This afternoon (Thursday, April 22, 2010) I'll be lecturing at Williams College on Iggy and the Stooges, presenting material taken from This Ain't the Summer of Love. A reporter for the Albany Times Union did a brief email interview with me to preview the talk; here's a link:

http://www.timesunion.com/ASPStories/Story.asp?StoryID=923759&LinkFrom=RSS

The talk will be at 4:15 in the Brooks-Rogers recital hall at Williams, if anyone is able to make it on such short notice.

Boy it's been a while since I've posted anything here. It's been a busy stretch, during which I've seen some great music. The Hold Steady played here a little over a week ago and were quite fine. Singer Craig Finn exuded way more charisma on stage than I would have expected, of a funny nervous sort, but very entertaining nonetheless. I love the fact that a band so entrenched in '70s arena rock has somehow managed at the same time to gain so much indie cred. They cop Springsteen's best moves so well they almost make me want to listen to Springsteen himself. But then when I do I'm reminded that I've never liked him all that much. Hold Steady is like Springsteen cut with a heavy dose of AC/DC and then a strong sprinkle of angst put on top. Works for me.

More recently I was in New Orleans, for the annual IASPM-US conference (that's International Association for the Study of Popular Music - U.S. chapter for those who don't know). Good conference, and nice that it coincided with the French Quarter Festival, something of a lead-in to the massive New Orleans Jazz Fest that's about to start. Last Friday I cut out of the conference early and made my way to the Festival. It was an absolutely beautiful spring day in New Orleans, about 75 degrees, sunny, and hardly any humidity (!). Spent lots of time wandering between stages and around the French Quarter. Amidst it all, two bands stood out.




The Zydepunks are, as the name would suggest, the sort of hybrid creation that would only exist in a place like New Orleans. These guys (and one gal) have the look of a modern punk band, with tattoos all over and downtrodden hipster fashion sense. But their instrumentation tells a different story: the standard rock rhythm section of electric bass and drums, but on top of which are two burning fiddle players, an accordion player, and one guy who switched between fiddle and accordion, seemingly equally comfortable with each. The sound was like great Cajun music on amphetamines and full of good spirit.




Even cooler were the 101 Runners, a heavily funky jam band-esque group that featured a great expanded lineup of two electric guitars, bass, organ, tuba, drums, conga, timbales, and three bona fide Mardi Gras Indians. I'd never seen Mardi Gras Indians live in the flesh and it was a real treat to see them in their home setting - the head Indian in this case being someone named Monk Boudreau, not a familiar name for me but apparently well known locally. In case anyone's not aware of this particular local custom, for about a century certain neighborhood groups of African Americans in New Orleans have made it a practice of donning very elaborate faux-Indian costumes for Mardi Gras, and compete to outdo each other in the magnificence of their outfits. The masquerade aspect has intermingled with the city's music and dance culture, most notably in the 1970s, when a group of Indians made a killer album in collaboration with the superlative New Orleans funk group the Meters under the name the Wild Tchoupitoulas. That album from 35 years ago was straight-up New Orleans funk with Mardi Gras Indian chants and lyrics added on top. The 101 Runners were also very funky but with a lot more rock thrown into the mix; the hairy guitarist in one of the pictures above, Anders Osborne, played some sweet slide guitar solos throughout their set. I danced, I rocked, I was wowed by the crazy costumes of Monk and his crew. What more could you want from a set of music?

I just saw the following performers play live two nights ago, in the same space, on the same stage (but not all at once, thankfully):

Faith Hill
Iggy and the Stooges
Ronnie Spector
The Hollies
Rob Thomas
Phish
Jimmy Cliff
Wyclef Jean
Eric Burdon
Peter Wolf
Chris Isaak

Was I at the most fucked up, surreal rock festival ever devised?

Sort of. I was at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, at the Waldorf Astoria in NYC. Never before have I attended such an event, so swank, so exclusive, so rich with music industry self-congratulations. And yes, you're damn right I felt privileged to be there, even though a part of me felt like the geek academic in the corner soaking in all the weirdness around me.

That said, the people I was sitting with were a cool bunch. Holly George-Warren was the leader of the proverbial pack, a veteran music writer who was gracious enough to invite me to contribute an essay to the induction ceremony program, which is how I got to attend the event. (I wrote an essay on prog rock, in connection with Genesis' induction into the Hall of Fame.) Also on hand were Anthony DeCurtis, longtime Rolling Stone writer; Bob Gruen, one of the great rock photographers; Ashley Kahn, who has written some very fine material on jazz history (books on John Coltrane and Miles Davis, among others); Jaan Uhelszki, one of the founding figures at Creem; Rob Bowman, a fellow academic and good guy who teaches at York University in Toronto and wrote an excellent book on Stax records; and many others who were gathered together at the "writer's table" (actually two tables, side by side). Good company indeed.

Needless to say, the highlight of the evening for yours truly was the Stooges. Iggy came out in fine form, dressed for the event in a clean white dress shirt, and duly flipped off the audience with both hands when he came onto the stage to accept the band's induction. But, as he spoke and reminisced about recently deceased former Stooge Ron Asheton and the others who've fallen along the way he seemed to get genuinely emotional and even on the verge of tears. An emotional Iggy soon gave way to the mischievous Iggy we all know and love though.


While James Williamson and then Scott Asheton gave their speeches, Iggy unbuttoned his shirt and swayed behind them, knowing he was the center of attention even in the background. It was like he was getting into character. And then, the Stooges played a too-short set that was totally killer. "Search and Destroy" followed by "I Wanna Be Your Dog." The latter was especially great, with saxophone by Steve Mackay and that awesome one-note piano line filled in by Scott Thurston, both of whom have been Stooges collaborators for almost as long as the band has been together.


Iggy jumped into the audience, which was comprised of a weird mix of rock star celebrities and music industry moguls, and while I can't say there was a palpable air of danger or anything, the band rocked the house more than you would ever have expected in a room full of folks in tuxedos. As the song proceeded Iggy was joined on stage by Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day (who inducted the Stooges into the Hall), then by the rest of Green Day, Eddie Vedder and a bunch of other folks from the audience and came close to generating something like real chaos. Back at the writer's table me and a couple others damn near started a mosh pit we were so excited. It was a damn fun time.

Nothing else quite matched the Stooges for sheer coolness, but I have to give props to Jimmy Cliff, the reggae star who was inducted that night. He sang three songs, all from the landmark The Harder They Come album - "You Can Get It If You Really Want It," "Many Rivers to Cross," and "The Harder They Come," the last with Wyclef Jean - and his voice sounded great. "Many Rivers to Cross" was especially awesome, like some reggae/gospel hybrid, and Jimmy was wearing some of the coolest duds of the evening, including some super fine shades.


I'm still processing the whole experience so am not even going to try to do justice to the entirety of the event (and given that I was at the Waldorf for about six hours that night, doing the whole thing full justice would take me a long time). It was a trip to be in a room with so much money and celebrity circulating, and at the same time part of the trippiness of it was how mundane so much of it was, with the overlong acceptance speeches and other things that we all know from watching awards shows on TV, except that I was there in the room. But seeing Iggy and the Stooges made the night worthwhile. If only it had been some evening in 1970...

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As a sad, unrelated postscript to the above, I just saw the news on Pitchfork that Alex Chilton died today. Hero of indie rockers everywhere, Chilton made his biggest artistic mark with the much-revered power pop luminaries Big Star in the early 1970s, but had a long career that stretched back into the '60s with the Box Tops and years forward as a solo artist. I saw him play a show in the late 1980s that was charmingly idiosyncratic and packed a good bit of rock and roll punch. He will be missed. For more info and some videos of Chilton performing, click on the following:

http://pitchfork.com/news/38212-alex-chilton-rip/

So I don't know what happened, but somehow it seems that Blogger made all the comments disappear from this blog. Actually, it's weirder than that. All the archived blogs say they have 0 comments but when you click on them, the comments that were there before are still there. I do not understand this problem and have fussed with my settings a good bit to no avail, so if you've left a comment before please don't think I went through and erased it. Technology be damned!

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I recently traveled to Cleveland, and while I was rushing to get off the plane I forgot to bring the book I had been reading with me, so it was lost to the airline. This was a particular bummer because the book was one I was particularly enjoying and definitely wanted to keep around: Joe Carducci's Enter Naomi. The book is one of the most unique I've read about punk, and the great Southern California punk scene of the late '70s/early '80s in particular. It was also a signed copy I'd happened upon while up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where Carducci had apparently done a reading not long before I passed through town.


As some readers may know, Carducci worked for SST records back in its heyday, and after leaving wrote one of the most spirited, incisive and downright cranky books about rock ever written, Rock and the Pop Narcotic. This newer book, Enter Naomi, is quite different in tone. Partly a memoir of his years with SST, it's also an effort to reconstruct the experience of one of Carducci's SST comrades-in-arms, photographer Naomi Peterson, who took many a great shot of bands from L.A. and elsewhere, did tons of SST publicity photo work, but years later died an untimely death before she even hit 40 years of age, seemingly due to years of alcohol abuse.

What makes Enter Naomi so distinctive is its reflectiveness regarding the place of women in the testosterone-fueled SoCal punk scene. Sure, there are other books detailing women's place in punk, but none that are written from Carducci's peculiar point of view, as a not-quite-feminist guy who nonetheless wants to recognize the really meaningful contribution that women made to the scene of that time and place, and also wants to be sure that people recognize the particular contributions of his lost friend who never quite received the credit she deserved. The book is chock full of great examples of Peterson's work as well as a bunch of other candid shots that document the ins and outs of SST and its peculiar cast of characters. All the more reason that I'm bummed the book got left behind.


And for what it's worth, Naomi's story particularly resonated for me because she attended my high school, Simi Valley High. She was a couple years ahead of me, enough for our paths to never have crossed, and as Carducci tells it, she felt trapped by the conservatism of Simi Valley as much as I did but found a much more interesting escape route. Naomi, I'm sorry I never knew you.

I was just watching a few moments of last week's episode of Lost (not my fave show but it holds my interest), and was reminded that the show featured the Stooges' song "Search and Destroy" prominently in a scene early in the episode. When I watched the whole episode last week the song totally took me by surprise - I mean, sure, Stooges songs have been turning up in Nike commercials and such for the past few years but somehow it's still surprising when a song so aggressive and downright bad-ass shows up in such a mainstream pop culture place.

All the more interesting is the fact that the song isn't just there in the background but it's right there in the foreground during the scene in question, when the super-weird John Locke (a character who literally doesn't seem to be himself in this season's episodes) happens upon the show's bad boy character, James Sawyer, who's sulking by himself in an abandoned house drinking a bottle of liquor. An interesting mix of song and character, and one of the first times I've seen a prime time TV show use such a raw rock and roll song in a way that wasn't either tongue in cheek or doused with an aura of moral panic.

I'm very curious as to how much thought was put into the choice of song by the producers of the show. Lost isn't one of those shows where the soundtrack is usually a big point of interest - it's not like The Sopranos or, in a totally different vein, Gilmore Girls, shows where the soundtrack continually fed into the story and character development. Who decided that "Search and Destroy" should be such a centerpiece?

A few weeks ago I got an email out of the blue from an unexpected source. "Don Waller here" was the subject heading. Don Waller being a long-time Southern California musician and writer who had a hand in creating one of L.A.'s earliest and most influential fanzines, Back Door Man, and - this part is crucial - co-wrote the original version of the song that I named my recent book after, "This Ain't the Summer of Love."

In the last chapter of the book, I tell the story of how Waller was approached by one of Blue Oyster Cult's managers, Murray Krugman, at the behest of L.A. scene maven and Runaways manager Kim Fowley. Krugman was looking for material for the Cult to record, Waller laid out a bunch of his lyrics on the floor of his apartment, and "This Ain't the Summer of Love" got picked.

I was much relieved when I opened Waller's email to see that he wasn't writing to tell me how badly I fucked up the above story (for which my main source, a piece written by Kim Fowley, was admittedly sketchy). He got my book for Christmas, read it, and liked it well enough to want to get in touch. How cool is that? We've exchanged a few emails since then and he seems like a helluva good guy. Even sent me the original lyrics to "This Ain't the Summer of Love," which are quite different from the version recorded by Blue Oyster Cult.

Don also told me about a new release by his old band, the Imperial Dogs: a DVD release of video footage documenting the band's 1974 performance at Cal State Long Beach, previously unreleased footage by a band who's not well known but is definitely in the vein of early 1970s bands who were building on the influence of '60s garage rock and '70s proto-punk like the Stooges and Mott the Hoople.

I duly bought my copy of said DVD, and urge anyone reading this with an interest in the twisted, intersecting paths of metal and punk to do the same. The footage is predictably shaky: black and white video footage shot from a single camera of a gig that was decidedly high energy and unpolished. But the traces of things to come are all over the material from the moment you realize that's a flag with a swastika draped over one of the guitar amps. I've never been super comfortable with the punk affinity for the trappings of fascism, but there's no doubt that it was a crucial aspect of punk - appropriating the signs of corrupt power as a way to offend those of more delicate sensibilities - and the Imperial Dogs were clearly in on this impulse before it became more widely recognized.

There's a song called "Loud, Hard & Fast" that is indeed all of the above, and that Waller introduces with the amusing assertion, "We fuck the way we play - loud, hard & fast!" And of course there's "This Ain't the Summer of Love," the centerpiece of the band's hour-long set, here played as a 7-minute ballad that could hardly be more different than the sub-three minute polished bit of hard rock it became in the hands of BOC. Waller introduces it with a hilarious monologue accusing the hippies of having given up the rock to move to the country and listen to Carole King, and during the song's instrumental mid-section he apparently "simulates a puking OD by spitting up a fistful of blood and foaming capsules" (this according to the liner notes; because of the less-than-professional camera work you can't actually see this, but you can see Waller momentarily disappear from view and then get up wiping his mouth). No doubt a good time was had by all.

It's amazing this show was recorded, let alone that it's been issued on DVD. The liner notes are great and help to put this lost nugget of hard rock history in the perspective it deserves. You can find out more about the disc and the Imperial Dogs at the band's blog/website (where Waller also posted a nice notice about my book):

http://www.theimperialdogs.com/

Those who read this blog regularly might recall that a few months back I was interviewed by Monte Belmonte, the morning show host on radio station WRSI, The River, one of the more hip local radio stations. Well, Monte invited me to collaborate on a new project which is now up and running on The River and also available on the station's website. I recorded a series of artist profiles in commemoration of Black History Month, which Monte has lightly edited and set to music in a very cool radio-ready format. I recorded 22 in all. As of now, 13 are available on the WRSI website, and I assume the others will be forthcoming. Here's the link:

http://wrsi.com/Black-History-Month/6268259