Bye Bye Pleasant Street Video

Much ink has been spilled (figuratively) in recent years about how the doldrums of the music industry have meant the veritable death knell of the local record store. Thing is, in the peculiar place where I reside, you'd hardly know it. Sure, we lost one longstanding member of the record store fraternity in recent years - Dynamite Records, RIP - but we have three remaining in a town of 30,000. This is a fluke, but it's a good fluke and hopefully one that will last for a good while.

Meanwhile, another trend that seems to be generating less fanfare - at least in the media circles I inhabit - is the death of the local video store. Sure, everyone who cares knows that Blockbuster just went under and that is certainly a sign of the times. But how often do you hear about the smaller, independent video stores of the sort that have been absolutely crucial curators of film culture over the past three decades. I've been lucky enough to live near a few good ones in my time and they always enhance my quality of life, especially when you're living in a town that has no good movie theaters to speak of (i.e. Bowling Green, OH, which sucked for movie theaters but had a great local video store the name of which I cannot remember, but I sure hope it's still alive and kicking).

As of this weekend, we're losing one of these treasured resources locally, as Pleasant Street Video will be effectively closing its doors (you'll still be able to go to the place for a couple weeks but no more new rentals after July 3, from what I understand). Pleasant Street epitomized what makes a locally owned independent store such an important form of living breathing commerce, the sort of thing that no online retailer can approximate, however good its services otherwise. It's a great source for all manner of independent and foreign cinema, as any independent video store worth its salt should be. But, it's also been a veritable community center in a way that very few local retailers truly become. I don't have time now to do it justice, but I can say that even at times when I've gone two months without setting foot in the place, just knowing it was there made me a little bit happier to live where I live. And now that's it's closing, some small part of Northampton won't be the same anymore.

If you're local and not yet clued in, the store's collection is being donated to Forbes Library, which is awesome. But, it also means that the owners are not going to yield any great dividends from the sale of their extensive holdings. To offset the losses, they are accepting sponsors who are willing to pay $8 so that a selected video will be sure to be included in the turnover. If you want to know more, visit their website.

What's in a Name?

Angel, a so-called "pomp metal" band from the '70s, may be one of the least "punk" bands of precisely the moment in time when "punk" became a movement of consequence. Their music is full of synthesizer swells, high-pitched male vocals, power chords and extended guitar solos. All of which makes them a hoot - and also makes it very puzzling that their lead guitarist goes by the name "Punky Meadows." Seriously, Punky? Was this a nod to punk's controversial credibility in what's otherwise a musical context that seems decidedly unpunk? Or just a random turn of phrase with no meaningful connection to the larger punk phenomenon?

(Wikipedia tells us that the man's given name is Edwin Lionel Meadows, but doesn't explain the origins of his stage name.)


I'll leave you to ponder these mysteries of life watching this fine example of Angel in action performing (well, lip-synching) "The Tower," the lead track from their self-titled debut album.

Metal vs. Punk II (?!?)

File this under: my book is but the crest of a wave...

The Middle East Nightclub in Cambridge, MA is readying for an event of clearly epic proportions: an evening called, Metal vs. Punk II, apparently the second (annual?) evening devoted to pitting punk and metal bands against one another to see which genre reigns supreme. My only question is: why the fuck didn't I think of this first? Apart from the fact that I'm not a concert promoter, of course.

Here's a link to a listing and lineup; check the photos, quite hilarious. And the guy on the right (the metal guy) almost kinda looks a little like me, except for the spikes.

How Teaching Made Me a Copyright Criminal

The semester is coming to a close, and none too soon. It's been a bear, for reasons that I won't belabor. But one running theme this semester has been technical difficulties in the classroom. For my class at UMASS, I was placed in a room where the only a/v I had at my disposal was my laptop. No cd player, no dvd player, let alone anything as old fashioned as a turntable - and this in a graduate seminar on popular music! At Smith things were only moderately better. My rock history course met in a room that ostensibly has all that one would need: cd, dvd, turntable, installed computer as well as plugs to accommodate laptops, hell even a vhs player. Problem is, hardly any of it works the way it's supposed to. The turntable is hooked up to sound like crap, same with the laptop jacks, the dvd player loses audio out of one channel, the in-class computer makes a horrible buzz whenever you turn the volume up past barely audible. So that basically leaves you with a CD player. Awesome - not! So much for being at a school with a $1 billion + endowment...

The upshot of all this is that, not being able to play vinyl in class, and refusing to pay for music I already own - and having to work with a music library that's done a good job purchasing stuff I need for class but still has its gaps - I've had to resort to so-called "illegal" downloading on a regular basis. Not that I think anything I've done should actually be considered illegal, but that's a topic for another post. And not that having downloaded a bunch of music for free is anything that deserves congratulations - in this day and age it's a given. What I find ironic is that I was pretty much forced into the situation of doing so by the horrendously inadequate technical facilities provided in the classrooms where I taught.

This is doubly ironic in that, old school music consumer that I am, I've generally been disinclined to make digital music into something I use on a regular basis. I've posted along these lines but it's worth reiterating: I like vinyl. I still buy vinyl, as well as CD's. I buy a lot of music in physical form, and I prefer to buy my music in that form and to listen to it in that form. I don't like headphones and portability is all but irrelevant to my listening habits. I am the kind of consumer that is allowing the record industry to have some sort of continued solvency, and yet...when all is said and done, I find that there are many situations in which I basically need to go online to troll around for free music because otherwise my options for acquiring the things I need are too limited and expensive.

Besides taking the opportunity to vent about a situation that I find very frustrating, this story seems to me worth telling because it provides something of a parable of the contradictions involved in being a professor of popular music. It's my job to try to cultivate a more sophisticated understanding of popular music and the larger media system through which it's produced. But to do so, I need resources of a sort that are pretty common outside the academic setting but far less so inside. Adding to that, it's important for me not to take the supposedly inevitable tide of technological "progress" as a given. Just because the corporations that earn enormous profits from the production of new technologies have deemed some particular item or format to be obsolete doesn't mean that we should all follow suit. Vinyl may be, in the end, just another commodity item, no more no less, but it was also a dominant form in which people experienced music for the better part of a century, and the notion that we should all dispense with our vinyl archives because of changing media is folly.

I find it a matter to despair that academic institutions, ostensibly a site in which we can resist some of the gravitational pull of market capitalism in at least a limited degree, are so shortsighted on these matters that it would be possible to have a classroom in a music building that doesn't even have a cd player, let alone a turntable (yes I'm talking to you, UMASS).

This rant is now officially done. For now.

Poly, Goodbye

I just checked my blogroll for the first time all day and saw the bad news, posted by Brian at This Ain't the Summer of Love, that Poly Styrene just passed away due to complications from cancer. Poly (born Marianne Elliott-Said) was one of the great women of punk with a wonderful air raid siren of a voice. She was the lead singer for one of the most creative bands to emerge from the British punk scene of the late '70s, X-Ray Spex, and she wrote some of the most trenchant lyrics of any punk songwriter, questioning the daily rituals of consumerism that give us all a sense that our identities have been manufactured for us by some large impersonal system. Anyone reading this who has not heard the X-Ray Spex album Germfree Adolescents, stop reading and go find a copy to listen to now. You won't regret it.

Meanwhile, in memory, here's a rockin' video performance of the band playing their pivotal first single, "Oh Bondage Up Yours!" An anthem for female rockers everywhere...

Metal Idol, continued

This wasn't as cool as Durbin singing Judas Priest's "You Got Another Thing Coming" a few weeks ago, but gotta give the man props - he is unapologetic in his metal-ness, even if he does choose a pretty suck-ass song (Sammy Hagar's title track from the film Heavy Metal) to prove it. If nothing else, this was easily the most time given to a guitar solo in the history of American Idol and for that alone it was sorta neat.

Jason, Iggy and John

Last night Holly and I went to see Sebadoh, and it was a great show, better than I'd anticipated. Holly went to high school with Jason Loewenstein, who mainly played bass but switched instruments with Lou Barlow at various points and played some damn fine high-wire indie punk guitar along with singing most of the evening's more punk-fueled tunes. A fine and funny moment happened while Jason was at the mic. He recounted all the time he spent at Pearl Street - the club where they played - and all the hearing he'd lost going to shows there, and looked out at the club to the spot he usually remembered standing, which just happened to be right where Holly and I were positioned. Looking out, he looked right at Holly and said "Hey!" For some reason she found this embarrassing but I thought it was sort of cute.

In a much weirder vein, Iggy Pop appeared on American Idol this past Thursday night (!). The sheer novelty of the thing was fun in and of itself, but I have to say, it was sort of underwhelming all in all. It would have been one thing if he'd appeared with the Stooges but he was there with a bunch of younger musicians who were sort of just okay in the manner of much of Iggy's non-Stooges solo work, and he sang a song - "Wild One" - that was cute in its self-referentiality but really, it mostly proved that Iggy on network TV is largely innocuous, because he can't do the things that really make him Iggy. Still, though, gotta wonder just which producer of the show thought that of all the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-related folks (that was the week's theme) to bring on, Iggy was the one. And it definitely seems to consolidate the show's progressively growing play for a more straight-up rock audience (also indicated by this season's big rocker contestant James Durbin, who sang a Judas Priest song earlier this season - which to my mind, was a way more radical breach of American Idol decorum than having Iggy perform).

A final note: next Saturday (Apr. 16) in Northampton, underground legend John Sinclair will be performing at the First Church chapel downtown. Tickets are $15 and apparently aren't selling like hot cakes so anyone with an interest in seeing one of the most intriguing characters in the past several decades of alternative culture still has a chance to check it out.


For those who don't know, Sinclair was a poet, writer and activist based in Detroit who became the manager of one of the great rock bands to ever hail from that city, the MC5, back in the 1960s. Sinclair wasn't just a manager, he was an ideologue, master publicist, mischief maker and tireless advocate who mentored the Five in the ways of avant-jazz improv and sent shivers down the spine of local and national authorities. In 1969, having caused so much trouble, he was sentenced to ten years in jail for possession of marijuana in a trumped up charge that was obviously motivated by politics. While in jail, Sinclair collected many of his writings in a great document of countercultural idealism, Guitar Army; upon his release in 1972, Sinclair went on to found the Ann Arbor Jazz and Blues Festival, and has continued to write poetry and make music with a distinctive vision. He'll be accompanied for his Northampton gig by some cool and creative musicians who play in a manner conducive to Sinclair's adventurous character.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UhaQm6of0I