The ‘08-’09 G.S. Warriors and Once Great Rock Bands as Self Parodies

Warning! Sports content below!

A couple of years ago, excited by the Golden State Warriors late season run into the playoffs and a favorable first round matchup with the Dallas Mavericks—resulting in an historic upset victory by the Dubs—I decided that the unconventional, chaotic style played by my team reminded me of the seventies rock and roll band, The Faces.

For one thing, I’d recently gotten The Faces box set, Five Guys Walk into a Bar…and was deeply immersed in its four volumes. It’s a thrilling, perplexing collection. Definitely not for the beginner, it’s for the fanboys and girls. For one thing, the set is not organized in chronological fashion. Studio recordings, live songs, airchecks, rehearsals from different periods are all mixed together. It’s disconcerting at first, but then you begin to understand why this is so: it’s a representation of the eclectic creativity that five partying guys brought to a band. What could have resulted in drunken chaos (and probably sometimes did) often did not—especially live. There’s nothing like witnessing the power of a group of individuals hitting a groove, pushing each other to discover something new in a tune they may have played thousands of times. Whatever it is that kicks them into that gear—joy, animosity, random whatever—it’s there in the moment and then it’s gone. You’re lucky if you’re there to witness it. But what about when you’re in the middle of it? It’s the rush that must make the tediousness of touring, rehearsal, and music biz scumbags momentarily tolerable or at least forgotten. And it’s nice if you can make a living at it…

Anyhoo, I digress…The point I want to make is that the rush of experiencing the surprising success of the ‘06-’07 G.S. Warriors was for me a lot like listening to the Faces. That group of knuckleheads and overachievers coached by the eccentric, brilliant, infuriating Don Nelson managed for a few months to harness basketball chaos to their advantage, to overturn the rules of the right way and wrong way to succeed in the N.B.A. We Warriors fans, so starved for any kind of positivity or success, grew drunk on the possibilities. A few made free throws against the Utah Jazz in the second round of the playoffs (or what if Houston could have gotten by Utah in the first round? We matched up well against the Rockets!) and we could have made it to the conference finals…Next season’s going to be great! Maybe we’ll land Kevin Garnett!

And then, the inevitable decline. You can’t harness chaos for long. It’s bound to follow it’s own nature. Baron Davis is bound to go back to looking out for Baron Davis (rich and in limbo with the L.A. Clippers); Rod Stewart is bound to follow what’s best for Rod Stewart (very rich, continues to shag models, makes thirty years of shite music). Nellie is Nellie, whoever that is. We are left with good and bad memories, hurt feelings, and the question “Did this really happen?”

Now here we are in ‘09. The Warriors are in chaotic chaos. Nellie has a plan either to escape or remake the team (Watching Stephen Jackson and his supporting cast right now is not unlike observing another band, the late days of the Clash when Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon played with a few flunkies to what purpose no one was sure). Desperate fans cook up fantasy trades in which Baron Davis returns to the Warriors…Sigh…let it go, people!…We’re Warriors fans, our true state is one of humorous resignation with occasional ten year flare-ups of false hope. In this sense, being a Dubs fan is a lot like being involved in a dysfunctional relationship (or some might say, is a dysfunctional relationship)—you’re always waiting for the next disaster to happen.

And here’s where the Faces come back into these ramblings. For some time last year it was reported/rumored that the surviving members of the band would be reuniting to play shows and possibly record a new album in ‘09. I weighed my mixed feelings of disgust (without the late Ronnie Lane, the heart and soul of the band? bollocks!) and curiosity (how much would I be willing to pay to…what am I thinking? how will the fellas be able to deal with Rod Stewart’s ego? piles of money, I guess) The most recent news I’ve read is that the reunion is off. Not that I begrudge Ian and Kenny from picking up some coin, but why tarnish the memory of a great band? They’d probably end up playing “Hot Legs.”

Once again, I sigh. Let the past go. Rod Stewart won’t be the Rod Stewart of 1973 again, nor will Baron Davis be the Boom Dizzle of Spring ‘07 (although there’s a better chance of the latter, I suppose). I’m at peace with this. Just thought you’d like to know.

Musings on Master of Reality and Being Fifteen in This Big, Lonely World

The other night Emel and I went to see John Darnielle aka Mountain Goats in conversation with the great American writer, Tobias Wolff. We got the tickets quite some time ago and had been waiting for the event with much anticipation and curiosity. Was Tobias Wolff a fan of John Darnielle, Indie singer-songwriter cult icon? I had hoped that the two weren’t just thrown together and that T.W. appreciated Darnielle’s narrative songwriting gifts. Yes, T.W. is a Mountain Goats fan and he even sang backup on one of J.D.’s songs after the interview was over. A wonderful moment.

As far as fandom is concerned, I became a Mountain Goats appreciator well into Darnielle’s prolific career. He had been banging out the boombox recordings for a number of years before Emel put one of his signature tracks, “Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” on a mix for me. I got that tune instantly. It felt like autobiography. It cut to the heart of being fifteen, confused, angry, hopeful, rebellious, dreaming—all those mixed up feelings you have at that age. And it’s triumphant cry at the end, the raised middle finger to dream-killers, authority figures, etc.: “Hail Satan! Hail Satan!”

This song is quite the popular concert staple for Mr. Darnielle, for who doesn’t relish throwing their devil horns in the air and shouting “Hail Satan!” in a crowded, sweaty club? Me, possibly. I hailed Satan inwardly, but I wondered about the motives of this crowd (a sign of true music snobbery on my part, I’m sure). Are they yelling “Hail Satan” because they feel for the plight of Cyrus and Jess or are they yelling “Hail Satan” ironically, as in, “Heh, heh, I used to know tweakers like that in high school, I’d never listen to that shitty music unless it was, here comes the word again, IRONICALLY).

Ah yes, that vein of underground/college/indie irony that I first encountered in the Eighties when people used to yell “Whipping Post” or “Freebird” during  the cool underground bands that we’d see who were unlikely to play such AOR chesnuts. Shouting the names of those stoner anthems showed us how far we’d come from our suburban—or in my case, rural— high school prisons. In the beginning I laughed at these ironic requests, but after a while I used to secretly wish to hear “Freebird” or “Whipping Post.” Sure, you could hear them by turning your FM dial to any number of stations (back in my high school days it was “KZAP, Sacramento’s Best Rock!”), but it wasn’t the same as barrelling down the road with your loser friends and hearing “Whipping Post” blasting out of the speakers, or as was more often the case with me, listening to “Freebird” at deafening levels on my headphones while hiding out in my bedroom—a pure musical moment.

But back in the trying to be an independent young adult cool guy in the city days, I would tamp down my desire to hear those Southern Rock guitar anthems and laugh and laugh at the absurdity of such music. Maybe I was selling my fifteen year-old self out, but as Mr. Darnielle himself observed in an interview, for the music obsessed (and even the not so obsessed, I would imagine), the bands and styles you discover in your teen years hit you like mini-revolutions: as you develop your young adult identity(s), you shed certain kinds of music like old skin. I remember going so intensely from Thin Lizzy to Led Zeppelin to Bruce Springsteen to Bob Marley to The Clash. Being somewhat poor, I had to sell my old records to buy the new ones I lusted for so much (In time, I would re-buy many of those old records). Maybe that wasn’t the case for all the other cool underground, indie people I knew back in my college radio days. Maybe they were secure enough to hold onto all their vinyl and didn’t mind if you saw that their Joy Division records were nestling up comfortably with their Journey records. I, however, wasn’t that guy. I thought there were rules. If you were underground, you didn’t go overground. Ya know, “commercial”; “sell out.” It was a true moment of cognitive dissonance when I went to my friend DC Dan’s apartment and saw that he had both an Allman Brothers poster and a Sex Pistols poster on his walls. I thought that was against the, ya know, rules!

I suppose all that proves what a timid soul I was, how much I wanted to be cool in my sheeplike way, even though I fancied myself a rebel. And that, getting possibly back to the point, is what went through my mind at that Mountain Goats show, “Are these people sheep and not, um, Mountain Goats, as it were?”

Who can truly say? John Darnielle spoke to these people on a meaningful level to them. Would they follow him, as I did, into his more fleshed out productions such as Tallahassee (a fave of mine from a few years ago) or We Shall All Be Healed or The Sunset Tree? Were there grumblings that he had “sold out” because he moved on from the boombox recordings and started using other instrumentation and an outside producer? And was I uncool for preferring these fleshed out recordings and the fact that he had moved on from writing quirky songs to more “mature,” detailed compositions( I feel the same way about Nick Cave’s career, invisible antagonists, so just deal with it!)? And does it matter anyway? You like what you like, eh?

Yeah, well, anyway, me and Tobias Wolff dig where Darnielle is going, and that includes his recent novel for the 33 1/3 series of books about records series, Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality. Here’s where we hopefully come full circle in this long ramble, people. Darnielle’s book about Master of Reality is a novel that features a fifteen year-old named Roger Painter who is locked up in a psychiatric facility in 1985. His things have been taken away and he’s writing journal entries to the man who has his stuff. All Roger wants, besides getting out, is to get his Walkman back so that he can listen to his copy of Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality. Darnielle’s novel in journal form functions as both a well observed close listening to the album’s tracks and its emotional/spiritual importance to its intended audience. Darnielle/Roger Painter poignantly describes the feeling of needing to be saved by music just when you need it most. In fact, Roger’s life changes dramatically when he decides he has to get that tape back. I’ll just leave it there…go out and buy the book!

Not surprisingly, reading this book brought me back to being fifteen, and if not locked up in a psychiatric facility, certainly feeling like I lived in one. I tried to be a “dope smokin’ moron” and listen to Black Sabbath, but dope smokin’ wasn’t much of a rebellion in my house, and as I’ve written before, I was a bit scared of Sabbath. Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy was terrifying enough for me. I moved on, not necessarily forward, into the abovementioned path of music.

A couple of years ago, I stumbled upon Paranoid again for the first time since those fifteen year-old days. I listened to it obsessively, and then picked up the other early albums of theirs. There I was at forty, slowly banging my head to the sludgy riffs of Sabbath. Pardon my French, what a fucking great band!!!

So, here’s the forty something me embracing all of my past selves, listening to Master of Reality with the fifteen year old me and Roger and Cyrus and Jess. Find the hope in the record as John Darnielle/Roger Painter does.  Hail Satan!

Today: Listen to “Son of Obituary”!

About thirty years ago my mother’s boyfriend bought George Gerdes’s Son of Obituary from the cut out bin at the Value Giant in Sonora. That cut out bin holds a rather mystical power over me even now. That guy got quite a few good records out of that bin, including the first Taj Mahal solo record, and I think, B.B. King Live at the Regal. Two blues albums that had a huge influence on my spiritual and existential life. And all for $3.99!

Anyway, Son of Obituary is some record—a double pun because it’s both the sequel to Gerdes’s first record, Obituary, and because of the obvious naughty word play that you can figure out. The Double G was (and is) an actor and musician who mingled with both New York actors and folkies. He ran in the same circles as Loudon Wainwright, and you can certainly hear the same sardonic sense of humor in Gerdes’s songs. His somewhat nasally (but melodic) whine adds to the sardonic tone of it all.

About those songs: somewhat countryish, country-rockish, singer-songwriter, melodic, smart-assed, and at times contemplative. Backed by Nashville Cats in Nashville, this record is filled with piss and vinegar. Listen to the joyful “Hey Packy” (a song addressed to a dog),  the bitter, Dylanesque “Roll Me Over Jehovah”, the mournful “Sack of Woe”, the funny-sad “Messin’ with Mrs. Lately, the wistful “Catechism Wednesday.”  Wonderful narratives and wordplay. Too clever probably by half.

Never made it to CD or MP3. Pick it up if you find it on vinyl. It’s still out there!

If Art Garfunkel Builds It, They Will Come (A Dream)

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the Simon and Garfunkel song, “America”—a song that I’ve loved for most of my life, despite my up and down feelings about the duo’s recorded output. Oddly, perhaps, my thoughts about this song were rekindled when I heard a version that Yes (!) did of this song early in their career. Paul Simon’s lyrics about hopeful but anxious lovers are not the usual words you hear emitting from Jon Anderson’s pipes. In fact, I don’t think Anderson truly inhabits the lyrics the way Paulie and Artie do—probably why the song was never released on an album (a single B-Side maybe?). Nice guitar soloing though!

But I digress…

“America” is a fascinating song. The verses begin quietly with the musical tension building as they advance to the soaring chorus. The two lovers portrayed in the song take a bus journey to “look for America” armed with a pack of cigarettes and light hearts. They joke about their fellow passengers, including one that they imagine is a spy: “I said, ‘Be careful, his bow tie is really a camera!’”

But as the trip continues, they smoke through their pack of cigarettes, and as the narrator’s lover, Kathy, dozes, he confesses that he feels empty and doesn’t know why. The song ends as our narrator is counting cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. Is this the America we’ve come to look for? Is it the journey or the destination?

Maybe all of these questions were going through my mind as I dreamed the other night that I was watching a filmed interview with Art Garfunkel. In this dream documentary, Garfunkel was standing next to a green field that I understood was in New York City. He explains to the camera that although he believes in sustainable agriculture and would like to grow crops, he feels like it isn’t enough space. It looked like enough space to me, but I was just watching a documentary. In my dream mind, I asked myself, “Why doesn’t he build a baseball diamond?”

Back to Sporting Reality! R.I.P. ‘07-’08 Golden State Warriors

Hi Sporting Reality!

I’ve taken a break from our relationship over the past year. I’ve been busy chasing the ebbing highs of last year’s wonderful, improbable  Warriors playoff chase. Once you get the improbablility high,  you don’t want to come down—even though you know that’s where you’re headed. I doubt that I’ve talked about anything so much over the past year—personal feelings, the presidential race, religion, literature. Maybe music, but even then I’ve privately (insanely) pondered whether this season’s Warriors were the equivalent of the late ’60’s, early ’70’s Rolling Stones (The answer to that was no—more likely the ‘72 Stones for a bit then ultimately the ‘85 Stones, which is to say tired out and blechhh!!!).

Back to the lottery!

An Open Letter to The Dashwood Sisters and Ironic Narrator of Sense and Sensibility

Dear Dashwood Sisters,

I did it. I read Sense and Sensibility. I slogged my way through your tale. I followed your ups and downs. Elinor, I admired your maturity and self-restraint. You are some kind of woman. Marianne, your self-absorbed ups and downs, your illness, your drama. Jesus, girl, settle down! I guess you’re a teenager, I’ll cut you some slack. Ironic Narrator, I dug your dry irony (just as I did in Pride and Prejudice). And I’m glad the good were rewarded and the semi-wicked punished. And finally, yes I’m hip to fact that the women characters in this book had limited choices and really had to do some fancy footwork to achieve positions of (limited) power.

But gee whiz, did it take me forever to get through this book! I found my mind wandering halfway through every sentence, just as I did twenty years ago when I read P &P. Have I been reading too much crime fiction over the past few years and get impatient when someone isn’t being shot in the face every twenty pages or so? Well, I suppose S&S characters do get shot in the face—with irony and withering scorn…

It may be that I can’t put my brain in that 19th Century space, but I have no problems with Twain and Melville—I’ve read Moby Dick several times. So maybe it does come down to the fact that Jane Austen isn’t Flannery O’Connor. Now there’s a woman who would shoot you in the face!

With all that said, I may take another crack at J.A. I hate to give up on a project. I’ll get back to you on this…

Signing off for now,

A Dude Trying to Read Jane Austen

Let It Bleed

It was the summer of 1979. I was fifteen years old. I’d barely made it through the first year of high school. My face was breaking out, I had a peach fuzz mustache, my once straight long hair was now turning wavy and knotted. My hormones were raging. I felt like a monster stumbling around filled with alternating fits of rage, desire and embarrassment. I felt dirty. What better state can you be in to listen to The Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed?

Here is a record that revels in dirt, danger and death. All throughout the summer I spun the opening track “Gimmie Shelter” at top volume. After all, the inner sleeve instructs, THIS RECORD SHOULD BE PLAYED LOUD.

Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away! Merry Clayton hollers in the song. It all seemed possible in my melodramatic, hormone-addled teen mind. Life felt like the ruined sculpture on the back cover of the album. “Live With Me,” “Monkey Man,” and “Midnight Rambler”(a song that predicts Manson’s creepy crawly adventures—the Stones were tapped into the MOMENT) added to the feelings of grime and discontent. And if You can’t always get what you want, how could you possibly get what you need?

Maybe Mick and Keith knew, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to start my own band—just the imaginary one in my brain.

Nearly thirty years later, I’m listening to Let It Bleed a lot, marveling at its snottiness and grime. Equal parts Punk, Cosmic American Music, humor and death. Especially the humor. On some basic level, I guess I got the jokes in ‘79 (the tenth anniversary of the album’s release), but the depiction of flower children falling into the dirt and grime didn’t feel funny to me then— it was just the true story of my family. I laugh at the bitter jokes a little more now.

A good guide to listening to this record is Stanley Booth’s True Adventures of The Rolling Stones, an eyewitness account of the Stones in the apocalyptic year of 1969.

A Dude Reads Jane Austen

That’s where you’re wrong/I’ve read Erica Jong.  Bob Dylan

I don’t consider myself the most macho of dudes. Not even close, in fact. I’m a sensitive Pisces. I enjoy sunsets, long walks on the beach, the Gilmore Girls. I prefer the company of women. I like P.J. Harvey. I’m the only guy in an otherwise all woman writer’s group. I read fiction, a genre largely devoured by women.

Ah, but what sort of fiction do I read? Mostly fiction written by dudes—from Chekhov to Pelecanos, a real range. I read about thirty eight books last year (and parts of lots of others), and all but three were written by men (the distaff three? Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name—Vendela Vida; The Wolves of Willoughby Chase—Joan Aiken; The Mistresses’ Daughter—A.M. Homes). I’ve read six so far this year, and they are, no big surprise, all by men.

So what’s the deal? Do I not respect the wordsmithery, the intelligence, the sensitivity of women? Of course I do! Flannery O’Connor, Joan Didion, and Toni Morrison (just to name three) are among my favorite writers. Not to mention Cynthia Ozick, Eudora Welty, Sarah Vowell, A.J. Albany, etc. and so forth. Okay? Doth I protest too much?

Probably. Okay, so call me a sexist, a one-gender pony, but I’m going to devote a portion of this year to reading the works of Jane Austen. That’s right, all of ‘em! The irony, the dramatization of women’s power roles in early nineteenth century England, those Austenian sentences. Oh yes, I am!

So amidst the analysis of the Golden State Warriors‘ fight to get into the playoffs (and what rock band they remind me of—still the Faces, I think), my mourning for Omar Little and the end of The Wire, and whatever else, I’ll be checking in with my Jane Austen thoughts.

I’ll see ya at the Dashwood cottage for our continued reading of Sense and Sensibility!

Me in Reverse

Heh, heh, it’s funny. As I get older, I find myself going to shows headlined by performers in their forties and older. Seeing a much older act, like say Merle Haggard, Brian Wilson, The Zombies, as I did last year, you keep your fingers crossed with the hope that they will play a decent set (they all did, pros that they were). It’s sort of the reverse of seeing a band of twenty year olds and hoping that they can keep themselves together through an entire set (And my patience for that type of thing is pretty short indeed these days).

Well anyway, grandpa, what’s your point?

Ah, yes, where was I?

At the Fillmore the other night to see the reconstituted Meat Puppets (that is to say, Curt and Cris Kirkwood reunited) open for Built to Spill. emel and I and possibly some others were more excited about about the Meat Puppets than Built to Spill (more on that in a second). I personally saw the Meat Puppets countless times back in the eighties. The amped up psychedelic country punk of the band never failed to leave me levitating and intoxicated after a show. Their second and third records, Meat Puppets II and Up on the Sun were my Revolver and White Album of the eighties. My small group of music fanatic friends worshipped these records as well. I remember riding in a car with my “aging” hippie aunt and uncle (they were about my age now) listening to Meat Puppets II on my Walkman knowing that there was no point trying to explain how this music was capturing the moment, man, of my little early twenties sub-generation. Right about the same time, there was a teenager by the name of Kurt Cobain who was picking up on the same vibe…

Oh yeah, I guess that’s why “Lake of Fire” was getting such a large response the other night—fist pumps and everything. Dear departed Kurt is rolling over in his grave perhaps? It’s odd for me to realize that songs from my beloved Meat Puppets II are beloved by a sub-younger sub-generation because they were performed on Nirvana Unplugged, a record I have never actually heard. By the time Nevermind overturned the rock world I was deep into the Louvin Brothers and sixties and seventies soul. In short, I was no longer a rocker (although I did like Nevermind). I watched the Nirvana phenomenon as a semi-interested spectator who rarely went to shows any more and had no idea what was going on in the underground rock world. (Wow, that’s fascinating, gramps, do tell us more!) Somewhere barely registering on my radar screen I learned that Nirvana performed some Meat Puppets songs and that the Puppets themselves scored a gold album, which seemed as likely as pigs flying in the eighties.

So, anyway, much time has passed, Curt Kirkwood is twenty five pounds heavier, but still handsome; Cris Kirkwood, looks as my friend D.C. Dan noted, like professor Irwin Corey and an Exhibit A in a “This is what drug abuse can do to you” poster. Cris used to be cute, people… Current drummer Ted Marcus is good, but I kind of miss Derrick Bostrom’s deadpan as the Kirkwoods whirled around the stage.

Not so much whirling these days. Cris still spazzes out on bass, but Curt is now pretty much rooted to the ground. Nevertheless, the dude can play the guitar. The rough Kirkwood brother “harmony” singing is more or less there. Hell, man, they even did a Louvin Brothers song (for the record, “My Baby’s Gone”)! An all too-short set, I thought. What I would have given to hear “Up on the Sun” and “Away” and “Maiden’s Milk”! Ah, well…another time, perhaps.

As far as Built to Spill goes. Hey, I loved their last one, You in Reverse, and have admired their earlier records, but I’ve seen them live twice, and man are they boring! Where does this reputation for being a great live band come from? How many songs does it take before they take flight? Do they ever? All I have to say is that they were blown off the stage by a pair of near fifty year-old brothers.

Huff and Puff: Chris Webber and Original Sins

Watching 35 year old Chris Webber lumber up the court with the out-of-sync Golden State Warriors last night was a real life assessment moment for yours truly. Like many Warrior fans Webber has been a symbol of the team’s many years of playoff futility, not to mention bad basketball. To put it in simplified biblical terms:  Webber was Adam, Cain, Ham, Esau, Joseph’s brothers—leading “ungrateful” rebellions against God/Patriarch Don Nelson. Of course it was more complex than that (as is the Bible), but in any case, Webber and then later Nelson left the Warriors in shambles when I needed them most.

Now, here we are fourteen years later, life is better for me, Nelson and now Webber have returned. The Warriors made the playoffs last year and had an exciting run. They’ve been alternately brilliant and mediocre this season. Last night, they laid a big egg on national TV. God love ‘em, they can be so inconsistent! Anyway, Webber is back, looking out of shape and slow. Not the twenty year old astonishingly agile big man with the million dollar smile anymore, that’s for sure. But who among us is?