I'd have to guess it stuck out my stocking like a candy cane out my breast pocket, but without leaving traces. That Stafford shirt still has a tell-tale rainbow-colored stain. I wear it despite. Without a mantle from which our stockings hang, Christmas is but a pale imitation of itself no freshly cut pine can disguise. The first album I ever owned was a Beach Boys greatest hits, a Christmas present when I was 7 or 8. That year we had a mantle. I played the tape once and decided that listening to music wasn't nearly as much fun as recording myself pretending to be Boston Red Sox radio announcer Sean McDonaugh interviewing my friend pretending to be Don Mattingly. You'd be surprised how much spite a 7-yr old could inject into Sean McDonaugh, but how Mattingly deserved it! A couple of summers after that, deep into reading long baseball books and playing Trivial Pursuit (Sports Edition) and thinking myself all erudite, my kid brother and his friend went through a phase where they ran in circles around our house with a Fisher-Price tape player blasting the Beach Boys all of the goddamned day. I thought they were Satan. I had forgotten it was Endless Summer stuck out my stocking the first Christmas I could remember.
But a guy couldn't have a game of darts without an interruption. My brother and his friend, the Beach Boys and someone named Fisher Price, I thought they were ALL Satan (my devil-worshipping would've been polytheistic had it been at all). Nowadays, I like the Beach Boys, because they wrote about cars and girls, but I like Leif Garrett's versions of their songs better, because they've got a disco beat. The Beach Boys sound really gay, he just sounds like his voice hadn't changed yet. I never went to school, so I have nothing to be true to.
Emotional attachment to records is gay. I can't even remember the last record I liked for any reason other than it turned my knobs. It was probably something by the Magnetic Fields. My point exactly. I bounce one place to the next judging each by how loud the music is. They say rock is dead, so I figure we need good cover bands. Hail Scandinavia.
Mensen do "Jumping Jack Flash" like if the prime Peel Sessions Slits had been Norwegian, worn leather cowboy hats, sprinkled songs named after hair-metal porn star drummers and characters in Fraggle Rock with cries of "rock 'n roll!" and "hell yeah!", thought they could do better than Guns 'N Roses at doing the Stones and were right. It's a gas, gas, gas. Gluecifer kick out "Prime Mover" like if Zodiac Mindwarp hadn't had their geeky name hanging over their heads. Turbonegro rock "Suffragette City" like singleminded street urchins to David Bowie's chameleon. Anal Babes shit up "Deathtime" like if Turbonegro had been as good at playing death-punk as they were at singing about it. The Hellacopters cut "A House Is Not A Motel" like they knew full well it wasn't, but were determined to rock Love up regardless.
Even from the first, anyone worth their salt in rock was no more than a tribute band. What were all those garage bands but wannabe pirates? All any good rock band wants to do is rape and pillage. I'm just surprised it took so long for anyone to pay tribute to the vikings (unfortunately, it'll be even longer before anyone pays tribute to The Vikings, a band Turbonegro guitarist Happy Tom formed to cover the Devil Dogs, themselves one of the best cover bands ever). It must be all those years of being overshadowed because their cannons weren't as big (or was it cuz their moustaches weren't as curly? Maybe if I'd gone to school I'd remember these things). Even disco was just a perversion of pirate/viking-envy, the principal difference being that disco pronounced Leif like it fell from a tree. The one was made for plundering, the other for dancing. Either way it's all, all, all, all night long.
Recently, Sterling Clover criticized an article in Feed which covered the current state of jazz. Say what you will about Clover -- he goes by a silly-sounding handle, some of the stuff he likes is no fun to listen to, including the kind of 4th-gen would-be free-jazz Josh tries to like, and he's smarter than me--but he cold-calls broads. I can respect that. Cold-calling for dates is harder than picking up Smith girls, which is in turn harder than picking up lesbians, probably because that's invariably part of it.
The author states, "It's not as thoroughly quiff-bound and retro as rock and roll, but jazz, now, is not just part of the American academy, it's part of the American heritage industry." Fuck that. These days, I for one WANT my jazz as thoroughly quiff-bound as rock and roll, whatever that means, and I sure as shit want it just as retro.
I want someone in jazz to get as fucked sideways in the aesthetics as the Hellacopters did when Otis Redding "Left the Water Running" and it showed up a quarter-century later in places Nordic as a backwashed brown trickle they saw fit to cover. I don't want some pomo-meta-ironic assfarmer who thinks he's in jazz to quote something solely because he sees it doesn't fit. (I want Tzadik to fold, Mr. Bungle to kick the bucket). If the revolution will not be televised, then bring on the re-re-revolution the author speaks of.
My favorite jazz track of the last thirty years is by sampledelia-turned-sinewave master Otomo Yoshihide's chaos-rock group Ground-Zero, and it's this double-drummered arena-jazz-rock cover of Chilean folk singer Victor Jara's "El Derecho De Vivir En Paz." In the context of Ground-Zero's otherwise distractionary uber-futurist catalogue, it seems thoroughly retro, with its Roland Kirk powersax and unwavering adhereance to the melody. There's something juicily asinine about its obstinate obviousness (though I'm sure I only like it because it merges cocktail jazz with cock-rock). I won't condone how the Hellacopters, the greatest biker-punk-metal band since Motorhead, turned into a boogie rhythm and blues cover band, but their recent material holds the same appeal.
To answer the hardest question in rock 'n roll (where do you go once you're the loudest and the best?), the 'Copters are on the wuss-rock tip like a Scandinavian Lynyrd Skynyrd (which, if you've seen pictures of them lately, you'll know is exactly what they look like) covering Silky Hargreaves so well it's not a cop-out, while the rest of the scene's approach has been less rock, more cock, which pretty clearly started with Turbonegro's ass-rocket recording of "I Got Erection."
Even as they left the rock for the roll on Tender Is The Savage, Gluecifer retained their self-appointed title as the kings of rock, proving that sometimes it's enough just to talk the talk, with a record that's all balls-out swagger despite the fact it rocks half as hard as anything they'd done previously. The swagger alone justifies itself.
Dregen left the 'Copters to make fagboy bowling shirt and keychain sideband Backyard Babies his main gig, thereby freeing up more time for his modelling. The fuck? These days the Babies sound as gay as they ever have but at least with a fashion model in their band full-time they have to pretend they're not, which means they're way better now, unlike Turbonegro, who got way better when they started pretending they were gay, and became the best band in the universe once they actually started sounding gay, with the arrival of guitarist Euroboy, who, as the name suggests, is gayer than fuck, and skinnier than me (draw no correlation), but who still might not be as gay as Dregen. I bet the Babies were watching Turbonegro singer Hanky stick a firecracker up his ass when they wrote "a white night space rocket in sight, it's so beautiful with valleys and heights." Yet the Babies still swagger, almost palindromically, singing "good goddamn I'm goddamn good."
Pay no attention to them when they sing "you live like a wannabe in this sick society," they're wannabe pirates/vikings as much as the next guys. They also sing "I'm a dead end cruiser," "destination hellbound," and "I need diamonds, I need gold, man" because "it will make me feel like I'm a man" (maybe the gold will, but the diamonds won't, and neither will the pink feather boa, Dregen. You should've stuck with the 'Copters so you could've been around when they recorded the vintage viking rock of "(I'm A) Stealer." Maybe you're who Gluecifer is talking about when they sing "changed a pot of gold for a pot of stone." If it's any consolation, a pot of stone is a whole lotta rock).
Turbonegro prove you can be gay without sounding pussy, but can you be pussy without sounding gay? Mensen sure can, but are they even broads? They just don't sound like girls, and in Scandinavian rock not even the Anal Babes are female. Maybe it's dick disguised as pussy, like the Gluecifer single. I won't be sure until I see their knickers (c'mon, girls, it's for informational purposes). On the other hand, Mensen sing "all I want is a rich man, honey," so maybe they're just trying to impress the vikings with their rockin' beat.
The best reason to do anything is for the sake of conversation, so if Turbonegro's Pål Pot Pamparius opened his pizza parlor just so Hanky could sing about it, I'm all for it, like I'm all for Hanky breaking up Turbonegro to be the manager and only employee of a whaling museum in Norway. Now if only someone would sing about it.
On Turbonegro's fond farewell live album, Darkness Forever, Hanky does an eight and a half minute rendition of "I Got Erection" featuring acapella bits and audience participation: "Every time I walk down the street (erection!), I see a woman that I'd like to beat (erection!) / when I dig a hole in the ground (erection!), when I hear a new death-punk sound (erection!)." This, Stephin Merritt, is how we like our camp. It morphs into Euroboy quoting "Sweet Child of Mine" in the first thirty seconds of "Bad Mongo," which, judging from the name, I can only take to be a scolding of the Anal Babes' guitarist. The only way you could find a better nine minutes would be if you played the version of "I Got Erection" they sing in Norwegian back to back with "Europas Juvel," a post-Turbonegro remake of "I Got Erection" by Happy-Tom, Euroboy, and a couple other drunks, which they suggested be the official anthem of the Norwegian national football team.
"Good Head" reminds you that where some bands use guitar solos to wank, Turbonegro go down on you. Gluecifer's "Leather Chair" is high-class leisure rock for a world where "grab a chair" doesn't mean sit down, it means fight, like in their own "I Got A War," which depicts one hot relationship if I've ever heard one. Their viking booty ballad "Gimme Solid Gold" also works as wife-beater rock, with its line, "I'm gonna take it to your sorry face." Turbonegro themselves acknowledge that "Get It On" is their own "ode to fighting, to love-making" (see, it's all the same), not to mention "to ourselves and to death-punk." In "Look At You," Backyard Babies sing "I'm gonna have myself a ball, and I don't care if you don't like how I act when I'm on top of your wife." Pirates and vikings, like girls, just wanna have fun, so maybe that's where Mensen fit in.
I'd have to guess we stuck out like anarchists in a civilized world, but we left traces. My friend's sportcoat still has a tell-tale alcoholic stain. He thinks it's Goldschlager, I know it's kahlua. He wears it out of spite, like any good nihilist. He's not really an anarchist, he wears too much black to be. We blasted "Are You Ready (For Some Darkness)" by Turbonegro all of the goddamned day. It wasn't a question, we were ready. But we had to leave because the stereos all broke. We had to leave because the music wasn't loud enough. East coast girls are hip, but it's an awful story. If you want me to tell it, grab a chair. And hand me those darts. By the time you read this, we'll be back there, or we'll have come and gone. Regression is death, but what's more rock 'n roll than death? Some of the time you've gotta go back to go forward. We can move to Norway next month.
In The Big Lebowski, nihilists believe in nothing. John Goodman's character says "Nihilists! Fuck me. Say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos," but fuck that, I don't believe in it. I'm a nihilist. I'm all about a mythos, which conveniently for me requires suspension of belief. I wonder if the whaling museum is hiring.
They say rock is dead. I want a motherfucking pizza pie. I want to know what's more rock 'n roll than death? I want to know when the Turbonegro cover band comes on.
Otis Wheeler, June 1 2001
