Author Archives: Roger Catlin

PHOTO: NINA FERNANDEZ | Hatched via email between musicians, the new trio Night Crickets comprise the talents of Violent Femmes co-founder Victor DeLorenzo, David J of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets, and multi-instrumentalist Darwin Meiners. Their debut release A Free Society, released earlier this year on CD has just been issued on vinyl this summer by Omnivore Records. From his studio in Milwaukee, DeLorenzo talked about the collaboration, his experimental drum approaches, the split with Violent Femmes, and the drum pattern that captured the world.

How did Night Crickets come to be?

In 2013 my band Violent Femmes played the Coachella Music & Arts Festival in California and backstage, I came across Darwin Meiners. It turned out that not only was he a fellow musician, but also was the manager of David J of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets.

I didn’t really know that much about Bauhaus or Love and Rockets other than maybe the one or two hits that Love and Rockets had. But I got on well with Darwin and stayed in touch. And then two holiday seasons ago, he got in touch with me and asked me if I would be willing to create some drum tracks for him that he could write some music to. So I said, yeah, that sounds like a great idea because as a matter of fact, I own a recording studio here in Milwaukee and I’ve had this studio for over 30 years.

From time to time, when I had a great drum setup going, I would just record wild drum tracks just to some kind of click track or some kind of drum track, and I would just store them away to be able to use in the future for different music projects.

So I told Darwin I had some of these already recorded and that, if he wanted, I could create some new ones for him too. So I did that, but when I got to the point where I sent him some stuff, I said, what about the idea of maybe seeing if David would want to be involved in this and maybe we could create some stuff together, what do you think about that?

And Darwin went to David and got back to me and said, “It sounds like a great idea.” So that just started us on our kismet way of putting together some music that eventually became this full length record.

Is it unusual to start songs with drum tracks?

I think for some people, it’s just another way of recording. Because I’ve been in the business so long, I’ve learned to record music from many different ideas at the onset. Whether it’s just the drum track, or it’s the guitar track that’s recorded to a click track, or what have you. Or maybe just starting with a lyric and building from there. So I don’t look at recording music as being a one way process. I’ve got many different ideas in my arsenal.

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Brash, messy, and super opinionated, Creem magazine came out of Detroit as an edgier alternative to the more staid rock magazines of the ’70s. The first showcase for writers from Dave Marsh to Lester Bangs, it covered the era in a manner that was always entertaining. And the acts they covered seemed to dig it as well.

Gone for more than three decades, its memory was revived in the 2020 documentary Creem: America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Magazine. Since then, the entire 224-issue archive of the magazine has been put online, a digital Creem site has been posting new stories, and in September, beyond all expectations, a revived Creem will be back in print for subscribers.

“It never should have gone away,” says John Martin, the former Vice publisher who serves as CEO of the new Creem. “It went away and it was the champion of rock ’n’ roll. Then look what happened. Culturally we got obsessed with the idea that rock ’n’ roll is dead. That’s not true—it’s not true at all.

“That’s the central thesis of why we should bring Creem back,” he says, “because we need to embrace that rock ’n’ roll community that’s been micro-niched and sub-genred to pieces over the last 30 years. We know that Creem is the brand to do that.”

Martin bemoans the state of rock journalism over the past 15 years when “the impish, funny tone of voice has been lost from music writing. It’s felt very academic, it’s felt very stale, and writing to offend no one and give your opinion to the lowest common denominator, broadest group, because that’s how you get the most clicks.

“What Creem invented—really opinionated music journalism—the time was right to bring that back,” he says. “Because when was the last time you had a good time and laughed while you were reading about music? Probably an old issue of Creem.”

Already the online Creem content has caused some waves. A review of an Imagine Dragons record was written without listening to it, for one. And there was a long interview with John Hinckley, who before he turned to a music career, was notorious for firing a gun at Ronald Reagan. They have also gleefully trolled the hyper-commercialization of modern entertainment, publishing a satirical column reviewing the hold-music loops and sound-effects on apps for Missouri online casinos and cryptocurrency exchanges as if they were serious concept albums. “The headlines write themselves on that one, obviously,” he says.

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More than a half century ago Lou Reed would end the sparsely attended shows by the Velvet Underground by leaning their buzzing guitars against the amps, allowing the pulsing waves of feedback to continue long after the band had left the stage. Nine years after Lou left this mortal coil for good, he would likely be pleased to know his guitars and amps are still churning out that feedback.

In the sculpture garden at the Hirshhorn Museum in DC one hot Friday this month, a dozen of his amps, some of them out of cases with “Lou Reed Sister Ray Enterprises Inc.” stickers still on them, were arranged in a circle on the grass, between a couple of contemporary sculptures.

In front of each amp was one of Reed’s own guitars that he had used over the years until his death in 2013, each one turned on and tilted toward the speaker. Where once the guitars rang with “Vicious,” “Walk on the Wild Side,” and “Dirty Boulevard,” were now emitting low hums in various frequencies.

Presiding over the noise was Reed’s own longtime guitar tech Stewart Hurwood, in a T-shirt emblazoned with the familiar image of his onetime boss from the 1972 Transformer album. Hurwood, his hair an explosion of greying curls, would turn a knob here, shake a guitar there, or gently bang the body of a guitar against the ground to conjure more up noise.

Presented under the name “Lou Reed’s Drones,” it was a project of the rocker’s widow Laurie Anderson, in conjunction with the large survey of her art currently on display inside the Hirshhorn, the Smithsonian’s contemporary art museum. The elfin artist herself was tucked away in another corner of the sculpture garden, under a pine tree’s shade, adding her electronic violin and loops to the undergirding drone.

Completing the experimental improvisations in the opposite end of the garden, Karou Wanatabe, a member of Yo Yo Ma’s Silkroad, punctuated the sound with all manner of percussion as well as occasional flute. Initially exciting in its abstract way, filling the summer afternoon with notes as challenging as the surrounding art, the event also lived up to its name by droning on, largely formlessly, for four full hours nonstop.

On a hot afternoon, it was a lot.

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Singer, songwriter, author, and actor John Doe balances his busy summer playing with his pioneering punk band X, but also the inaugural tour of the John Doe Trio, on the heels of his latest album Fables in a Foreign Land, just out on Fat Possum Records.

The man who helped write “Los Angeles” and personified the punk scene there (chronicling its rise in a pair of books, Under the Big Black Sun and More Fun in the New World) has been living in Austin for the past five years or so where he met the players in his trio, bassist Kevin Smith of Willie Nelson’s band and drummer Conrad Choucroun.

Doe’s new songs reflect collaborations with Terry Allen (“Never Coming Back”), Shirley Manson of Garbage, longtime writing partner Exene Cervenka (“Destroying Angels”), and Louie Perez of Los Lobos (“El Romance-O”). The tunes coalesce not just in their folky, back-to-basics style, but with their surprising 19th century setting—they all take place in the pre-industrial 1890s.

We talked to Doe just before his tour, which kicked off in Virginia.

What brought you to Texas and how has it changed your point of view, if it has?

I would say if it wasn’t for living in Texas, this record wouldn’t have been made. Because it was all created on Kevin Smith’s back patio without amps, and without PAs, and just sitting out there singing and playing. Also, some of the images, especially for down South, were written here. All the songs were written here, and any artist reacts to their surroundings.

Did you meet Smith there, or did you know him before?

We did meet here, but it’s been maybe eight years or so. We kind of hit it off from the beginning. He was a fan of X, but I’m a fan of rockabilly bass players. It pushed him and Conrad in a different role because I’m not a great guitar player. So they had space and the need to get into more melody, which is the great advantage of a trio.

I imagine the pandemic shutdown gave you the time to develop this.

Yeah. I called up Kevin in April 2020, and said, “Willie is not doing anything, right?” And he says no, he’s not. I said, “Well me neither,” because X wasn’t touring, so I asked him if I could come over just for the hell of it. And he said, absolutely, come on. And then onward came a month or so later. We worked for about a year and a half. Other songs would come along and we’d work on that. We’d play covers and see what was similar to the cover that we played and what we were playing now. We just got to know each other musically.

Did the pandemic affect the songwriting, too?

Not directly, did it influence the content. But afterward I realized that there was a lot of loneliness and isolation which were definitely in play in the last couple of years. It allowed Kevin, Conrad and I to sit on Kevin’s back porch and figure out how we wanted this to sound. And I give them all the credit in the world for understanding that and having the ability to keep it in that world. It’s such a gift.

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Marking just its 15th anniversary, Record Store Day is now an established enough cultural event to warrant its own book. Record Store Day: The Most Improbable Comeback of the 21st Century (Rare Bird, $20) by Larry Jaffee tells the tale of the triumph of vinyl as music’s hard copy of choice in part because of the annual day that calls attention to the mom and pop stores that have been the mainstays of the record business, and to celebrate the format that has not only just survived but is recently thriving.

In it, Jaffee recounts the rise of vinyl sales in recent years, concurrent with the increasing embrace of Record Store Day, including testimonials from a number of artists to the vinyl format and their formative years hanging out in such cherished places. “The timing was good,” Jaffe says in an interview. “I think it was better they waited until 15 years as opposed to ten, because the story is so much better at this point and had this really unusual arc to it in the sense that the pandemic changed the game for a lot of stores especially, and labels.”

“Nobody knew how much effect being closed for four months, for example, would have,” Jaffe says. “What it did was to force certain stores who wouldn’t have done e-commerce to get up to speed on doing online sales. One of the great things also was how the industry shared information on best practices to keep everyone safe.”

It was also in recent years that vinyl re-emerged as music’s top physical object after years of being dominated by the compact disc. Jaffee had been commissioned to write the book by Record Store Day co-founder Michael Kurtz after covering the vinyl resurgence for a number of publications. He traces its beginnings to a 2007 conference of three major independent record store coalitions that had been “friendly rivals” before.

“It was at that conference, the record day concept was green-lit,” Jaffee says. “The funny thing is they waited until the morning of last day to try to get support for this concept and there were only 10 people around, so I did my best to track down each of those people.” Of them, some were still hung over or otherwise recovering from the partying that had gone on the night before. “A few of the principals couldn’t even give exact details of what happened.” he says. “But enough did.”

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The creation of the Manchester music scene in England can be traced in many ways to one man—a bespectacled TV journalist there named Tony Wilson. His work in signing Joy Division and creating Factory Records inspired dozens of other bands and made the industrial city in the North a kind of beacon for a type of post-punk, industrial sound before he died in 2007 at 57.

Also from Manchester, the writer Paul Morley chronicled the rise of the city’s sounds and the particular character of Wilson over the years for New Musical Express and other publications. More recently, he’s spent 10 years writing the eventual biography, From Manchester to Love: The Life and Opinions of Tony Wilson, which is just now getting a US release this month on Faber Books. We talked via Zoom with Morley from London about the effects one man could have on a city, and culture.

Why did it take a decade to complete the book?

It was something I wanted to get right. I think technically a few years ago I could have finished it. I wanted more perspective on it, to see how he would develop as a character as times were changing very quickly. The kind of iconoclast that Tony Wilson was in the 20th century—those kinds of figures don’t exist anymore.

I suppose it could have been difficult to know at what point to end the book as well.

That’s right. Because stories continue to change. And also it’s a story about a city, Manchester. And that’s been going through a lot of changes, a lot of them having to do with Tony’s presence and ambitions. For me the equivalence was the 19th century industrialists who set up the city and are already being forgotten about, apart from the occasional statue. I just wanted to animate that work. Because it’s a story not just about music, it’s about many other things as well.

Did you grow up in Manchester?

Yes. I grew up in Manchester, in a town just a few miles south, Stockport. Manchester consists of a lot of satellite areas if you like. The city center itself is very compact and small. It’s got a lot of resident history.

So I hit my teens in the early 1970s, I was just a bit younger than Wilson. At a time when Manchester seemed to be done as a place; its history seemed over, people like Tony Wilson, oddly enough, kept urging it to reconnect with its industrial heyday.

How did he try to make that happen?

I think it was simply the fact that he had a knowledge of it. Unlike the people in that area at the time, he was a Cambridge University student, which gave him an immediate difference to the rest of us; he’d been out there, and been out in the world and come back with a very different kind of presence than most Northerners, an intellectual presence, or the presence of a deeper, stranger thinker.

He was very aware of the history of Manchester and the history of things that were firsts: the first computer, first suffragettes, the first library. He felt that we considered ourselves in the North at the edges or margins of the universe, why not put ourselves at the center of the universe. And he had the ambition and energy and the desire to do that.

Of course he was also a great broadcaster, and what happened in the late ’50s and 1960s, a local TV company, Granada, started working out of Manchester, showing that it could be good. And it was very innovative and progressive, and had some of the greatest journalists in the country. It gave a great modern presence to the city in the ’60s as it was declining. Tony ended up there and that fed into the realization that he could make a change. He had a revolutionary sensibility as well, coming out being 18 in 1968, the year of all the great revolutions. And this all sort of coincided.

But it was music that he thought he would do this through?

Yes. The first visit in 1976 of the Sex Pistols to Manchester—that was a great catalyst for him. Not so much the music but their manager Malcolm McLaren, who he identified with as a figure very similar to him. He didn’t do anything specific. You couldn’t say he was a musician or an artist or a designer or a writer, it was this weird thing you have a lot of examples of in rock music, the impresario, the behind the scenes character, like Andrew Loog Oldham or Brian Epstein or Peter Grant—the ones who saw and made the myths. And he was a great myth-maker, so McLaren made him think he could do something. He was very good at broadcasting at Granada television, and he was a local celebrity. But he got bored easily, and he was just at a lull. He was bored and looking for an opportunity to do something else and make things happen.

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WELCH, MN | There is something about the serenity and tone of Carlos Santana that keeps him soaring, more than a half century after the world ignited from the Latin fire he brought to Woodstock. The magic of that appearance, which essentially made the band’s career, continues to be alive as the band that performs under his name plays every show, including one at a rural Minnesota casino on a chilly April night.

His generous set at the Treasure Island Casino in Welch, MN, last Friday (4/8) didn’t culminate with the Woodstock hits; it started with it. First with footage from the popular movie, and three songs from the band’s first album that they played at that mammoth stage: “Soul Sacrifice,” “Jingo,” and “Evil Ways” without a break between them.

And then they jumped to the peaks of their million-selling second album—their cover of Peter Green’s “Black Magic Woman” that segues into Gabor Szabo’s “Gypsy Queen,” right into their version of Tito Puente’s “One Coma Va,” just as it came on Abraxas.

The five song assault—joyful and fulfilling enough to fill a winning Super Bowl halftime show—was capped with the coolness of “Samba Pa Ti,” the lilting instrumental, which like so much of Santana’s music has perfect tone and control, and wild power as the percussion revs behind him.

Santana, at 74, is quite a serene player on stage, head tilting back as he reacts to the pure notes on his custom Paul Reed Smith, often turning to his band like a jazz player to give and receive their input. He wore a shirt that pictured Jimi Hendrix; other nights he’d wear Bob Marley. He continues to exemplify the best of both men in their musical chops and uplift.

And when the crowd had received so much, so soon in the set, they were quite happy to receive his blissed-out spiritual speeches that followed in what is the show’s first break between songs. There was also a moment given to sing happy birthday to his longtime conga player Karl Perazzo, who has been with the band since the early ’90s.

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