Monthly Archives: October 2014

“Would it be a Patti Smith album without bullshit?” asked Robert Christgau following the release of one of her many albums. And he likes her. Me, I’ve mainly disliked her for years. Her 1975 debut is undeniably brilliant, but only to the extent that you can mentally filter out her “poetry,” because exactly 62 percent of the verse in Horses is pure horseshit. Her next three albums had their share of great songs as well, but only reinforced Smith’s delusional image of herself as the second coming of the famed French poète maudit Arthur Rimbaud, as well as the Official poet-prophet of boho NYC. I say delusional because even the most cursory reading of her lyric sheets reveals she’s neither a good poet nor a visionary. At her best she’s a poetaster and a second-rate Jim Morrison.

What irks me even more about Smith is she has somehow managed to convince ostensibly intelligent people (including the French Ministry of Culture, which named her a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in July 2005) that she’s a sort of shamanistic priestess, when in fact, as John Strausbaugh notes rather cruelly but accurately in his 2001 book Rock Til You Drop, she is “one of the least talented posers in rock… Jim Carroll with breasts, Lydia Lunch with anorexia, the Madonna of punk rock: everything bad and pretentious about the union of punk and poetry in one self-conscious package.” She was only a punk poet priestess to the extent that she lacked a sense of humor (priestesses take everything, especially themselves, far too seriously to laugh), which even pseudo-acolyte Bobby Christgau conceded when he wrote she “always took herself too seriously” and “Good thing she’s a little nuts, because funny’s beyond or beneath her.”

In short, Smith put one brilliant album and three more-than-decent ones while being utterly humorless, totally pretentious, and the worst rock poet (because she takes herself more seriously) since Bernie Taupin. Except Taupin would never unleash a line as bad as “Wisdom was a teapot/Pouring from above” on a defenseless world, or for that matter the fecal mysticism of “The transformation of waste is perhaps the oldest pre-occupation of man/Man being the chosen alloy/He must be reconnected via shit, at all cost.” I don’t quite know what she’s getting at with that mini-lecture, but if it’s really true that shit must be transformed, I humbly suggest we start with her poetry.

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We have a special Halloween Needle Drop for you all starring Rachel Goodrich & The Grrrls in their campy video send up, “MonstA Mash.”

Filmed for genuine VHS glory and boasting an array of janky props and gags, this music video is a must see for any home-made-movie horror fan. Rachel and The Grrrls have to battle vampires, mummies, and Frankenstein and do so without smudging their make up or frazzling their teased hair. In the end, it seems the only logical solution is to pick up their instruments and entertain their demented guests with punchy power chords and doo-wop harmonies. Well played, ladies… well played.

“MonstA Mash” is from Rachel’s newest EP, “Baby, Now We’re Even” which digs deep into the fuzzy influences of the British Invasion, catching some ’70s pop punk veneer on the way back to 2014. The ladies definitely have a solid and identifiable retro sound which adds serious points to this already kitschy video.

As the bleakness of the ‘70s begat the stagnation of the ‘80s, Philip Johnson was one of numerous figures populating the often fascinating DIY underbelly that fermented in the UK. Issuing over two dozen tapes during the period, he managed a solitary LP, 1982’s Youth in Mourning. Originally released without fanfare by the Namedrop label, the album has been retrieved and given unexpected but welcome reissue by San Francisco’s Superior Viaduct.

In the succinct background information provided by Superior Viaduct regarding their fresh pressing of Youth in Mourning, Philip Johnson is described as a component in Great Britain’s “cassette culture,” an impulse that gets regularly tagged as UK DIY. The origins of this scenario can be traced to the hugely influential shambolic punk act The Desperate Bicycles, the back of their ’77 debut 45’s picture sleeve containing the mantra so many have embraced since: “It was easy, it was cheap—go and do it.”

The increasing ease of cassette reproduction that eventually came to be associated with DIY was also an integral aspect of the fledgling Industrial scene, with Throbbing Gristle one of the earliest adapters of the format. Indeed, DIY and Industrial have much in common, and that crossroads is where the work of Philip Johnson resides.

Along with a ton of self-made tapes, Johnson started the Namedrop label in ’81. That enterprise completed four records: Exist, a 10-inch by Doof, the project of Johnson and a gentleman named Paul Platypus, Straight Out the Fridge, a 10-inch by Twelve Cubic Feet (also featuring Platypus), “The Machinist” 7-inch by Cold War, and Johnson’s LP.

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“What I love about vinyl is it ties me to a listening experience where I’m home and still.”

“I’m one of those on-the-go Americans, and listening to vinyl in my den or bedroom is grounding—I stop hustling or meeting with people and just basically hang with a record. That hang and the physicality of records ties them to the place and time where I bought them and listened to them most. I moved from Alabama to Austin in 2008, bought Amy Winehouse Back to Black at Waterloo Records, and probably listened to it 50 times in my bedroom over my first couple months there. When I listen to that record now, living in New York, it takes me back to my little house in Austin, when I was new to a city, didn’t know people with future unclear.

For me, a vinyl collection is about great 12” full-lengths from top to bottom—true pieces of music, not singles. I love the A side – B side aspect of how it breaks up a piece like intermission between two movements. I have some records where I’m particularly attached to one side. Rolling Stone’s Tattoo You, for example, I’m all about that drippy B side. I play it on repeat and don’t usually listen to side A.

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Music and Dreams, a 1976 private press album by Robert Lester Folsom, isn’t exactly a new find, but its fresh reissue by the Mexican Summer imprint Anthology Recordings will surely introduce it to a wider audience. Coupled with the emergence of Ode to a Rainy Day, a collection of Folsom’s home recordings made between ’72-’75, Music and Dreams doesn’t necessarily contain the man’s best work, but it is the most representative documentation of the singer songwriter/ guitarist/ studio maven’s artistic personality.

Murky and satanic basement heavy metal, overwrought Hendrix idolaters, hippie burnouts on a Christian kick, twisted mystic folkies, and efforts of maximum expressiveness if questionable competency; these are but four apt descriptions of what can be discovered in the self-financed wing of the sonic 1970s.

While certainly not synonymous with the categorization known as Outsider (“Real People”) Music, many of the period’s privately pressed LPs do flirt with or directly fall into this admittedly wide scenario. So the highly developed approach of Georgia, USA resident Robert Lester Folsom is refreshing; where the output of cultish margin walkers regularly flies in the face of their era’s norms, Folsom was truly of his time, his folk and country-tinged soft rock singer-songwriter gestures lacking in overly exaggerated tendencies as they occasionally inhabit a zone retrospectively branded as Yacht Rock.

Ode to a Rainy Day is edgier and perhaps nearer to what one might anticipate from a rescued private press, and in fact much of it was self-released by Folsom onto 8-track tape. If humbly produced (but with considerable ingenuity already on display), as the solid instrumental “Heaven on the Beach” attests, the musicianship throughout is unstrained.

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“The first vinyl record I remember listening to was Led Zeppelin IV.“

“The record was my mom’s, stored in the garage along with the record player. I was probably about 10 years old at the time and Shannon and I were primarily listening to MC Hammer and Michael Jackson tapes.

Even though I can’t remember what exactly sparked my interest enough to pull it off the shelf, once I plugged in the turntable and hooked up the speakers, I definitely remember being frightened by how heavy the music sounded coming out of those speakers.

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