doesn’t just refers to the workforce of artists, musicians and other cultural/knowledge producers.  It’s also the title of the economic development paradigm advanced by Richard Florida that counsels cities, states, and other growth-promoting entities to build the physical, organizational and amenity infrastructures needed by this ascendant post-industrial class.  Florida gave a lecture as part of the city’s South By Southwest Arts & Music Festival back in 2003; more generally, he has long cited SXSW as the kind of synergistic, value-creating development that can arise when cities embrace and promote their creative advantages.

I have no idea how familiar the filmmakers are with Florida’s ideas, but certainly their attitude toward SXSW indicates they would take issue with his celebration of what by now is literally a block-busting event in Austin.  Echotone presents SXSW as a massive headache for most Austin bands, who regularly find themselves excluded from the official events and have to scramble together unofficial, off-site events in order to catch the attention from the thousands of attendees.  If the distaste expressed by local musicians and promoters isn’t clear enough, the film includes a surreal on-the-street segment at a recent SXSW that gives the impression of a garish college spring break event set up by music merchandisers.  Here then is another unanticipated hazard of Austin’s prosperity — the mega-event equivalent to the high-rise condominium construction on Congress Avenue. 

Echotone thus emphasizes the conflict of interests between local bands and SXSW, as at least an implicit rebuke to the coincidence of interests that Richard Florida or other economic development planners would expect.  Surprisingly, no one offers the third view: that Austin musicians aren’t either (or only) the beneficiaries or victims of creative-city development, but actually (or also) comprise the very aesthetic landscape sought out by creative-economy employers, real estate investors, gentrifiers, Starbucks, Urban Outfitters, and so on.  To be fair to Florida, his writings signal he’d anticipate anticipate this kind of ecological dynamic of creative-city development.  However, his work is generally so instrumental and growth-minded in mindset, he’d likely describe this pattern as a good thing, a virtuous circle.

Elsewhere, Echotone shows the political efforts by local musician Troy Dillinger and other music-scene advocates to push back against the noise and nuisance complaints made by a growing number residents.  These advocates find it strategic to embrace Florida’s kind of rhetoric: “Music is economic development and growth,” Dillinger says.  It’s uncertain whether these efforts, which in the film are made by folks in their middle or later age (possibly once their own music careers have slowed down), are shared by the 20-something musicians featured in the documentary.  What is certain, however, is that Echotone’s filmmakers seek to secure the connection between indie rockers and political advocates as a result of their film’s message and (in case the course of action isn’t clear to viewers) the “get involved” agenda presented as the last title of the end credits. 

 

The number of new-economy buzzwords in this statement (at the moment, I couldn’t tell you what “aggregate your audience” means) suggests the differences between the creative-class agendas of Echotone and Richard Florida maybe aren’t that great.  Both seek to arm local musicians with a shot of careerism and a rhetoric of economic productivity to counter residents’ NIMBYism and other threats to the scene.  They also give political urgency to statistics such as the one Echotone reports: 70% of Austin musicians make less than $15,000 a year.

Look, no question it sucks when profit is extracted from musicians by corporate record labels, big festivals, or real estate developers.  (Not that any of those larger entities should be considered secure in the creative economy; what once was a smart investment five years ago is often an inevitable financial morass from today’s perspective.)  But for once, let’s ask ourselves: does urging musicians to treat their art like a business really help a music scene?  In almost the same breath that musicians’ advocates express alarm at the precarious balance that the Austin music maintains, they acknowledge that an economically vibrant scene will attract more musicians to the city — of both the touring and full-time migrant side.  How likely is ratcheting up this creative-economy agglomeration going to benefit any one struggling local band?  Musicians might think about that separately from the question, how likely will ratcheting up this creative-economy agglomeration benefit the scene’s professional services — the city’s music venues, promoters, graphic designers, lawyers, landlords, etc.  (Just because many musicians have a foot in both camps doesn’t make it any less of a contradictory position to be in.)  If we consider the latter question a little more carefully, then maybe the imperialism that SXSW exerts over the scene will start to appear a little overstated.

Here’s a timely thought.  Want to help the 70% of musicians who make less than $15,000 a year, in Austin and no doubt many other places?  Then go occupy Wall Street and join the fight against broader socioeconomic inequality and the weakening of the social safety net. 

The point is that Austin musicians’ vulnerability isn’t fundamentally a consequence of their occupation; to believe so only naturalizes the neoliberal ethos that people are essentially defined by their contributions to the labor market.  (This is why the so-called dilemma between a day job and full-time devotion to one’s art, as depicted in Echotone and so many other creative-class manifestos, has always struck me as problematic.)  However, musicians’ vulnerability is, among other things, a consequence of their locality — specifically, of living and making music in an urban economy heated by creative activity, population growth, and urban development.  A city like Austin should make evident that local music is a force for “competitive” urban advantage and broader uneven geographic development.  These are political economic games that the creative class didn’t create, and that they can’t mitigate if they choose to play them.

It might seem a strange argument for a blog about musical urbanism to make, but the problems represented in and by Echotone suggest maybe we should rethink the “natural” relationship between musical activity and places.  Particularly if (as I discussed in pt. 1 of this review) the relationship is an aesthetic one filtered through indie-rock solipsism, with no genuine participation in the collective practice of a local style — maybe the musician’s creative relationship to place is primarily one for the extraction of inspirational inputs, analogous to a sampled found sound, the profits of which can follow the musician should they ever leave for another creative hotspot.  Treating music like a business doesn’t necessarily soften or mitigate this symbolic exploitation of place; it doesn’t necessarily make the city more livable for musicians either.  

losing Austin's weirdness: a review of "Echotone" (pt. 1)

 

A 2010 documentary that just graduated from the film festival circuit to DVD, Echotone captures the Austin music scene at a moment of transition.  The film is a pleasure to watch and listen to, with great photography, fantastic sound (plus great sound editing, not something I usually notice), and an effective yet easy-going narrative style mercifully free of expert talking-head interviews and other clunky conventions of the rockumentary.

Analytically, however, the film is a bit of a muddle.  From a distance, its three themes are unassailable.  First, Austin has a lot of good bands currently.  Second, Austin is, as the city advertises, the “live music capital of the world.”  (Well, I suppose someone could assail that, but why bother? Austin has more good live music in a week than you or I could see in a year.) Third, Austin’s music scene needs protection from the rising costs of living, incompatible zoning, and residential complaints associated with the city’s prosperity over the last couple of decades. 

Echotone aims to document the overlap of these three themes: i.e., Austin’s good new bands are part of the live music scene that deserves protection.  But is that really the case?  The problem comes with the two concepts that the film uses, both on screen and in its marketing materials, to make its argument: indie rock and the creative class.  I'll address the latter in my next post; here, I focus on the Echotone's depiction of Austin's indie-rock bands.

An opening montage of Janis Joplin, Willie Nelson and Stevie Ray Vaughan suggests the direct line of descent from these Austin legends to the current groups featured in Echotone.  But Joe Lewis, frontman of soul revivalists Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears, makes a crucial observation: “There’s not even that many roots bands around anymore, though. Indie rock took over, man — college kids.”  In fact, Lewis’s band provides the only exception to the film’s predominant focus on Austin’s current crop of indie rock bands.  Viewers looking for the latest blues guitar hero or honky tonk sensation will likely come away disappointed.

Furthermore, the ways Lewis is shown making his music — operating out of an established pop-music genre, bandleading a large number of musicians, working toward a record deal, submitting to professional direction in a promotional photoshoot — is held up as obsolete in contrast to the methods used by indie rock groups, like making recording studios out of bedrooms and vacant buildings, incorporating untraditional sound media, and handpainting their CD covers.

(The racial correlate here is awkward, since Lewis seems to be the only person of color in the film’s primary cast.)

Not to put too fine a distinction on this, but Lewis’s soul revivalism can be thought to fit into Austin’s famed roots music tradition, at least insofar as both sustain live music scenes characterized by established genres and repertoires of classic songs that musicians seek to master in order to play with each other.  Stylistic innovation is respected but not a primary concern; virtuosity generally comes from individual mastery, not rejection, of musical conventions.  As Howard Becker (writing about jazz musicians), David Grazian (writing about Chicago blues clubs) and Richard Lloyd (writing about Nashville songwriters) have shown, scenes like Austin’s roots tradition involve the collective, sociable interaction of musicians — in rehearsal, on stage, having a drink or sharing a joint afterwards, exchanging songs, and via the revolving door of membership (often just play-for-hire) in multiple bands.  Through such quintessentially social activities, local styles and idioms develop, circulate among a scene, and are learned by new generations of musicians.

Possibly, with its emphasis on individual expression and continual innovation, rock music stands apart from this social practice of creativity.  And possibly indie rock (in the broadest sense, including electronic music, folk-rock, etc.) most embodies these modernist aesthetics of rock.  But Austin’s indie rock bands are a notable exception, at least until recently.  I’m thinking of the Reivers covering Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” on their 1985 debut album, or Kathy McCarty recording an album of songs local iconoclast Daniel Johnston.  Historically, Austin’s independent rock groups embraced the city’s roots heritage, since it’s the musical source of the city’s cherished ethos, Keep Austin Weird, as a glance at any picture of Willie Nelson will attest.

Echotone has lots of on-stage footage by the new crop of indie rock groups, but more symbolic are its images of these bands’ private settings and mental spaces.  A memorable scene features the group Belaire playing keyboards in their van, jamming out a secret improv for themselves, the cameraman, and the film’s audience (is it me, or is the level of self-consciousness in the van very high?), but not a paying Austin audience.   

A recurring visual motif (the film’s favorite metaphor for indie rock’s connection to its local environment) shows the duo Machine hiking through condominium construction sites, hunting for the perfect found sound to sample and mix later into their indie electronic music.  Not that sampling field recordings is an entirely novel technique, but it remains a highly individual, idiosyncratic form of musical practice.  The contrast with roots music is clear: you can’t easily show a fellow musician how to incorporate your signature sampling style into the local style, can you?

It’s not clear whether the problem belongs to these Austin bands or to the film, which is visually indebted to the dreamy, solipsistic aesthetic of indie rock.  Maybe Belaire actually moonlights as a shit-kickin’ honky tonk group with a rousing version of “Jolene” that the filmmakers couldn’t license.  Something like that would shoot down the preceding hypothesis.  But it’s worth remembering that in the sense I described above, indie rock groups in Austin are really no different than their counterparts elsewhere.  And that may be the point: Austin’s indie rock groups are no longer weird in the sense of that uniquely local, collective tradition.  If that’s the case, then what does Austin really give them?  A place to build a career in; a cool brand (or “moniker,” as a local promoter calls it) to distinguish themselves from other bands; but relatively little of the stylistic influences, performative exchange and “weird” way-of-being that comes from participating in the city’s venerable musical practice.

[For pt. 2 of this review, go here.]

punk-rock dads in suburbia: reflections on "The Other F Word"

I'm still thinking about "The Other F Word," Andrea Nevins' new documentary about punk rock musicians who became fathers, since I saw it a week and a half ago at the Woodstock Film Festival.  Featuring the dads who play in Pennywise, NOFX, Blink 182, Rancid, Bad Religion, Black Flag, Rise Against, U.S. Bombs, and Fear (represented by Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers), the film is entertaining, glossy and (this isn't insignificant) generic enough as a rockumentary to go straight to VH1 Classics, as it develops the absurdity and unexpected nuances of its premise: "Isn't it funny how guys who played music to rebel against the system have now become part of the system?"  

Narratively, "The Other F Word" alternates between interviews of punk-rock dads in their domestic settings, usually with kids in tow, and an extended focus on Pennywise lead singer Jim Lindberg over (what we discover by film's end is) his last tour with the band, a narrative device that develops common conflict of emotions and principles that almost all the musicians feel between punk rock and their families.  Maybe the film follows the threads of Lindberg's story too much.  We really don't need to spend so much time on the music industry's decline as fans stop purchasing recorded music, for instance, to give context to the grueling 200+ date tour that Lindberg finds himself on.  (The priority that punk rock gives to live performance over selling recordings has long preceded the music industry's current predicament.)  But Lindberg, who has written about his life as a punk rock dad before, is candid and articulate; with his rather 'suburban' appearance, he makes an appealing figure for mass audiences to identify with.

If Pennywise isn't exactly the kind of band that comes to mind when you think of punk rock, then you might be disappointed by Nevins' choice of informants.  For the most part, the dads' bands featured in "The Other F Word" hail from Los Angeles' South Bay and neighboring Orange County, with a few exceptions (Rancid, Rise Against).  And for the most part, these are the "punk rock" groups you hear on the Warped Tour — a well-produced derivation of Southern California hardcore, characterized by a fat guitar sound and an aggressive masculine bellow, that can be slipped into a KROQ playlist — or the original hardcore groups that inspire those bands.  (A mellow, wise Chavo from Black Flag, a.k.a. Ron Reyes, gives one of the film's most welcome appearances).  Nevins fails to provide a representative picture of contemporary punk rock: among other absences, there's none of the DIY stuff played in youth centers and basements, no metalcore, and obviously no queercore or riot grrrl (if those 1990s sub-genres have any contemporary manifestations).  But what the film sacrifices in terms of representativeness, it gains in terms of empirical coherence.  By inadvertently focusing on a regionally identified sub-genre, "The Other F Word" sheds light on a very tangible set of class dynamics that illuminate tensions and contradictions in the lifeworlds that punk rock and its offshoots provide many young and not-so-young adults.

I confess: I've never been a major fan of this stripe of punk rock.  Back in the mid-1980s, it was easy enough to have your world changed by Black Flag (whose achievements across North American post-punk and alternative music are documented in Michael Azzerad's Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991).  It was only when I was a college student in Los Angeles that I got up to speed on groups like the Descendants, the Adolescents, the Vandals, and Social Distortion.  This means I missed being a high school student in Southern California, which I discerned was the place where the real local punk rock diehards came from.  At that time, Hollywood punk rock was either a memory (the Germs, the Weirdos, the Screamers) or a group trying to eke an existence in the uncharted waters between major labels and college radio (X, the Go-Gos, the Red Hot Chili Peppers).  The punk rock that has always thrived in Southern California, drawing legions of young guys looking to let off some aggression by picking fights and slam dancing (I never heard the term "mosh" until east coast thrash metallers Anthrax recorded "Caught in a Mosh"), hailed from the suburbs.  

The fact that American hardcore punk originated in Southern California's suburban environs is fairly well established.  In We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk (Three Rivers Press, 2001), Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen record two contemporary recollections from hardcore's ground zero:

Jeff McDonald: I know exactly how and where hardcore started.  I remember the day!  I was a teen with a couple of friends around my age who were all into punk rock.  Somebody told me about this school in Huntington Beach where there was supposed to be over a hundred punk rockers.  That was unbelievable to us, completely unheard of.  One afternoon we went by that school, Edison High, looking forward to meeting all these cool new hip people.  We were shocked and bummed instead when it turned out it was the same kids who previously been hassling us for liking punk and now they're all red-hot punkers emulating how the media portrayed punk rock, as really violent and fucked up.  The Edison High punks all seemed to worship Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten.  All their bands sang with English accents, whatever was coming over from England, stuff that had nothing to do with their lifestyle in southern California.  The entire New York punk scene just wasn't a factor.

Mugger: Edison High is just this one school.  There were a lot of schools in the Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa area that attracted the sorts of kids whose families didn't care about them or whatever, and they just got crazy.  Huntington Beach was the term people used, but it was all over Orange County... it was basically a full-on white suburbanite rebellion.  People were saying "fuck you" not only to these people that were trying to tell us what to do but to the establishment in general... the kids did their thing and now the punkers were doing their things (pg. 193).

Of course, hardcore never stayed confined to Southern California.  Indeed, aside from legends like Black Flag and Circle Jerks, it's arguable whether the best stuff even came from Southern California.  (Ultimately, I don't think the Minutemen can be considered a hardcore group.)  But as hardcore took on more political overtones and/or expressed more inner-city perspectives in Washington DC, NYC, San Francisco, North Carolina, and elsewhere, punk rock in Southern California mutated into a more tuneful and self-consciously 'juvenile' form.  Ryan Moore argues for its cultural influence in Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture and Social Crisis (NYU Press, 2010):

In the L.A. suburbs, nihilism begat a new sub-subculture of punk bands described as "brat-core" or "snot-core."  The names of some of the seminal bands — the Dickies, the Circle Jerks, and the Adolescents — seem to say it all.  These were groups of young men who flaunted their immaturity and idiocy while making high-speed but very melodic music, which might be described as the sonic equivalent of being teased by an annoying child.  This was "punk" in the juvenile sense of the word, and their songs were full-blown but fleeting temper tantrums against authority.  The Adolescents personified this state of retardation in "No Way": "No class / No job / I'm just a victim of society / A slob / No ass, no head / I gotta go home and jack off instead."  This sense of boredom and anomie had originally been expressed by the Ramones and the Buzzcocks, but it seemed especially relevant to punks growing up in the Southern California suburbs.  The Adolescents were part of a circle of punk groups in the Orange County cities of Fullerton and Placentia that included Social Distortion and Agent Orange.  Although nestled in the suburbs, the City of Fullerton in particular was beginning to experience downward mobility, and Social Distortion developed a uniquely working-class aesthetic in that social milieu.  Further toward the coast, an even more violent punk scene developed among much more affluent youth in Huntington Beach who followed the bands T.S.O.L. (True Sounds of Liberty), the Vandals, and China White (pg. 56).

In fact, brat-core or snot-core punk seemed to anticipate a larger trend in dumb and dumber American popular culture, where billions of dollars are now made from men who regress to adolescence on screen, over the airwaves, or in cartoon form...  The man in the gray flannel suit, we might say, has been replaced by the boy in the backward baseball cap (pg. 57).

This legacy of "suburban punk" leaves us more or less at the point in which Andrea Nevins documents the punk rock dads in "The Other F Word".  Have they given up the backward baseball cap for the gray flannel suit? 

Of course not.  "The Other F Word" shows us dads bonding with their preteen kids over video games, dressing their tots in precociously cool outfits (the daughter of NOFX's Fat Mike is a scene-stealer), escorting them to father-daughter dances at middle school, and chauffering kids of all ages around in mini-vans.  The dissonance in these scenes is only superficial; consumer materialism is the lingua franca between these punks and the 'suburban people' among whom they raise their families.  (Interestingly, scenes of fathers and children playing musical instruments together offer some of the film's only non-consumerist interactions.)  And as the cultural codes and status symbols of today's consumerism shift ever younger and younger, it turns out these punk rock dads are able to identify with and "provide for" their kids quite well.

Quite likely, at least some of the materialism that these punk-rock dads shower on their kids is a reaction to the ways they themselves were raised.  In fact, the most emotionally stirring section of "The Other F Word" examines the relationships these dads had when they were young to their own fathers, which Nevins portrays as generally negative.  Many of these punk-rock dads grew up in single-mother households, and several reminiscences involve occasions when their own fathers abandoned the family.  Others who came from two-parent households confess the lingering pain of moments when their own fathers didn't think to show up for little league baseball games, never really showed much concern for their kids' doings, or simply failed to live lives of integrity (Jim Lindberg recalls his father was a traveling salesman) that their sons could respect and emulate.  

As the interview with Flea illustrates, even when the punk-rock dads refer to their own family situations in the vaguest of terms, it's quite clear how deep the wounds of their childhood remain in their present lives.  These wounds are cited as both the reasons why they took up punk rock in the first place, and why they're powerfully committed to their own children.  In the film's most optimistic assertion, such family commitment is held up as the ultimate punk-rock principle.  It's a cheery note to end the documentary on, although it's a problematic one insofar as it casts aside any of the political contexts of punk rock's history and neglects the consumeristic settings in which (as "The Other F Word" would have us believe) musicians pursue punk-rock fatherhood today.  

Maybe this contradiction isn't (simply) a failing of Nevin's analysis; maybe it's generalizable to the whole of the American punk rock scene.  It's been said that whereas British punk originated as political protest, American punk was more cultural in its basis, expressing in extreme form the familiar American impulses of individualism and the youthful quest for autonomy.  Perhaps that's one way to explain the contradiction that "The Other F Word" ends with, but I can't help but think about this more in terms of economic class.  

For instance, does the sub-genre of commercially successful (relatively speaking), male-identified punk rock found on the Warped tour represent a particular class?  It's tempting to ascertain one, as Ryan Moore does in Sells Like Teen Spirit, in the downwardly mobile generation who grew up children to educated yet not exactly "free thinking" parents working in white-collar technical or administrative occupations of Southern California's once-booming aerospace/defense economy.  Certainly many of the fans of Southern California hardcore came from such circumstances, but, curiously, few of the punk-rock dads in "The Other F Word" seem to identify such a background.  The more important commonality Nevins highlights is the household/parental situation: abandonment, neglect, disrespect.  This raises an important issue: does the family situation also constitute a class situation?

I'm not yet ready to abandon the economic perspectives that Karl Marx and Max Weber offer in regards to class.  Furthermore, it's reasonable to be suspicious of family-based theories of social class, which smack of conservative ideologies that hold "personal values," not economic relations, to be determinative of life chances. But what "The Other F Word" does rather well, if somewhat inadvertently, is reveal some of the micro situations of gender, education, materialism, and family history in which individuals manifest and work through the macro contexts of economic relations and geographic setting.