Spoiler alert! Despite my previous inclusions of less-praised LCD Soundsystem tracks, "All My Friends does not make this list." For the reason why I haven't chosen the decade's best song about being in your 30s, look no further than "No Pussy Blues," a song by Nick Cave's side project Grinderman. Against all odds, Cave reached the golden anniversary of being born around the same time "All My Friends" was topping polls.
With a song that took to the oldest trope in art like salt takes to a slug, the pope of trash rock proved, beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, that he was the smartest man working in pop music today. It’s one thing to be smart enough to knows that old habits (misery, sex, jealousy, aging) die hard; it takes something closer to the divine to know when to pounce on a culture in dire need of a leader. No wonder Cave conceived of this song like something of a mad prophet. After a handful of soft-spoken albums, Cave turned back to his nastier, scarier roots just as rock was starting to forget why those roots mattered. In one song, Cave tries every trick he knows, including mocking contemporary purse Chihuahuas, citie classical poets, violence, and good husbandry. None of them work. At 50, Cave has stuck to his guns, however pointless the whole endeavor may have been 30 years ago. Yet somehow, he’s as popular now as he ever was. In 2007, Grinderman nearly started a Stravinsky riot in Madison Square Garden opening for the White Stripes. A year later, Cave was headlining the same venue. If music was religion, I think Nick Cave's work in this decade's latter three years would be enough to earn him sainthood.
When I think of the last few years of this decade, when indie rock fans were just starting to get a whiff of their long-brewing discontent, I think of Nick Cave, as gloriously spiteful as ever in his 50s, sensing that there was no one else willing to give the young idiots a push. After a few years of trying to be an adult, Cave reached for his trusty raunch lever and ratcheted up his own proclivity to filth. Which is perhaps why on the opening track of one of the harshest albums Cave has produced in decades, Cave sounds so disappointed that the young 'uns were not able to man up and live the scum life themselves. Despite the authority granted to Cave by his age, he’s a lot more Lazarus than Jesus, and the fact that forces in the world pulled Cave back into the dirt from whence he came allowed him to take a frank, smartass take on the New Testament, pointing out just how little has changed, be it Nazarath, Babylon (old and new), New York, San Francisco or L.A. Cave ended up producing a remarkably mature take on the world he knows all too well. After this album younger fan's proclivity to scum was back in full force, just like Cave himself.
In a perfect world, Friday would be the day we stop worrying, shut off our brains, and seek the rest and relaxation we sorely need. Unfortunately, in today's world, we're using too busy getting drunk, trying to get laid, and worrying about if our jobs will be there on Monday. To help purge the bad thoughts,I will conclude every Friday on this blog with a story that will hopefully help to put things in perspective, and shut off the delta brain waves without the need for chemical enhancement, a moment Zen you won't get on The Daily Show. While my inaugural Maroon Voices blog is now defunct, a clip I once posted from Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azzerrad on the Butthole Surfers still stands out:
The night of the [Butthole Surfers] appearance at the huge Pandora's Box festival in the Netherlands, [bassist Mark] Kramer went to fetch [singer Gibby] Haynes for a sound check. "It is firstly most important to state that, on this night, Gibby had eaten an entire handful of four-way acid tabs and drank an entire bottle of Jim Beam before the sound check had even begun," Kramer notes.
[Guitarist Paul] Leary was furious at Haynes for getting wasted for such an important show. "Fuck that stupid-ass motherfucker," he snarled to Kramer. "I hate this fucking band. I swear to fucking Christ on a stick, I hate this fucking band more than I hate myself. And that's a lot. I don't even care if we ever play again. If you can't find him, fuck it. FUCK IT!!!!" With that, he began smashing a couple of guitars with his bare fists.
The festival featured several stages, and Kramer eventually found Haynes at a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds show. As Kramer tells it, Haynes was completely naked, repeatedly fighting his way onto the stage and charging at Cave as hulking security guards punched and kicked him off the ten-foot-high stage and back into the audience, where he would remain for a few seconds before trying to claw his way back onstage again. Finally, guitarist Blixa Bargeld came forward and kicked Haynes in the groin with a pointed German boot. This time Haynes did not get up.
Kramer pushed his way through the crowd to come to the aid of his bandmate, only to find him lying unconscious. "I bend over to see if he is still alive, but he seems not to be breathing," Kramer says. "I poke him in the shoulder. Suddenly, like a volcano, he bursts to life and swirls his fists in every direction, clipping me but good, along with a few innocent girls, and drawing the ire of their boyfriends and the enraged security guards, who are now motivated to leave Mr. Cave to his own devices, descend the stage, and join the boyfriends in administring a thorough and none-too-subtle beating upon Gibby's face, head and shoulders, until he is once again unconscious on the floor."
Or so it seemed. Actually, Haynes was only pretending he'd been knocked out, and as the hired thugs walked away, he rose to his feet and began screaming at them, "DUTCH FAGGOTS!!! GODDAMN FUCKING DUTCH FAGGOTS!!!! A WHOLE FUCKING COUNTRY FILLED WITH NOTHING BUT FUCKING TURD BURGLING FAGGOTS!!!! I FUCK YOUR ASS IN HEAVEN AND HELL!!!! FUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOOOU!!"
"The ensuing chase and capture was the stuff dreams are made of," Kramer says. "Stark naked like the day he was born, beaten, bruised, bloody, and tripping, this icon of modern music ran like Jesse Owens through the entire complex, down the halls, up the stairs, grabbing beer bottles from people's hands as he went and throwing them down on the concertgoers below. A hail of beer cans, bottles, and miscellaneous garbage rained down upon the Dutch persons as I finally caught up with Gibby just as a throng of the biggest security guards I had ever seen caught up with him, too.
"At this time there were perhaps twenty hands upon him, holding him down, and although Gibby is completely crazy, he is not stupid. 'I'M SORRY!!!! I'M FUCKING SORRY!!!! PLEASE DON'T BEAT ME ANYMORE! I HAVE A BRAIN TUMOR!!! I CAN'T HELP THE WAY I AM!!!! PLEASE DON'T HIT ME AGAIN!!! IT'S AGAINST MY RELIGION!!!!'"
Haynes then made a successful run for the dressing room and slammed the door behind him. Kramer could hear Leary and Haynes screaming at each other inside, and when he finally worked up the courage to open the door, he found the two of them smashing guitars, bottle and chairs in what Kramer calls "the most potent example of bad behavior I have ever seen. To this day, more than fifteen years later, I have no more vivid memory of the effect a life in music can have on a human being."
Moments later a man entered the dressing room and asked if he could borrow a guitar. "BORROW A GUITAR??!!! WELL, WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU???!!! Haynes screamed, eyes flashing in delerious anticpation of forthcoming violence. But the man was totally unfazed.
Haynes was flabbergasted. After a long pause, he methodically opened the remaining guitar cases one by one and guestured at them as if to say, "Take anything you want."
Just before they went onstage, Haynes chugged an entire bottle of red wine; moments into the set he dived straight into the horrified crowd, which parted like the Red Sea. Haynes knocked himself unconscious on the floor, to warm applause from the theater's security team. "I look down at Gibby," recalls Kramer. "He tires to move, but the collapses as vomit begins pouring from his mouth."
After the gig Haynes was irate about having been unconscious for most of the show and insisted on getting paid within five minutes or he'd be "taking it out on your Dutch testicles!" Haynes snatched up the fistfull of guilders and stuffed them in a pair of pants in his guitar case, but almost immediately forgot that he had been paid and went on yet another rampage, streaking naked through the fesival complex and screaming that he'd been ripped off.
"FUCKING DUTCH FAGGOTS!!! A WHOLE FUCKING COUNTRY OF COCK-SUCKING QUEENS!!!! YOU FUCKING BEAT ME UP AND THEN YOU RIP US OFF!!! WHICH ONE OF YOU FAGGOTS STOLE OUR MONEY??!!!! FUCKING DUTCH FAGGOTS!!!!"
Yet another chase scene ensued, and yet another pack of Dutch goons wrestled Haynes to the ground, and yet again he profusely apologized. "After which he is released once again," Kramer says, "and once again dashes through the halls screaming obscenities while grabbing beer bottles from people's hands as he runs and hurling them against the brick wall."
"Those fuckin' Dutch," Leary explains, "they kind of get you pissed off after a while, man."
"We thought we had just ruined our careers by botching this show," [drummer] Jeffrey 'King' Coffey says. "Of course, the Dutch loved it -- 'The mayhem it is beautiful, it is wonderful, every song erupted into chaos!'" The next day the local paper ran an article about how the Butthole Surfers were the sensation of the festival. "So of course, every time when we came back after that and just played music, people would be horribly disappointed," says Coffey. "'[In Dutch accent] How come you do not beat up people?'"
Rock 'n' Roll Case Studies #3: Holy Shit! Holy Shit! Holy Shit! The Jesus Lizard is getting back together!
Image by armcurl via FlickrWhy the return of a once-forgotten noise rock band has the rock world crapping their pants.
Five years ago, if the Jesus Lizard had reunited, the indie rock world most likely would have shrugged it off. Never mind that, in 2003, the Jesus Lizard had only been broken up for 4 years; Pavement had been broken up for the same amount of time, but a Pavement reunion would have had music fans selling their possessions to acquire tickets back in 2003. The Hipster Handbook had just been published, a book that more or less defined the spirit the first half of the 2000s, fun, laid back, sweet but snarky hipster cynicism was in full force, and the postmodern chillness seemed like it was never going to go out of fashion. That was just 3 years into the Bush presidency, when the sentiment of the Iraq War was "Mission Accomplished" before it became an occupation. I don't need to tell you it ain't been the best 5 years since.
Earlier this year on the Electrical Audio forums, posters were forced to choose who was a better band: Fugazi or Jesus Lizard (what one poster described as Sophie's Choice.) Fugazi, need I remind you, was arguably the band that defined the indie spirit and ethos more than any other band of the last 20 years. But in a race that made Florida in 2000 seem like a landslide, the Jesus Lizard ultimately won out.
Perhaps this was shaped by a mid-poll endorsement by Steve Albini himself, who noted that though Fugazi "conducted themselves impeccably and treated everyone they dealt with generously," the Jesus Lizard "conjured up a new kind of rock music, simultaneously uglier, smarter and more perverse than anything before it. They have no peers." Albini’s sentiment summed up what ultimately swung this race among hardcore indie snobs (indie here referring to its original ethical meaning): there have been plenty of bands that did what Fugazi did musically before Fugazi and afterwards. There's never been anyone who did what the Jesus Lizard did.
In the 9 years since the Jesus Lizard broke up, the void that band left has only grown larger. The sense of danger, mixed with a strange sense of fun, intelligence, and permanence, had been replaced by a sense of permanent safety and blandness. There were noise rock bands after the Jesus Lizard, but they all had a sense of cool to them rather than danger (wasn't the point of noise to be dangerous in the first place?). None had the same sense of teetering off a 10,000-foot high brink, daring you to push them over. Over the past 5 years especially, the music scene has grown softer as the world has grown harder. By 2007-2008, with the economy no longer making apathy sustainable, the need for something urgent--something like the Jesus Lizard--had reached a fever pitch.
There's a regional element to address here too. While the Gawker culture of New York, L.A., and various other hotbeds of Yuppie allowed people to flourish in empty fun for the majority of the decade, people in the Midwest, South, and shit towns across the country still needed something to appease their never-ending sense of bitterness (Obama was more right with Bittergate than he could ever admit). In these places, and in impoverished, hopeless regions across the world, the Jesus Lizard mindset/ideal still reigned supreme. This is why come 2007-2008, we saw a slew of bands emerging from said shit towns with an axe to grind. We got the Pissed Jeans (Allentown, P.A.), Titus Andronicus (Glen Rock, NJ), The Black Lips and Deerhunter (Atlanta, GA), Jay Reatard (Memphis, TN), among others. There was also a strange Canadian contingent, helmed by Fucked Up (Toronto) and King Khan & the BBQ Show (not your Arcade Fire's Montreal). Basically, anywhere discontent in America was brewing, so was slummy, spiteful Indie Rock with a capital I-R. It was a sign that Nick Cave, who had gone soft and sweet earlier in the decade, went back to nasty mode again. It is also no coincidence that all these bands have emerged at that same time that the previously mid-American and foreign discontent has spread across the nation, coasts included.
This was the spirit that Jesus Lizard once and perhaps will always dominate. Dave Yow & co began their dominance with their Scratch Acid work (which came deep from the American Armpit of Texas), and eventually took on full dominance while in Chicago when that city's scene was exploding (backed by indie rock's greatest bittermeister: Steve Albini, a Missoula, Montana native).
In September 2006, before the economic downfall hit the nation, but when bitterness was still brewing worldwide, the Jesus Lizard briefly reformed for Touch & Go's 25th anniversary. People came from Brazil, from Eastern Europe, any little pocket of the world where spite still resonated. The mere glimpse of the greatest, most unique spite band of a generation was more than enough to justify the plane fair that five years earlier would have been spent on a Pavement reunion. With the biggest recession we've ever seen however, who gives a fuck if Stephen Malkmus and Steve West start speaking again?
Hence, with spite brewing in the world like very rarely before (certainly more than in 1992), the Jesus Lizard's finely-tuned bitterness is about to explode. Think the Pixies were big in 2004? Think Mission of Burma was big in 2006? You ain't seen shit yet, mouth breathers. The kings of bitter are back, and they're taking names.
UPDATE: Anya kindly points out to me that it was Scratch Acid, not the Jesus Lizard, who got back together at T & G 25. My apologies.
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