Why the Arcade Fire is the Greatest Rock 'n Roll Band in the World

First, you have to buy into the idea that there can be one, single, greatest rock ‘n roll band in the world at any given time, and I assert that this is not just a possibility, but a categorical imperative, that the living virus of rock ‘n roll virtually insists on it, that when it is healthy, rock ‘n roll tends to produce a single glorious queen bee that rules its disparate hive,one that taps into the zeitgeist in such a way that their concerts are like divine gifts from a beneficent deity. And the live element is critical here. Lots of bands make great records, but only a few can transcend them to make their live performances not simply the sum of their parts, but a moment of grace that validates an otherwise muddied world.
The idea that there is a greatest band in rock ‘n roll, and that this is defined by their live performances, was initially perpetuated by the Rolling Stones, but by the time I was old enough to go to concerts, circa 1979, Mick Jagger was in the process of losing his voice, and their shows were already becoming an exercise in nostalgia. The best thing you could say about them was that both band and fan still brought an enthusiasm to the exchange. And I’ve heard the legendary reports about the MC5, the Stooges, Led Zeppelin, even Queen, where for brief moments they may have been able to grasp the crown. But in 1979, the greatest rock ‘n roll band in the world was the Clash.
I was fortunate enough to attend the Clash’s concert at the Hollywood Palladium in the fall of 1979. I remember that some damaged dude in a gas mask was handing out political diatribes outside the Palladium while we were standing in line. Joe Ely opened the show, and after 30 minutes of constant taunts and the occasional lugie from the crowd, his band concluded their set by dumping a huge bucket of ice water on the crowd, but that just further primed us. The energy was palpable. This anticipation by the audience is critical to the experience, because the greatest rock ‘n roll band in the world can’t exist in a vacuum, or in somebody’s garage. It is the symbiotic exchange between band and fan that turns a concert into something more, into what I would consider the highest achievement of our culture, one transcendent yet transitory, destined to disappear into the cultural ether.
When the Clash finally came out on stage, the crowd surged, driving me forward, beginning a frenetic hour of chanting and cheering and pogoing. I felt part of something bigger than myself, part of the mass of sweaty bodies, our common voice joining Joe Strummer as he growled with an aggression that could not entirely mask his joy: “I went to the place/ Where every white face/ Was an invitation to robbery/ And sitting here in my safe European home/ I want to go back there again.”
I was an 18-year old freshman at UCLA just starting to venture out into the L.A. music scene. I had to bum a ride from a fat weirdo at Dyktsra Hall, the only other freak I could find who was even vaguely interested in going to the show. Punk rock in 1979, at least outside of England or Manhattan, was not the playground for quasi-intellectual arty types that it soon became. The dorms at UCLA were ruled by feathered-haired Molly Hatchet fans in tight jeans, with the smarter ones amongst them possibly opting for the Tubes or the Who. And the introverted, writerly types who you’d think might normally serve as partners in arms tended to save their passion for the Kinks, or The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or maybe Stevie Wonder.
In a phrase, the Clash blew my mind. I will add my voice to what has by now become such an oft-repeated chorus that it has lost all meaning: punk rock saved my life. What do I mean by that? Do I mean that somehow, by tempting me into a decade of club hopping, alcoholism, self-absorption, and drug addiction, that somehow punk actually served to keep me alive. No, of course not. But, for the first time, here was something that showed me an avenue where I could FEEL alive, immersed in moments of transcendence where everything didn’t have to have the dull, pragmatic optimism of the Southern California dream at the cusp of the 1980’s.
The Clash were passionate and they were loud, but lost amidst this at the time was their sense of language and melody, that above all their songs were hummable, that a crowd could chant “Janie Jones loves rock ‘n roll, woa; Janie Jones loves getting stoned, woa; he don’t like his boring job, no.” And that those seemingly silly lines would become poetry when sung at full tilt by 4,000 pairs of lungs. Like Johnny Rotten screaming “I mean it, man,” and doing it with the conviction of an old blues crooner. Or, later, an auditorium full of young men chanting “I met my love by the gas works wall, dreamed a dream by the old canal, dirty old town, dirty old town” with Shane MacGowan.
Going to shows back then was not just entertainment, nor was it the obligation to “help the scene” that is became by the late 1980’s. Back in the halcyon days, I was scared shitless that I would miss something important, that some great, never-to-be-repeated rock’n roll moment would take place that night and I wouldn’t be there. And there was generally a single band that you just had to see, because they were the greatest rock’n roll band in the world. The Clash held that crown from 1979 through their “London Calling” tour, where they played the Santa Monica Civic and even rocked that depressing barn. But by the time “Sandinista” came out, they had fallen victim to their own press clippings. They rocked, but also dabbled, and the crown fell for someone else to pick up. X grabbed it and were the next greatest rock ‘n roll band in the world.
Now, these bands have two totally different vibes, the Clash with their English pub chants and political sloganeering, their punk guitar backed by reggae-esque bass lines, while X were straight ahead American rock ‘n roll: twisted, often selfish rants fueled by Billy Zoom’s rockabilly licks, John Doe’s straight ahead bass and Don Bonebreak’s pounding drums. But these two bands had a few things in common that helps define what you need to be the greatest rock’n roll band in the world. First, you’ve got to have great songs, with catchy melodies and lyrics that bite. Second, you’ve got to have a singer with presence, and this is the letdown of most underground rock bands, where no one in the band can sing, so the singing goes by default to the guitarist who wrote the songs. But that definitely was not the case with either X or the Clash. Not everyone liked how John Doe and Exene harmonized, but they were unique, and their melodic yowling was the perfect expression of sadness, urgency and fun in their songs. There’s no doubt that Joe Strummer was one of punk’s great front men, but Mick Jones was also a solid vocalist, and his somewhat tender delivery often served as an interesting counterpoint. Which brings up the 3rd prerequisite, that everyone in the band must be able to carry their own weight, and most of them have to bring something distinctive to the mix, for instance, Paul Simonen’s reggae lines lurking underneath a seemingly straight forward punk song, or Billy Zoom’s punkabilly guitar. And all this sets the stage for the 4th requirement, that the band rocks out, that they bring a passion to their melodies, that they can play off one another.
So the Clash were the greatest rock’n roll band through “London Calling”, then X grabbed the crown, but X also quickly fell victim to their own publicity, shifting their focus to being earthy and clever, trying too much to please the likes of Robert Hilburn rather than remaining true to their own sound, their seamless melding of rockabilly and punk.
The early 80’s brought a period where I think about 20 bands held the title of greatest band in the world for about 3 weeks each, often one- or two-dimensional acts who nonetheless had that one amazing tour that knocked the world on its ass when they debuted, such as Public Image, Flipper, the Cramps, the Specials, Mission of Burma, Bauhaus, the Violent Femmes, the Butthole Surfers, Minor Threat, the Panther Burns, the Replacements, Lush, the Swans.
There was one band that could have taken the crown and kept it for awhile, namely Black Flag, but they were essentially a band without a lead singer for a crucial year, and when they did finally get a real singer, namely Henry Rollins, the guy was such a macho, dick-absorbed dumbass that he ended fucking up the whole band. Unless you were there, it is difficult to understand what a unique presence Black Flag had back in 1980 and ‘81. The band came seemingly out of nowhere, their 7 inch, self-released single was sold at just a few independent record stores, places like Zed Records in Long Beach, but their songs sounded like the realized promise of the punk dream: loud, chunky guitars, barr chords ablaze, with a crazed, guttural screamer out front and center: “I’m about to have a nervous breakdown, I’m going berserk,” Keith Morris screamed. Or another early classic: “Standing here like a loaded gun, waiting to go off, I’ve got nothing to do but SHOOT MY MOUTH OFF. Gimme gimme gimme. Gimme some more. Gimme gimme gimme. Don’t ask what for...1,2,3,4.”
And thousands of these crazy beach kids started showing up at their shows. The L.A.P.D. put Black Flag at the top of a punk rock “do not play” list, and club owners were warned that any show where these bands performed would be immediately shut down. So, for over a year, the only places where you could see Black Flag were in out-of-the-way warehouses, generally in the barrio or the ghetto, and even then it wasn’t long until the police caught on and shut the place down. But until they did, thousands of kids would throng to these old warehouses, finding out about the shows through flyers, by word-of-mouth, or the occasional ad on KROQ. And here was Black Flag, at the apex of all this energy, and all they had to do was be their most intense, fucked-up selves. But after Keith Morris and then Ron Reyes left the band, Flag turned to their buddy Dez Cadena as front man, and he just couldn’t cut it. You kind of felt sorry for him, his scrawny lungs striving valiantly to be heard over the din of noise. And then came Henry, gloating about where he stuck his dick last night, and this youthful threat that freaked everyone out, from the cops to your parents to even your older brother who turned you on to Zeppelin at 15, this threat was all of a sudden not so threatening at all, it was just a bunch of angry young white guys frustrated that their testosterone level was far greater than their social skills. With Henry Rollins as the new role model, punks were just another bunch of guys who liked to work out and get tattoos, and then they weren’t any more scary than your average biker or Marine. And, seemingly on cue, Henry’s entrance corresponded with the transformation of Greg Ginn from barr chord composer extraordinaire to just another practitioner of the stoned-out guitar solo, Ginn’s sole advance to the field consisting of a persistent randomness that seemed to try and ignore any notion of melody or syncopation all together.
Black Flag, with Keith Morris as singer, should have been the greatest rock ‘n roll band in the world. Certainly the kids were ready for them. But Keith left, and so both he and Flag became just minor lights in the rock’n roll firmament. Their greatest cultural legacy may be the once ubiquitous SST band, folks who wore their genericness as a badge of honor, down to the T-shirts of their friends’ bands, the gawky pants and the old gym shoes that almost all of them wore, their attire serving as an early warning that they were going to get up on stage and pretend that they were still in the garage, like they didn’t have an audience. What a stupid conceit. How can you expect to be entertained by a bunch of guys who all look as if they are getting ready to go out and mow their dad’s lawn?
Getting back to my narrative, by most accounts, Husker Du was probably the reigning greatest band in the world for a couple of years, but I never saw them live and cannot confirm this. Then there were the Pogues, their shanty soccer chants infused with MacGowan’s poetic touch, part punk rock rave up, part drunken Irish jam; then the Pixies, Frank Black’s twisted dreams of sex and aliens, the steady throb of Kim Deal’s bass, Black’s quirkiness balanced by the ballast of Deal’s simple rock riffs; then Nirvana, Kurt Cobain a fallen angel with angry dreams.
After that, I dropped off the cultural map for a few years. Or maybe rock’n roll was going through a dry period, the zeitgeist having shifted from the club to the dancehall. The few live acts I saw who reached that higher level, like Tom Waits at the Chicago Theatre a few years ago or the Pixies at the Aragon last fall, were essentially retreads. There were times when I tried to build the same kind of enthusiasm for the arena-sized gestures of the Smashing Pumpkins or U2, and these are both great bands, but just their inclusion in the conversation shows how thin the field had shrunk.
And then, seemingly out of the blue, came The Arcade Fire. I am old enough to ignore the media hype machine as a matter of course, and so I never really paid any attention to the band when they were first pronounced as the latest great thing. I never heard a single chord of theirs until about two weeks before Lollapalooza, when Becky, our friend from NYC who was coming to Chicago for the weekend and is still young and single enough to keep up on such stuff, mailed 7 or 8 CD’s to prep us for the show. I liked Death Cab for Cutie, but the rest of the CD’s got short shrift, because I think I played Arcade Fire’s “Funeral” just about every day during the following fortnight. The ringing guitars, the pretty piano melodies, the frantic accordions, the drums pounding in unison like a marching band, the dueling Quebecois violins. And one classic riff after another, tossed out by the wheelbarrowfull like they were no more precious than a sack of potatoes. With each listen, I’d begin to pick out a few more of the words: “I carved your name across my eyelids/You pray for rain/ I pray for blindness...The crown of love is falling from me.” or “It’s not a lover I want no more/And it’s not heaven I’m praying for/But there’s some spirit I used to know/That’s been drowned out by the radio.”
So, I was ready for the Arcade Fire when they took the stage that hot summer Sunday, replete in their black suits and their white, buttoned long sleeve dress shirts, which I guess some in the crowd looked down on as lacking good old American common sense, considering the 100 degree heat, but which I took as a sign that here was a group who bothered to dress for the occasion and were prepared to get down to the business of rocking all 30,000 or so folks who stood before them. And the Arcade Fire did more than just entertain; they thoroughly brought the rock, doing an Acadian version of the Pogues, accordion and fiddles ablaze, their small pack of manic percussionists reminding me of the Butthole Surfers in their prime, except fronted by real songs with melody and purpose, rather than just the drugged silliness of Gibby Haynes. Win channeling Ian MacCullough, but infused with the burly enthusiasm of the New World; Regine, a Goth princess. It was a great show.
It was only appropriate that the Pixies played the previous day, because it symbolized the passing of the torch, from the reigning greatest rock ‘n roll band in the world, as the Pixies had proven to be on their comeback tour of 2004, to the new kings and queens on the scene.
Don’t get me wrong. The Pixies certainly brought the rock that Saturday night, and there were a few magic moments, like at the end of the set when thousands of sweaty fans sang “Where is my mind?” (and Frank Black’s answer, “Way out there on the water, see it swimming,” an escapist fantasy I’ve sung to myself a thousand times during moments of stress or when packed tight on an el train). But if the Pixies in 2005 may be the best arena band in the world, able to pull out the stops on command, to leave 30,000 fans full of sweaty joy, it was a predictable triumph, one where they are now holding all the best cards, the result as inevitable as the Marines invading Grenada, whereas rock’n roll is all about risk, putting something out there that might be brilliant but could also at any moment fall on its ass and not get up.
One of my favorite bands back in the early 80’s was Social Distortion, partly because I loved their songs, their melodic riffs revved up and ready for action, but partly because you never knew what kind of performance you’d get from Mike Ness, whether he’d be strung out and falling apart, or if he’d jump off stage and pick a fight with a local gang banger who had been hassling some kids, and Mike would get beat up and the show would be over, or whether you’d be lucky to witness one of the times where he was really on, jumping around like a punk rock Chuck Berry, with these controlled guitar jams, tight, crisp, punk rock perfect.
It’s the danger of rock ‘n roll that makes it work, at least live, the threat that things could go spinning out of control at any time. And that’s how the Pixies have always felt to me, like a celebration hosted by freaks, sharing their fun and twisted dreams. That’s how it felt at the Metro in ‘89, where during the opening band I had crawled into a fetal position in a dark corner of the room, banging my head against a wall (I guess I should add I was on mushrooms at the time), but after a few chords of “Into the White” I was out of my funk, jumping and chanting, alive with the sunshine of their songs. I had similar, if less dramatic, moments at the Cubby Bear in ‘88, the Riviera in ‘90, and the Aragon, particularly during the Wednesday show, in 2004.
The Pixies at Lollapalooza in 2005 were great in the predictable way that all successful arena bands have to be great, and all bands must be predictable if they are charging 30,000 people at least $30 bucks a pop to gawk at them while standing 10 to 200 yards from the stage. But the Pixies that Saturday weren’t the unpredictable mess that makes for real rock’n roll, you knew they wouldn’t fall apart like Kurt Cobain did on his last visit to Chicago at the Aragon, but because the Pixies have become so predictably good, they also didn’t grace the crowd with the kind of soulful, off-kilter display that Cobain gave us at the very same club just two nights before his notorious collapse at the Monday show.
And, since the Pixies were the reigning lords of rock ‘n roll, it was only appropriate that the Arcade Fire showed up the next night and picked up the crown.
So I was pretty revved up when they returned to town in September, headlining a sold out show at the Riviera in Uptown, one of those grand, old movie houses from the Roaring Twenties that, during the last couple decades of its slow, downward spiral towards decrepitude, has served as an intermittent concert hall for punk and other underground acts.
Making a reluctant concession to my middle aged knees, I had opted to hide away in the upper rows of the Riv’s balcony, back amongst the plebeians in the cramped and wonky seats of the old theatre, and it was an interesting vantage point, looking down as over 2000 souls stood en masse to welcome the band, hips gyrating, fists up, cheering and chanting. And it was this chanting, echoing off the plaster ceiling and the cement stairs, that created a whole new feel, one where the crowd was doing half the work, as their enthusiasm hung thick in the air. From these heights, it felt like a two-bit Dickensian playhouse, the occasional wiff of ganja the only obvious anachronism.
The crowd was ready, and the first song was brilliant, the intro of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain”, presumably a tip o’ the cap to the Scorcese-directed biography that had played on public television the night before, melding in to “Wake Up”, its soaring, wordless chorus reverberating off the walls. It was a Eureka moment for me, listening to the massed singing of this wordless chant, one of triumph, full of major chords, but a falling melody, as if it was daring to ignore the forebodings of its own imbedded tragedy. It was a new variation on the 50-year old way to rock, like the Stooges defiant one-note piano riff on “I Just Want to Be Your Dog”, something that seemed so obvious once it had been done that everyone subsequently felt the need to copy it, like it was discovered, not made, and had become a common birthright to all, so that now I can sit down at a burrito joint in the Loop for lunch and hear Lenny Kravitz rock that one-note toy piano on the Lite-FM.
I hate to confess it, but parts of the Arcade Fire’s set at the Riviera were a bit of a let down, specifically some of the driving songs, like “Rebellion” or “Laika”, the sound too muddied to pick out Win’s lead vocals at times, or the individual parts of the 9-piece band. And the energy that the group is famous for, that was a highlight of their set at Lollapalooza, the raucous drumming, the antics, the wrestling, fell a bit flat at the Riv, that what once was spontaneous and intense had become pantomime. Maybe that’s what happens after a year of touring, of playing the same songs over and over, with Win even noting on stage that night that it was their 5th show in Chicago since the release of “Funeral”. But this more tempered energy let some of the quieter pieces, such as “In the Backseat” and “Haiti”, both of which are sung by Regine, to shine. There were moments of small transcendence, like when the melody line was taken over by the French Horn on “In the Backseat” during the encore (another inspired idea: I’d been waiting for decades for rock ‘n roll to discover the French Horn, all the way back to when I had a crush on the French Horn player back in high school band). And then they marched through the crowd to finish the set in the old theatre lobby. A nice touch.
With the tour winding down, the Arcade Fire soon return to Montreal, back into the comfort of their practice space to create, according to Win, “a million new songs”. Here’s hoping that “Funeral” was their “Surfer Rosa”, or maybe even their “Come On Pilgrim”, and that their “Doolittle” still awaits, that their voice is still being found, that they don’t drift into self-imitation this early, that their “Bossanova” is still years away. Because they are the latest, best hope for rock ‘n roll.