Why do they call it free jazz if there's always a cover charge?

I want to start by saying that I consider myself a music lover. From a Beethoven symphony to the latest underground phenom toiling their way at the Empty Bottle, from reggae to tambaritza, from a gospel choir to a punk rock screech, I love it all. I DJ’d at a free form college radio station for almost a decade. If you slit my wrists, I think they would bleed out a fine black dust from the old reel-to-reel tapes we used to use, and then I’d breathe my last.
So call me Brutus, but I feel the need to weigh in on WBEZ’s plan to eliminate most music programming from its airwaves next year. In short, I have not come to praise the current music format, I have come to bury it.
To be fair, I should add that, while I love music, I don’t really like jazz. Oh sure, I like Miles Davis, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Duke Ellington, and at least a solid handful of the major and lesser lights in the jazz firmament. How could you not like them? They developed their own sounds, their own ideas, conveyed their theme of the world through their gifts of music. In short, they had genius.
But most of the jazz that you hear today, whether it be in a lounge, at a club, or on the airwaves, is about as interesting as watching a high school gym class do calisthenics or, more charitably, like listening to Al DiMeola play scales.
As Tony Wilson said in the film “24 Hour Party People”, jazz is the only form of music where the performers are almost always having a better time than the audience. Unfortunately, a small cult of jazz aficionados (why are they called that? they don’t say “classical aficionados” or “hip hop aficionados”) have held the main public radio station in town hostage for over a decade, raising such a ruckus at the prospect of any substantive change that the program director can’t even do his job.
Listen to public radio in most major cities, and the stations offer a welcome musical diversity. I’m most familiar with KCRW, based in Santa Monica, which broadcasts an eclectic mix of music across the L.A. Basin , of which jazz is a substantial but complementary component. When I hear shows like “Passport” and “Afropop Worldwide”, both broadcast by WBEZ on Friday night, I mourn for the radio station that WBEZ could have become, one offering a range of interesting music that you don’t hear on commercial radio. Many a Friday night I’ve danced around the house to djembe drums, or maybe an accordion. But soon enough, the inevitable happens. The jazz takes over, and I put my dancing shoes away.
Let’s be honest: most jazz falls somewhere between boring and unlistenable. I guess Schoenberg is also pretty unlistenable, but at least you can imagine that it is expanding the musical confines of the listener, that someday a race of advanced beings may listen to his music and find Schoenberg a revelation or, somewhat less believably, actually enjoyable. But I doubt a superior race of beings will ever think the same thing about a generic jazz quartet doing a jam in E, so there is no excuse for its lack of listenability.
For some reason, this has become the default programming on Chicago public radio. And the creaky irrelevancy of some of this stuff is dumbfounding. Listening to Marian McPartland and her guests is like opening a door on a busy urban street and stumbling in to a box social. It’s so backward yet so sure of its tightly defined customs, it would be a marvel, if it just weren’t just so mind-numbingly dull.
WBEZ dumping its jazz format is no great tragedy. Back a few years ago when WNIB, the independent classical music station, was sold to an out-of-state conglomerate financed by the Mormon church, which junked the old format so that they could program more classic rock for the baby boomer set, now that was a tragedy. But a change in WBEZ’s format is long overdue.

In Praise of Dashboard Confessional

A function of fests like last summer’s Lollapalooza in Chicago’s Grant Park is to introduce the uninitiated to music they should know, to lead middle aged householders such as myself to the water and invite us to take a deeper drink. The short sets and the often muddied sound are a way to get acquainted, kind of like those round robin, rapid fire dating bees they have at bars nowadays. In this context,there were several bands that I was interested in seeing that weekend that I knew a little about, such as the Arcade Fire, the Killers, and Death Cab for Cutie. But some of the best discoveries are of bands that you had no intention of seeing at all or of which you were totally ignorant. In this context, my most pleasant surprise of the weekend was the set by Dashboard Confessional.
I knew absolutely nothing about Dashboard Confessional ahead of Lollapalooza. By looking at the promo photos, the singer replete in his flat top, black T-shirt, and tattoos, I assumed that it was some kind of rockabilly outfit. Then I read a preview of the fest warning that their fans were bound to be the most annoying of the weekend, shouting the lyrics in unison with the band, and a couple of young dudes I was hanging with ahead of the show started spouting on about avoiding Dashboard “and all of that emo crap” like it was a musical plague. Being the contrarian that I am, that pretty much meant that I had to check them out. Paraphrasing John Kennedy Toole’s paraphrase of Jonathan Swift, you can usually tell that something interesting is happening when all the dunces have aligned against it.
The first thing you need to know about Dashboard Confessional is that just about every bad thing people say about them is true: Chris Carabba writes songs about that corny, self-indulgent intersection of love and regret, and his audience consists primary of pubescent girls, most of whom shout his lyrics with an abandon that probably makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But I really enjoyed their set. Dashboard Confessional is the first band I admit to liking who has used the word “cuddle” in a song.
Music is essentially a non-rational art form; I don’t really need a reason to like a song or a band. But I am going to foist my apologia on you nonetheless, which is based on a cornerstone of my entire world view. When in doubt, I go back to a simple credo: What would Joe Strummer do?
I first heard the Sex Pistols and the Clash when I was 17 back in 1979, and the scales fell off my eyes. And while I can now see that my immediate and total obsession with the music back then was melded with ordinary teen angst, male aggression, and my search for an identity, there is part of that subculture that did and still does fit like a glove, and the most noble aspects of it can be summed up in the life and music of Joe Strummer at the cusp of the 1980’s. I won’t bore you with a detailed history of the Clash or recite the countless stories of how good a guy Joe Strummer was during the later incarnations of his career. What is important is that for those first few years of the Clash, from1977 through 1982 or so, Strummer personified a love of good music: his own, but also a lot of fellow punk acts, a lot of reggae, some American roots music, and the like. He personified the belief that these supposedly peripheral forms of pop music could be a kind of salvation for the rootless, for those of us without a seeming purpose other than to slide as effortlessly as possible into our comfortable, middle class lives.
The philosophy of folks like Joe Strummer, their challenge to the world around us, was melded to their music. Punk was a call to action, much more than painting or film or any of the other creative arts, as movies and the visual arts rarely if ever demanded a dramatic shift in lifestyle or how you looked at the world, but to the contrary served to flavor otherwise dull lives, defraying the moment of crisis and thus allowing their audience to go on, perpetuating the status quo.
Punk gave folks power, and one of the ways it did this was by returning melody to its place of primacy in rock ‘n roll, rejecting the show pony proficiencies that had come to dominate the genre in the 1970’s. To watch a guitarist wank on with some technically proficient solo is to be psychically emasculated; you can’t do anything but nod your head and be impressed. However, listening to a simple melody is a call to action, it nudges you to sing along, and you become a part of the event. On this level, the Monkees are more punk rock than, say, Al Dimeola or even Jimi Hendrix, and personally, given the choice, I would on most days rather listen to the Monkees than Hendrix, even though Jimi was an unprecedented guitar master and counterculture hero while the Monkees were prefab Hollywood make believe.
Whatever their strengths and deficits now that the wave has long ago crashed and punk rock is just more cultural flotsam scattered across the beach, this is a basic understanding that most of the great early punk bands had, that they were there to play their songs rather than to show off chops, that their melodies and the energy they brought with them were a noble raison d’etre. That first wave of punk rock brought a crew of great bands with great songs: the Pistols and the Clash, for sure, but also X Ray Spex, the Buzzcocks, and the Jam, and even some of the 2nd tier acts like Stiff Little Fingers and the Television Personalities.
The Stooges were probably the first band who had perfected the punk sound; in fact, they did it long before it was known as punk. Iggy of course is a musical god, a once in a generation performer who could get away fronting a hambo band and still be great, but it was their songs, “Search and Destroy”, “Raw Power”, “I Just Want to Be Your Dog”, et al, that were their gift to the world, one we do not deserve but that the beneficence of the human imagination has deigned to give us anyway.
This punk ethos is still my bedrock, the foundation on which I have built my cultural home. Everything must pass through this door before it becomes something that I care about. Possibly because he was a little older than most of the other early punks, Joe Strummer understood some of the cultural and political implications of what they were doing, and thus is the one we can hold up and say, “Well, what would Joe Strummer think about this?”
Getting back to Lollapalooza, from the first few chords, I found myself liking Dashboard Confessional. I liked the simple, energetic strumming, and I liked the catchy choruses, pretty standard stuff but still structurally a little off kilter from typical power pop, the choruses often just thrown in there, using rhythm, a more energetic strum to the guitar, rather than melody or rhyme to set them apart from the rest of the song. And I liked the chanting along by all of the young girls, as if an early Beatles concert had been infused with the ethos of the English soccer terraces. All those dissident screams that had been directed at the Fab Four were now given words, a hundred sopranos shouting “as for me I’ll sit alone and listen to the saddest songs and wonder” at full voice, which despite the maudlin tone is much more empowering than the inchoate screams of the 60’s Beatles groupie.
I found the set very punk rock, but in a clean, way, as if the producers of “Dawson’s Creek” decided to put together and market a punk band, the lead singer tattooed but cute, a modern Shaun Cassidy, not threatening to teenage girls nor their moms, a few of whom stood on their blankets near the back of the crowd and sang along with their daughters. I’m sure that this is one of the reasons that some people hate the band, but while decadence is part of the rock ‘n roll lifestyle, it is not a prerequisite, and I’ve always had a soft spot for innocence. There is no reason the innocent shouldn’t be able to rock with the rest of us. Besides, innocence doesn’t sell anymore, nor does cute, at least not like it used to. We’ve become a jaded culture, where even teenage girls are sold a cynical, more selfish image, where the hip hop star has long ago replaced the cute power pop singer in terms of star power. So I can root for the cute guy with the tattoos on stage singing about lost love without feeling like I’m supporting a sell out.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the lawn, the Brian Jonestown Massacre were regaling their fans with taunts of Dashboard Confessional, whose songs could apparently be heard across the park. The crowd for BJM was what you’d expect at a rock show, mostly young and male, and not near as big as that for Dashboard. I think it kind of ticked BJM off. To be honest, I didn’t catch much of their set, but what I did observe was mind numbing, watching some hairy dudes wank on guitar ad nauseum, with no great songs, no implied invitation to sing along, or dance, or slam, no call to action to do anything other than to marvel at their supposed virtuosity and rock attitude. It was what punk rock came to kill but unfortunately is now being marketed as some kind of “alternative”, to what I’m not sure. I guess to bands like Dashboard Confessional.
In contrast to the Brian Jones Massacre, most of the folks in the Dashboard Confessional crowd seemed to be having fun. I left wanting more. So I went to the Virgin tent and bought a copy of “The Swiss Army Romance”. There are a lot of good songs on it, to my ears just as good as most of the other acoustic guitar music making the rounds and getting all the critical accolades, Wilco, Son Volt, et al., and the lyrics are no more self pitying than, say, Death Cab for Cutie. I will admit that most of the pleasures of this music are unveiled within the first listen or two, but what the fuck, this is rock ‘n roll we are talking about; when I want something that gives up its secrets reluctantly, a petal at a time, I’ll listen to some Mahler or pick up my dog eared copy of “The Brothers Karamazov”.
The next time Dashboard comes to town, I plan on being there, near the back with all the parents and the chaperones, at a table with a gin and tonic in hand, humming along while the kids sing, “We’re not 21, but the sooner we are the sooner the fun will begin, get up, you fink, you think, our lives are fake ideas and real disasters, it’s cool to take these chances, it’s cool to have these romances, and grow up fast”.

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.