Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: breast cancer, day the world turned day glo, generation indigo, germ free adolescents, poly styrene, post-punk, punk, sex pistols, women in punk, x ray spex
Former X-Ray Spex frontwoman, Poly Styrene, died of breast cancer yesterday at the age of 53. The band’s most well known song may be “Germ Free Adolescents” but this one, “The Day the World Turned Day Glo” is my favorite. It’s such poetic angst. This was sad timing for Styrene who, along with the Spex, made a minor comeback in 2007 when the music mags reunited some of the old timey punks that were still living for the 30th anniversary of the Sex Pistol’s album, Never Mind the Bullocks.
The Spex formed around the later half the 1970s after Styrene caught a Sex Pistols performance and was inspired to start a band which seemed to be the case for a lot of bands that followed the Sex Pistols. This video goes to show you just how young they were at the time. A teenager runaway who traveled around music festivals, Poly Styrene was a kind of hippie. She made her outfits, had a mouthful of braces, and curly hair. Lora Logic was the other girl in the band, and for a time, played saxophone. So the band was one of the more unique ones at the time. I tend to think of them less as punk and more in that post-punk, experimental phase that came later. Her performing cut short, though, when they diagnosed her as schizophrenic, and later, as having bipolar disorder. And by the early 80s, she joined a religious cult. It was years before she was back on the scene again, touring and making new music, culminating in the release of a solo album called Generation Indigo only just last month.
Filed under: Movies | Tags: angst, biopic, cheri currie, dakota fanning, edgeplay, floria sigismondi, joan jett, kim fowley, kristen stewart, los angeles, memoir, michael shannon, neon angel, punk, rock n' roll movies, teenagers, the runaways
A great rock n’ roll movie is the one that gets the blood coursing in your veins. After watching The Runaways, all I wanted to do was jam at full volume.
For those of you too young to remember (or never heard about at all), The Runaways were an all-girl teenage rock band that formed in California around 1974. At a time when rock n’ roll was shifting towards faster tempos and amateurish ease, boys in leather jackets and dirty jeans were re-learning how easy it was to start a band and make some music. Unfortunately, double standards seemed to apply for their eager female counterparts who were discouraged from upsetting the paradigm of what was considered socially acceptable for girls. Like Joan Jett’s guitar teacher (Damone!) explained so bluntly in The Runaways: “Girls don’t play electric guitar.”
The hell they don’t. This was around the time that glam hit the scene, so gender bending was already a staple of rock n’ roll. But if guys like David Bowie and the New York Dolls could prance around onstage in women’s clothes, why couldn’t a bunch of girls plug in and go crazy in front of a stack of amps?
And so the defiant Runaways formed in Hollywood when drummer Sandy West (played by Stella Maeve) and guitarist Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart), having each toyed with the idea of starting an all-girl band, were introduced by Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon), the sleazy LA record producer who eventually went on to become the band’s sleazy manager. Fowley was a lot like the late Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren in that The Runaways was a concept band, and the other members — lead guitarist Lita Ford, lead singer Cheri Currie, and a rotating lineup of bassists (due to legal issues, the fictional Robin Robinson represented Jamie Fox) — were recruited more for attitude than musical ability. The all-girl rock band was still a fairly daring idea at the time.
Although they’re a band that has historically been labeled “teenage jailbait,” Kim Fowley clarified in the documentary Edgeplay that The Runaways weren’t all T & A. The songs, in retrospect, were kind of cutesy, but they were played with a certain ferociousness. These were girls who just didn’t give a shit (and had no reason to), and they modeled themselves on their rock idols who represented the same. And aside from Suzie Quatro, those idols were guys. Bowie, Keith Richards, Gene Simmons, Jeff Beck, and others. And even when ex-lead singer Cheri Currie strutted on stage in Japan in a Betty Page corset, she looked ready to dominate, not to be dominated. (Baby-faced Dakota Fanning made it seem more innocent when reenacting this in the film).
And so, The Runaways were born. The movie is obviously a limited biopic, which is a shame considering the renewed interest in the band that it managed to incite, especially among young audiences since it’s basically been marketed as That Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning Movie. Because it’s based on Cheri Currie’s memoir, Neon Angel, the focus is primarily on the relationship between she, Joan Jett, and Kim Fowley. But Currie’s career really fizzled out after she left the band, and aside from Joan Jett, guitarist Lita Ford, who teamed up with Sharon and Ozzie Osbourne, was more famous, having achieved some access as a solo artist after The Runaways disbanded.
The Runaways ran the risk of limited-release teeny bopper mediocrity, although it surprisingly proved otherwise (and a lot of credit is owed to its leading actors). It’s tricky pulling off a story about a handful of angst-ridden teenage girls in way that doesn’t come off as utterly trite (see Catherine Hardwick’s Thirteen), or drowned in gender politics as it did in say, Lou Adler’s Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (which is probably the closest cinematic kin to The Runaways). While in reality, rock n’ roll was still very much a man’s world in the 70s, the world of The Runaways is just the opposite. Most of the men in the film are either ineffectual (like their road manager), or utterly vile, like the Currie sisters’ alcoholic father and the band’s manager, Kim Fowley. (Though, that’s not to say that even the women in the film can’t disappoint – Currie’s mother was a real flake).
Because it’s a movie based on an American band that formed before the benign (and incredibly boring) Age of Extreme Political Correctness, the movie revisits the grime that has since been lost to cultural gentrification. Albeit, it’s a grime of West Coast flavor (rather than say, abysmal New York City in the mid 70s), but The Runaways is chock full of dirty clubs, dismal prospects, ambitious sleazebags, absentee parents, booze, drugs, leather, cigarettes, sex, and palm trees. And to have a handful of angsty teenage girls at the center of this chaotic playground makes it all the more naughty.
The Runaways oozes in ferocious rebellion and blissful sexuality, the very essence of rock n’ roll, and especially rock n’ roll out of that decade. Canadian artist/director Floria Sigismondi had the right sensibilities for this kind of material, having come from a background in fashion photography and later, directing music videos for bands like The White Stripes, Interpol, and David Bowie. More than just a band’s tale unfolding in a pristine reconstruction of the 1970s, Sigismondi injects periodic “artsy” display like the ebb and flow of an orchestra – the rich reds and blacks at the height of their decadent fame, stop-and-go action during the big performance scene, the dreamy sequences of excess, and the bleached aftermath. Suddenly the abstract of music has texture, and what better way to reveal rock n’ roll than through a band like The Runaways?
The film did draw criticism that it never went far enough, that the chance at contributing to a historical account of a band that made an impact on rock n’ roll was lost, basically synthesizing everything down to Cheri Currie (who wasn’t in the band long, anyways) falling apart, Joan Jett being a lesbian, and Kim Fowley being an asshole. But then again, this movie was drawn from Currie’s memoirs, which may have been as simplistic anyways at least in as much as it focused on the early days of the Runaways.
Filed under: Movies | Tags: american movies, avagant garde, diane lane, feeway bill, filthy world, grime cinema, laura dern, loss of innocence, lou adler, mary dowd, paul cook, paul simonon, post-punk, punk, ray winestone, smithereens, steve jones, the fabulous stains, the professionals, the sex pistols, the tubes, times square
“We need to make being poor cool again.” – John Waters, This Filthy World (2006)
The 1980s was really the last decade of true grime cinema. The unusual and corrupted sadly disappeared in the tide of national gentrification. And, reluctantly or not in film, dilapidated city life was traded for Rob Reiner-esque Americana. The vanguard of modern film-making was eventually traded for censor-safe subjects. And, it, and its sister world of contemporary art, really stopped being daring.
Director Lou Adler’s and writer Nancy Dowd’s über-obscure punk rock epic, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains was already probably considered passé when it was released in late 1982 (Dowd’s pseudonymous writing credit, Rob Morton, symbolized her displeasure with the final product). Although it came out around the same time as the similarly grimy, low-budget punk-themed movies, Smithereens and Times Square, post-punk and New Wave had already started taking over as the next musical epoch. The chord combinations too few, the angst too redundant, and the drugs too plentiful were punk’s problems. Shot over a two year period, it was released to near-obscurity, even with its ties to well-known music icons and convenient timing (Mtv was born), and it only just made the transition to DVD in 2008. As a movie that really isn’t all that original — it centers around the the triumphant marriage of music and youth rebellion — the significance of Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains lies in showing just how far from drawing lines in the sand film-making has become lately. While it arrived long after curtains closed on the first wave of punk, it did arrived in time to be part of the last vestiges of grime cinema.
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Filed under: Books, Lists | Tags: bay area, brenden mullen, california, cinderella's big score, gillian mccain, gimme something better, hardcore, indie, jack boulware, jocko weyland, john robb, leggs mcneil, london, los angeles, marc spitz, maria raha, michael azzerad, new york, oral history, our band could be your life, please kill me, post, post-punk, punk, punk rock, rip it up and start again, san francisco, silke tudor, simon reynolds, skate punk, skateboarding, the answer is never, the minutemen, underground, washington dc, we got the neutron bomb, west coast
There’s something really interesting in the history of counter-cultures. These were the scenes and the genres that formed out of a common desire for something different than the status quo and a realization about the possibility for a self-sustainable culture. The oral histories of punk, for example, all tend to start the same way: a distaste for the music that was crowding the charts and the radio at the time (though the Brits tended to be more positive about their heritage). These counter-cultural movements (plural because they took on a slightly different form wherever they originated… New York’s scene was very different from LA) survived on an ecology of zinesters, label startups, club promoters, show-goers, and of course, the kids who loved music and figured out that hell, it is that easy to put a band together and the music that meant something to them.
These are just a handful of books out of the multitudes that lay tribute to the rich history of punk, post-punk, and the rest of the underground that followed it from the people that were there. That lived it. That quite obviously loved it.
The reading list:
Leggs McNeil and Gillian McCain – Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. Punk Magazine co-founder, Leggs McNeil, and Gillian McCain co-edit one of the most popular, if not the best oral histories of punk in New York, where even the most obscure personalities are invited to contribute to a fairly extensive history that starts somewhere in the late 60s with those crazy motherfuckers out of Detroit (Iggy & the Stooges and the MC5) and wraps up sometime after Sid Vicious died of a heroine overdose in the early 80s. It was a scene that, like most fringe culture, thrived on all kinds of weirdos: poets, artists, musicians, managers, club owners, bored youth, junkies, hustlers, transvestites, and drop outs. The New York scene was older and artsier compared to other regional histories, but it’s also one with the highest body count; most everyone out of that period was hooked on hard drugs and liquor, and about half of them wound up dead before the book went to press the first time.
Brenden Mullen and Marc Spitz – We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk. New York punk already happened by the time the West Coast kids got wind of it. As would get repeated in the Bay Area story, Gimme Something Better, there was an exhausting amount of shitty music polluting mid-70s California radio. Like the New York scene, they figured out ways to nurture their own little isolated universe through zines and labels and clubs and radio stations and, of course, the bands, though without as much major label success as their East Coast elders. It was also less about art (because, you know… who the fuck is Arthur Rimbaud?!), and much more about chaos.
The interviews give some backstory on a broad range of West Coast bands, including The Runaways, The Screamers, The Weirdos, The Germs, X, The Dickies, The Go-Gos, The Cramps, The Blasters, Black Flag, The Nerves, The Gun Club, and even The Motels, among others who made first generation L.A. punk what it was. It’s a lot less organized than McNeil and McCain’s book, and eventually the late Darby Crash consumes everything. On the plus side, there’s some rare insight as to what followed: rockabilly’s attempt to make an impression, and the clash with the hardcore youngins.
John Robb – Punk Rock: An Oral History. I know what you’re thinking… “Wait a second… there were British punk bands other than the Sex Pistols and the Clash?!” I know, right! And editor John Robb’s got roughly 550 pages on all those other penniless kids who started and supported the bands that eventually made the first-generation London Punk scene, including The Stranglers, Siouxie and the Banshees, the Buzzcocks, and yeah, the Sex Pistols and the Clash, too. And that’s only half the book. It’s a good read and certainly a better alternative to Jon Savage’s painfully labored England is Burning, but John, this book is so fucking long!
Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor – Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day. Yeah, it opens with the usual — that mid-70s California radio was enough to make these kids’ ears bleed (also that Eddie Money was supposedly in a punk band). And then they did something about it. This is more your second-generation “punk,” the stuff that peaked in the mid to late 90s. Bands like Green Day, The Mr. T Experience, NOFX, Rancid, and so forth. Stuff that was way too melodic for attitude, and too commercial for the kind of accessibility that punk was initially intended to forge. Then, everyone grew up and made careers for themselves in social work and environmentalism.
Jocko Weyland – The Answer is Never: A Skateboarder’s History of the World. Jocko Weyland’s book is actually a combination of objective history and personal memoir, both on the subject of skateboarding (the “Never” in the title referring to skate photographer and cultural anthropologist, Craig Stecyk’s answer that he gave when asked when he would grow up and put the board away). But, I include it here because he discusses quite a lot about the advent of hardcore, and later, what more specifically became skate punk by the early 80s. And particularly, the DIY element of both spheres because, without the Internet around to compensate for the lack of shops that traded in the kind of discordant chaos Weyland preferred (he spent his teen years in redneck Colorado around the time the skate industry really started to tank), he spent a lot of time browsing catalogs and ordering music through the mail from small labels that would occasionally slip in a zine or two. (The Discordant Label was notorious for that, as Ian McKaye explained in Michael Azzerad’s book, Our Band Could Be Your Life… see the next item on this reading list). I loved the book so much, I emailed Weyland, who now lives in NYC and still skates, with the hopes of doing an interview, although he said he felt like he’s said about all he could about the book. On the topics of skateboarding and music, it’s really one of the best out there.
Michael Azzerad – Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground Between 1981 – 1991. Azzerad’s is absolutely one of the best books about the music underground I’ve read in the last few years, aside from Please Kill Me, though the focus is only on a handful of bands, including the generally shocking Big Black, rock bands like Mission to Burma, Husker Du, Dinosaur, Jr., and The Replacements, noise rockers (and Nirvana influence) the Sonic Youth, hardcore icons like Minor Threat, and the crazy ass Butthole Surfers, all of whom emerged on a timeline somewhere just after punk blew up, but just before grunge did. So while West Coast’s econo jammers The Minutemen and East Coast hardcore godfathers (Black Flag, and Minor Threat/Fugazi) were really left out of the other oral histories, they certainly get their dues here. Meanwhile, Maria Raha gives a beefy lowdown on female and co-ed bands from the around same period in Cinderella’s Big Score, some who crossed paths or collaborated with the bands spotlighted in Azzerad’s book. Although Raha’s book tends to get too praising, and the list way too long to compute and store.
Simon Reynolds – Rip It Up and Start Again! Post Punk 1978 – 1984 1978 was the year the Sex Pistols broke up. The year, I guess you could say, that punk self-destructed. Not really in terms of ethos. That still lives on, but just in terms of the music itself. Malcom Maclaren, after not having any success trying to manage The New York Dolls (by then Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan were just too far gone in their drug habit to do anything with), eventually became a founder of a boy band. Yeah, I know that some will object to that conclusion, but essentially that is what the Sex Pistols were: manufactured. Maclaren intentionally booked wherever they could cause the most trouble: from proper talk shows to redneck bars. By they time they broke up, things had been falling to the way side, and everyone was ready for something new. Enter post-punk which even Johnny Lyndon was part of, with the lesser-known band, Public Image. Simon Reynold’s book features an extensive number of bands that experimented with genre and lyrical poetry, a lot of them also being European bands whose members went to art school. It was a fairly interesting and diverse period of music in terms of what was being produced. Some of the chapter summaries can get a little exhausting to read, but it discusses a subject that not much has really been written about.
Audiologue 