on the stroll: a book review of "The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll" by Preston Lauterbach

Cities shape music, we know, but how does music shape cities? To be specific, how can a DIY music industry heat up urban economies, enliven public spaces, foster local idioms and local traditions of artistic practice, and even create jobs? This question suggests the policy criteria adopted by creative-city analysts, as well as the legacy asserted by musicians and fans of punk rock and hip-hop. But they can be insightfully posed toward an older, less documented, but undeniably influential era of popular music: the chitlin' circuit of jazz, blues, and soul music that flourished in the American South from the 1930s to the 1960s. 

This is the titular subject of The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll, a fantastic book of music history by Preston Lauterbach (W.W. Norton, 2011). Most histories of black music frame the topic through the lens of particular genres, musicians, or record labels. Lauterbach takes a different tack, focusing on the many nightclub owners, promoters, publicists, do-gooders and street hustlers who brought live music and racous good times to the black neighborhoods of the Jim Crow South. No single musical movement or figure held the stage over the period Lauterbach studies, from the late 1920s to the 1960s. Indeed, such creative dynamism, he argues, gave rise to rock 'n' roll—not the circuit's primary destination, but a legacy too often overlooked by music audiences and critics—in its continuing evolution as a base for soul and (finally, it seems) blues music today.

While music buffs should count The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll in the best music writing lists of 2011, the book can also be read as urban theory of how an oppressed people's cultural practices—musical performance, nightlife rituals, and economic activities (legal and illegal)—can put cities and regions on the map, so to speak. Lauterbach documents how, in a historical context of Jim Crow and African migration from the agricultural countryside to industrial cities, a subaltern music industry established, extended, and deepened a regional geography of venues and affiliated activities that supplied entertainment and collective validation to black communities. Studying the chitlin' circuit reveals the cultural significance of cities like Indianapolis and Houston that usually go unexamined by urban theory (or, for that matter, much 20th-century African-American history). Arguably, the chitlin' circuit revived Memphis, a legendary center of African-American cultural production, whose black district inspired W.C. Handy's seminal jazz trilogy ("Memphis Blues," St. Louis Blues," and "Beale Street," written between 1912-16) only to stagnate over three decades of police harassment and political oppression. Like alveoli in an expanding lung of black culture, the chitlin' circuit developed African-American markets and created community consciousness across small cities and podunk towns in the South. How many of us can locate, much less say we've visited, all the cities where the chitlin' circuit touched down?

No dot on the map was too large or small: Ardmore, Muskogee, Oklahoma City, Taft, and Tulsa, Oklahoma; Houston, Longview, and Tyler, Texas; El Dorado, Hot Springs, and Little Rock, Arkansas; Monroe, New Orleans, Shreveport, and Tallulah, Louisiana; Greenville, Hattiesburg, Jackson, McComb, Vicksburg, and Yazoo City, Mississippi; Dorthan and Gadsden, Alabama; Athens, Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, Cordele, Macon, Savannah, and Waycross, Georgia; Jacksonville, Pensacola, St. Augustine, St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Tampa, and West Palm Beach, Florida (pg. 50).

PLAYING THE CHITLIN' CIRCUIT

There are several so-called chitlin' circuits where different forms of black performance culture have flourished under the radar of mainstream (white) commercial culture. The comedy chitlin' circuit gave us Redd Foxx, Dolemite and Richard Pryor; the drama circuit has most recently launched Tyler Perry into bigtime success. At times these have merged with the live music chitlin' circuit that Lauterbach documents; before the Depression, they all came together in a black vaudeville circuit that also included dancers, novelty acts, and burlesque entertainment. Whatever the type of performance, the chitlin' circuit refers to a low-budget scale of venue where black performers play primarily for black audiences. These are pointedly not the great theaters of Harlem, Chicago, and other industrial cities where African Americans moved en masse over the Great Migration of the early 20th century, but rather the no-frills dancehalls, roadside shacks, storefront backrooms, converted churches, and other utilitiarian spaces that black entrepreneurs could wrangle in the segregated south. Circuit veteran Sax Kari remembers:

Chitlins to black people were like caviar to Europeans. It's played out now, but it was a delicacy. The average chitlin' dinner was a dollar. You could go to one place and buy supper, drinks, and see an orchestra perform. It doesn't exist now as it did then. Back [in the 1940s] you had big bands, anywhere from ten- to twenty-piece bands that had to squeeze themselves into a corner if there was no bandstand. There were no inside toilets at many of the places; you had to use privies. Now, when you got into a place that had running water inside, why you were fortunate. They sold ice water. They didn't have air conditioners; they had these big garage fans: two on the bandstand and one back at the door. These were wooden buildings on the outside of town; there were very few concrete buildings or places in town. It was seldom you'd find anyplace for blacks that would hold more than six hundred. The people'd be damn near on top of you. We'd get the brass and reeds on the back of the stage and get the drummer and rhythm section down front where you could see over their heads. You would play for two and half hours straight, then take a thirty-minute break, then come back and play for the next hour and a half. Four-hour gigs (pg. 10).

As this suggests, the chitlin' circuit entailed hard work for musicians in unpretentious settings—hardly the glamour associated with famous venues like New York's Apollo Theater, much less the urban theaters and big-time nightclubs that commercial crossover to white audiences brought. Additionally, there was the unrelenting hustle associated with touring the circuit. Another veteran, drummer Earl Palmer, recalls circuit bands as "always traveling, working one night stands. Barely getting by, but [sounding] good. The raggedy bands, we called them, big raggedy road bands" (pp. 91-2). Laterbach writes, "The chitlin' circuit's pounding succession of one-nighters kept bands on the road, sleep-deprived and sardine-fed, for hundreds of miles a day through poor weather and past cops who took exception to a Cadillac limo or flexi-bus full of slick black dudes" (pg. 159). For this exhausting and often risky musical life, the pay-offs were playing raw and uncensored music before audiences itching to let loose the daily burdens of racist America, hopefully ending the evening with a few dollars in your pocket, and living the dream of the musician's life.

A few stories and sounds drawn from over six decades of the chitlin' circuit illustrate the diversity and ethos of the music performed on the chitlin' circuit, as well as Lauterbach's gifts as a raconteur, historian, and critic:

The International Sweethearts of Rhythm 

The all-girl International Sweethearts of Rhythm began, similarly to their stablemates the Carolina Cotton Pickers, in the late 1930s as a moneymaker for the all-black Piney Woods Country Life School near Jackson, Mississippi. Piney Woods founder Laurence Jones assembled the group and bestowed the "international" tag to emphasize the Chinese sax player, Hawaiian trumpeter, and Mexican clarinetist in additionn to the fourteen African-American girls in the group. Rae Lee Jones, whom the school assigned to chaperone the girls on their travels, had convinced the ladies to throw off their amateur status mid-tour in early 1941, astutely pointing out that they could top their Piney Woods-mandated eight-dollar-per-week salary. They absconded to Arlington, Virginia, under the guidance of real estate developer Al Dade, who assumed their management. Piney Woods principal Laurence Jones did not take the news well. He reported the band bus stolen and several of the band's underage members missing. The Sweethearts ditched the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and made it to Memphis, where a roadblock netted the fugitives. Four of the girls returned to Piney Woods, and the decidedly square Laurence Jones threatened to withhold diplomas from the rest. They seemed to prefer Dade's tutelage, who reportedly introduced them to the wonders of makeup. He lodged the refugees at his property, redubbed "Sweetheart House," and they called him daddy. Clearly in need of a positive role model, the Sweethearts joined forces with Denver Ferguson as one of the first major acts at Ferguson Brothers Agency. Tiny David, a three-hundred-pound, proud lesbian vocalist, joined the group just prior to "one of the greatest one night tours ever staged by any attraction," as did Toby Butler, the group's first white member. The Sweethearts had as many nicknames as members of a male orchestra, counting "Rabbit" Wong, "Vi" Burnside, and "Trump" Gipson among their membership, and claimed to have musical chops on par with any bunch of no-good men. Still, the ladies understood femininity's value to the blues crowd. As vocalist Anna Mae Winburn sang, "I ain't good looking and I don't have waist-long hair, but my mama gave me something that can take me anywhere" (pp. 82-3)

Amos Milburn  

Milburn and his gang of five played every Houston joint, the Peacock, the Boston Lion, and the Big Apple, but they harbored a special affection for a rustic camp outside the city replete with picnic grounds, sixteen cabins for rent, and a commissary that served deep fried shrimp, steak, and chicken all night. Though formally known as Sid's Ranch, Milburn cooked up a theme song for the place called "Chicken Shack Boogie," a sure enough portrayal of a classic chitlin' circuit dive. Milburn lays down friendly, half-spoken verses, elaborating on the shack's out-of-the-way location and humble architecture, then leads his band through torrid instrumental breaks to illustrate the fun all would have. On stage, Milburn perched at the enge of the piano stool nearest the audience, turned his body toward the crowd, pumped that right leg, lashed his pompadour toward the keyboard, tore through his set, and ruined the audience for anyone less charismatic than T-Bone [Walker]. As a jazz quartet leader who was to follow Amos at the Keyhole recalled, "He was supposed to open for us, but we couldn't go on" (pp. 124-5).

Roy Brown  

"Boogie at Midnight"... captures [Roy Brown's] group's explosive form fans heard on the epic 1949 tour. As he had with "Good Rockin' Tonight," Roy sang it as he saw it on the chitlin' circuit in "Boogie at Midnight," in Billboard's description, "a frantic, shouting, hand-clapping, job that sounds like cash in hand." The song rocks harder than Roy's previous records, and would become his biggest hit to date, peaking and no. 3 on the Billboard R&B chart. You can hear rock's New Orlean's brass roots, the sanctified hand-clapping and choir chanting Roy brought to the sound, and Roy and [saxophonist Leroy] Batman [Rankins] pushing each other higher up the rafters. No more compelling document exists of rock 'n' roll as it was made on the chitlin' circuit (pp. 166-7).

Marvin Sease  

A former gospel singer named Marvin Sease wrote a song called "Candy Licker" in the late 1980s, and has enjoyed steady chitlin' circuit headliner status since. More than mere song, "Candy Licker" is a sometimes belligerent, ten-minute liberation of cunnilingus from black man taboo, sung from the perspective of Jody, a mythical lover conjured from the mists of Yoruban trickster lore. Jody does what othr men do not deign discuss. Even more subversively, he cares about female satisfaction. Jody calls out the sorry-ass men who won't go down. A sharp ploy, considering the conventional wisdom, dating to the 1930s, that black women buy more blues records than black men do (pg. 5).

THE CIRCUIT IN HISTORIC AND ECONOMIC CONTEXT

Many of the performers described in the book are known to fans of American black and/or roots music; a good number of them (like the highly successful Carolina Cotton Pickers who barnbusted the South through the 1930s and 40s) never recorded, which only underscores the great contribution of Lauterbach's research to American music history. But the book's broader relevance to urban research is twofold.

First, Lauterbach contextualizes these musicians' careers within the broader fabric of the black South under Jim Crow. His attention to the details and texture of black life, its historic events and subtle shifts over the decades of the Great Migration, is often astonishing. Dig the evocative poetry of this extended passage introducing 1920s Indianapolis, home of one of the chitlin' circuit's central characters:

In 1920, Denver [Ferguson] moved into a small home at 412 West North Street, abutting the Avenue's south end. He'd arrived with enough money to open the Ferguson Printint Company, and after some initial success running the business out of the house, he set up shop nearby at 322 Senate, overlooking Indiana Avenue, which would hold Denver's headquarters for the next twenty-five years.

From Denver's office, the Avenue streetcar line stretched horizon to horizon. The trolley clambered along the cobblestones, where the last stubborn carriages frustrated motorists. Buildings on the Avenue's south end near Denver's shop were brick, some oxblood red, others sandy brown with black flecks, two and three stories tall. They extended from two storefronts to a half-block wide. They housed junkmen, fish and game shops, clothiers, and cobblers. Striped canvas and painted tin awnings reached from the façades over the sidewalk, shading the concrete in the absence of trees. After sunset, electric lights, five milky-glass globes on an iron post, a half-dozen per block, wiped away the darkness in soft yellow puffs. Avenue men dressed the same, in long-sleeved, collared, white shirts, suspenders, and dark trousers. A few sported vests; fewer wore suits. The greatest variety was seen atop their heads: newsboy caps, ivies, derbies, bowlwers, straw boaters, and fedoras. Ladies' fashion functioned primarily to keep male imaginations active. Continuing up the street, broad brick buildings shrunk to double storefronts, with one- and two-story, tin-roofed wooden buildings interspersed among them. The architecture appeared increasingly modest farther up toward Fall Creek—raw plank shops and homes that would have blended in fine on an unpaved thoroughfare in the Old West.

The Avenue's first picture-show house, of corrugated iron, stood on bare ground. Each evening's show began with a fresh scattering of wood shavings to absorb the torrents of tobacco juice. The nearest thing to an orchestra in those days—a trio of piano, violin, and fiddle—sawed through the night at Vinegar Hall, where patrons dipped whiskey from a communal barrel. Another of the era's recreation spots, Bob Parker's Hole in the Wall, occupied the entire second story of a quadruple storefront. It was remembered only as "an institution of wide notoriety," a truly awesome distinction in this open town.

People lived above Avenue storefronts, where it stayed loud, and then spread throughout the rooming and shotgun houses along the cross streets. By 1920 most residential blocks adjacent to the Avenue were nearly 100 percent black. Sprawling family homes were divided to board the latest arrivals, and black families filled rooms where once a single white body had slept. Migrants adapted old Kentucky architecture to its new, high-density urban setting. They dug wells around back, and in one tenement installed a two-story privy that upstairs tenants had to reach by braving a wobbly, splintery footbridge. In winter, coal smoke from stoves and furnaces blackened the foggy, chill air, and ashy-gray snowmelt sloshed in the gutters. In summer, the fragrance of tomato plants punched through the humidity.

The Jews hung on around Indiana Avenue—Abraham Tavel and the Sachs Brothers ran their pawnshops, and the Schaeffer cleaners and Kappeler jewelers still did business—but the migrants had begun to transform the strip and were deep in the process of making it their own. Small-town Kentucky ways translated well to the Avenue. People lived intimately, publicly. Most homes lacked comfort, so folks spent their time visiting, out on the porch, walking the street, or lounging in a café, many of which served "Kentucky oysters," local code for hog intestines. Consequently, the track buzzed night and day. Everybody living on top of and in front of each other lent the weekly Indianapolis Recorder a penetrating vitality. It kept a second-story office halfway between the pawnshops and the hospital, where it saw and reported on everything. You might open it Saturday afternoon and learn who your sweetheart was seeing on the side, go find the cheaters in a café, cut their asses in front of everybody, and end up in the next edition (pp. 18-21).

Second, The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll documents the story of the music industry that organized the circuit. It's a story with a generous share of hustlers, criminals, and the temptations of the musicians' life—elements familiar to readers of Frederic Dannen's Hit Men and Dan Charnas's The Big Payback—but the businesses and hustles generally operated beneath the high-stakes arenas of the mass record industry and mainstream radio.

Perhaps in some way the chitlin' circuit should be understood as an accidental consequence of the Great Migration of African Americans out of the the south, for it was in the North, and in black Americans' reverence for the artists and writers associated of the Jazz Age and the Harlem Remainssance, that a peculiar market niche emerged which the Southern chitlin' circuit would serve. In the 1920s, Harlem and Chicago were strongholds of black swing orchestras (Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Count Basie) who performing for white audiences in big-city theaters of the North under the booking monopoly of the mob, a.k.a. the syndicate. The white criminal underworld had successfully forced its way into a mutually beneficial relationship with the white record companies: syndicate bookers needed records to promote their bands, and the Northern record companies needed personal appearance tours to promote their recording artists.

If a black musician wanted even to entertain this level of success, they would necessarily have to pursue their livelihood in the North. Conversely, since all the lucrative markets lay in the North, the big swing orchestras had little need to visit the Jim Crow South. African Americans in the South participated in black commercial culture via Northern output: recorded music and literature, including black periodicals, like the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier, that were "a forbidden pleasure, an ally from the outside world, and a trusted source for style points" (pg. 39).

On the stroll: Walter Barnes 

The end of Prohibition, the incarceration of mob kingpins like Al Capone, and the nosedive in consumer spending with the Depression brought this system to a steady close over the 1930s. Lauterbach argues that the first to perceive the commercial rewards of bringing Northern music to the South was Walter Barnes, a bandleader at Chicago's Cotton Club and a Southern migrant himself. Fortuitously, Barnes wrote a column on the black big-band scene for the Chicago Defender, which he unashamedly used to publicize his own orchestra as well as his more famous peers. More importantly, Barnes' column was the Twitter of its day (if you will) for the scattered territory bands of Black America:

These colorfully named orchestras worked according to the lean scale the Depression imposed. Many held a hotel ballroom residency and broadcast from there over low-watt radio stations, then toured as far as their reputations and broadcasts carried. Around these acts grew the rudimentary infrastructure of the Southern black dance business: dusty dance halls, hustling dance promoters, and hucksterish dadvance men, who went around drumming up gigs and publicity. In the absence of full itineraries, they barnstormed, packing into a Ford AA bus or Model A Woody, tying their instruments down to the roof, to catch gigs as they could.... They sent Barnes their locations and provided as much of a plan for the future as they had scripted: "Lee Trammell and his Spotlight Entertainers are barnstorming Arkansas. Skeet Reeves is traveling in advance. The unit will route for northern states in March and may be reached this week at Stuttgart, Arkansas." Though he began as Chicago orchestra columnist and self-publicist, Barnes rapidly became central dirt dispatcher for traveling black jazz bands. Barnes's readers learned the whereabouts (and names) of Dittybo Hill and his Eleven Clouds of Joy, Herman Curtis and his Chocolate Vagabonds, Walter Waddell and his Eleven Black diamonds, Jack Ellis and his Eleven Hawaiians, Belton's Society Syncopators, Smiling Billy Steward and his Celery City Serenaders, and A. Lee Simpkins's Augusta Nighthawks (pg. 40).

Barnes' column relayed musical news from black America's dispersed enclaves, or what he called in his hep lingo "the stroll": racially segregated black districts of Southern cities that were economically self-sustaining (at least until the era of desegregation and urban renewal). His dispatches also proved to be highly valuable "road intelligence" when he decided to tap these distant markets with his own Chicago band. Barnes toured the South regularly from 1932 until 1940 (when he and 208 others died in the famous Rhythm Club fire in Natchez, Mississippi). While on the road, he published boosterish dispatches from the Southern cities he plays in, thereby publicizing the urban markets for black entertainment and and the scattered venues, lodgings and services open to black musicians:

We are now driving down Desiard Street, the stroll in Monroe, [Louisiana]. . . . The Red Goose Barber Shop is the place where all the boys have their grooming down. . . . Lovely Brown's Beauty Shop is where all the ladies get fancy waves for the dances. . . . The Grog Cafe is the dining place of the profesh, and what good, Southern, home-cooked meals they serve here. . . . The Frog Pond ballroom located at 1003 Desiard Street is the most beautiful and spacious dance palace here (Walter Barnes, December 1936, quoted on pg. 53).

 
In the South, Barnes worked with regional promoters whose names would become eventual legend in chitlin' circuit lore: Don Robey of Houston's Third Ward; Frank Painia, former barber and owner of New Orleans' famed Dew Drop; Clint Brantley of Macon, Georgia's Cotton Club (and future manager of James Brown); Bill Rivers, Cracker Johnson, and Charlie Edd in Florida; and so on. But in the 1930s, their operations were largely unconnected and limited to an intra-state area, maybe a few states. It was Denver Ferguson, an Indianapolis booking agent, who coordinated these promoters into a single industry and thus, Lauterbach asserts, deserves credit as "the man who invented the chitlin' circuit" (quoting Sax Kari, pg. 5).

Stickin' his neck out: Denver Ferguson 

Originally a printshop owner, Ferguson first became a mover and shaker in the Indianapolis numbers racket by printing daily lottery slips that resembled harmless baseball scorecards. His career in musical entertainment started with a tip about a lucrative parcel of Indiana Avenue real estate across the street from an unannounced future housing project. Here he built the Sunset Terrace, which flourished in the 1930s amidst the Depression, cutthroat rivals, and corrupt police, until a 1940 nightclub murder brought enough heat to lead him into a somewhat safer venture, talent booking. In 1941, Ferguson opened the Ferguson Brothers Agency to serve a bigger and remarkably underserved market for entertainment.

Denver, knowing well how the syndicate controlled black bands in the big Northern Cities, built his circuit in the territory Walter Barnes had pioneered for black bands in 1932 and virtually closed with his death in 1940. Unlike the syndicate, Denver put the black audience first, a simple variation at the core of his innovation. Denver knew the black South intimately... Denver understood the ways black neighborhoods functioned, and he knew that because of racial segregation, all-black enclaves existed in every excuse for a town. Whether he had read Barnes writings or not, Denver was in touch with the stroll concept and its prevalence across the map. He brought his own street-financial expertise to the enterprise. The money principles of the numbers game applied: the Negro individual lacked financial resources, but the stroll possessed collective wealth in nickel and ime increments. Add those nickels and dimes, multiply by numerous bands playing different joints simultaneously with a percentage of proceeds from each flowing back to Ferguson, repeat nightly, and you come to see, as Denver correctly surmised, that there was serious cash down there (pg. 87).

Ferguson puts his printing press to use printing advertising materials and tickets to be couriered to future tour stops. His publicity machine also benefited from a board member placed within the black periodical Indianapolis Recorder. J. St. Clair Gibson, a.k.a. "The Saint," relayed tall and flattering stories about Ferguson acts, such as the "creation myth" of one reasonably overlooked King Kolax, for black America via the Associated Negro Press wire:

They were holding a jam session at the Savoy Ballroom one night in the month of May 1940 . . . and all the cats had their axes sharp for some deep cutting. . . . As the session started and the cats started swinging . . . a young fellow came up from out of nowhere and asked to sit in. . . . This young fellow with his horn under his arm hit the stage in two jumps and told the pianist to take "Honeysuckle Rose" in E flat. . . . This kid raised his horn toward the ceiling and started blowing and for 10 choruses he kept them jumping, hitting the high notes with a different riff for every chorus. When this kid had finished, one of the old timers said, "There is your new King of the Trumpet" and this new king was King Kolax (J. St. Clair Gibson, July 31, 1943, quoted on pp. 85-6).

Perhaps the most game-changing of business practices that Ferguson introduced involved his method for securing effective local promotion across a staggeringly expansive region. Lauterbach writes that Ferguson "stuck his neck out," sending his people on the road and making many roadtrips himself to enlist the dispersed regional promoters from the territory-band circuit or "make" them (instruct a well-placed novice) himself.

Denver approached his relationship with these far-off promoters just as he had his numbers runners on the Avenue. If a promoter failed to pay Denver or his act according to the terms of their deal, then Denver would drop them from the circuit. No need for violent reprucussion. He could always make another promoter. He wanted his freelancers, either in the street or on the circuit, to recognize the long-term value of their arrangement. He wanted them to see that they would make thousands more dollars with him over time than the few hundred they'd make off with by disappearing with the proceeds of a single dance. If they were incapable of this, let them go, Denver said. This was the closest thing to loyalty he could breed (pg. 88).

Characteristically, he would sell each promoter blocks of shows across their region, which would encourage them to tap all their established venues and then find some more. The concerned parties—regional promoters, local venue operators, and his own performers—would then be linked together with a contract of Ferguson's devising. The tradition on the chitlin' circuit was to pay performers "first money in the door," which promised next to nothing if a gig was poorly attended. Ferguson transformed this incentive structure into a mutually reinforcing association:

Denver negotiated for his talent to ensure that the act, and agent, got paid before anyone else regardless of attendance. Denver and the promoter settled on a guaranteed fee. Denver extracted a deposit from that figure, paid before the show to "guarantee" the appearance... refundable only if the artist failed to show. If the gig proceeded smoothly, Denver kept the deposit and the artist kept the remainder of the guarantee, which the artist collected from the promoter at intermission. The promoter kept an amount equal to the artist guarantee, and if profits exceeded payouts, the artist and promoter split the surplus, according to the term of their deal referred to in contractual lingo as the "privilege," often, but not always, 50 percent. A chunk of this also went back to the boss. A Ferguson-employed road manager (who might also be the bandleader, as in the Carolina Cotton Pickers' unfortunate case) accompanied the agency's acts to count heads in the dance hall and then wire the cash into Denver's pockets—just like an Avenue numbers runner (pg. 90).

The circuit starts rockin' 

With more cities and towns to play in, the far-flung chitlin' circuit set in motion big changes for black music in the South. World War II was an important catalyst. Wartime mobilization put blacks to work at rates not seen since before the Depression; thus, folks had some money in their pockets to spend on entertainment. The war froze the record industry for several years, as jukebox factories converted to martial production and shellac rationing brought record manufacturing to a stop in 1943. Thus, black demand for entertainment in the South would be channeled into live entertainment. These were about as good a set of circumstances in which black musicians could pursue a career, and the chitlin' circuit began to overflow with performers.

Finally, wartime allocations hasten the decline of the big jazz orchestras, as the Office of Defense Transportation imposed a bus ban as part of fuel rationing, a direct blow to the traditional means of big-band transport. The end of the war saw blacks lose work en masse, and the subsequent dampening of entertainment demand meant club owners could no longer afford big orchestras' fees. Smaller units were best adapted to these circumstances; with fewer musicians to pay, savings could be passed on down to ticket prices. The meteoric rise of Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five, the small jump-jive combo fronted by a zany bandleader, to the top of Billboard Magazine's "Race Records" charts in 1943 illustrated the decline of the jazz swing orchestra in black America's popular music (this music would remain beloved to mainstream white audiences for many more years). 

Instrumentation would change with the shift to smaller bands; vocalists and electric guitar would especially benefit in the musical space opened up. Guitar and saxophone would symbolize a new aesthetic. Now, the music rocked, and the lyrics would often say as much, most famously in Roy Brown's 1948 smash hit "Good Rockin' Tonight"; Lauterbach asserts this was the first rock'n'roll record (albeit before the genre had such a name) to come out of the chitlin' circuit and reach major commercial success.

The shift to smaller bands in turn changed black musicians' employment circumstances. "After Louis Jordan's rise pushed the vocalist into the limelight, the band became an afterthought," explains Lauterbach. "Early rock star-attractions Joe Turner, Wynonie Harris, T-Bone Walker, Cecil Gant, and Ivory Joe Hunter traveled without bands. Hell, anyone could be the band, as long as the star, whose voice you heard on the jukebox and face you'd seen on the posters, was there on stage" (pg. 116). For most chitlin' circuit musicians, finding a gig no longer involved joining a roadworthy band, but rather being in the right place when touring musicians came to town. This was the context in which Memphis' musical juices began flowing again:

By [1949], area band activity all ran through Sunbeam [Mitchell, the main promoter in Memphis], as the Mitchell Hotel became an informal musicians' employment agency, a regional chitlin' circuit hub. Like New Orleans's Dew Drop, Dallas's Empire Room, and Indianapolis's Sunset Terrace, bandleaders organizing tours of the region would check in at Sunbeam's cantina to find musicians to hire. Rain or shine, night or day, someone could be found (pg. 193).

From this setting, unknown Memphians could occasionally become overnight stars (e.g., Johnny Ace, who hit big in 1952 with "My Song" only to by his own gun in a mysterious accident two years later). Thick with local talent, Memphis would be the site of America's first radio station with an all-black music format: WDIA, "73 on your dial," in October 1948. A Mississippi guitarist named Riley King would get a DJ slot on WDIA as "Bee Bee King," ultimately to become blues legend B.B. King. Memphis musicians would transform and blues and "rhythm & blues" (Billboard's new name for its former Race Records chart) into soul music on local record labels like Stax and Hi. The rest, of course is history.

THE LOCAL HEART OF THE CHITLIN' CIRCUIT

The story goes on, with a significant chapter closing as the record industry eclipses the chitlin' circuit to make stars out of Southern musicians like Little Richard, James Brown, and Al Green.  But for urbanists, what's especially interesting about the chitlin' circuit—and there's no reason to think this has changed significantly, although the caliber of venue (at least the quality of its construction) has slowly upgraded—is how much it got the whole of each far-flung black community involved in the local show. It's well known how central were music, performance, and nightlife for segregated black America at this time in history, but Lauterbach offers new insights into what happened before each gig. In "making" his promoters, Ferguson would explain in considerable detail how to enlist local businesses ("the black barber and beauty shop, restaurant and bar" [pg. 88] and assorted hustlers into the work of promoting each show. Today, the old concert posters and window placards collected blues and roots music afficianados evoke the neighborhood publicity machine that Ferguson set in motion, and which still gears up for new generations of booking agencies and promoters pushing chitlin music below the commercial radar.

The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll documents some unexpected aspects of tearing down the fourth wall between performer and audience. In touring stops too small to support black hotels, promoters would plug out-of-town musicians into home-style accommodations. "We couldn't stay in the white hotels," bandleader Andy Kirk recalled. "I'm glad now we couldn't. We'd have missed out on a whole country full of folks who put us up in their homes, cooked dinners and breakfasts for us, told us how to get along in Alabama and Mississippi, helped us out in trouble, and became our friends for life" (pg. 90). The local economies that grew to support touring musicians (let's not forget local tailors to mend uniforms, auto mechanics to fix the cars...) saw their parallel within the club. In these "nondescript places" (as Sax Kari called them), nightlife amenities were rarely provided in-house. Providing the suppers, cold beer, garage fans, frontdoor security and the like would be tasks outsourced to local residents.

Maybe it's tempting to overstate the solidarity among musicians, their employers, audience and community. The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll has its share of backstabbing, violence both threatened and real, and mundane exploitation—and that's just inside the club. Lauterbach is appropriately unsentimental about how racial oppression and economic misery could be the parents to the desperation, predation, and self-destructiveness found in so many ghettoes. Still, this book testifies to the fact that the backbone of the gemeinschaft that the chitlin' circuit instilled in so many black districts of the South lay not just in folks' love for the music, but in the economic networks—often legit, sometimes informal, and once in awhile just plain criminal—that emerged in each city and town to make the show go on.

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.]