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1st Record/1st Concert by Erica Easley
I am a bit embarrassed by my first record purchase. It’s just not cool…However, I might as well embrace the truth now, once and for all:
The first record I bought with my own money was Poison’s debut smash “Look What the Cat Dragged In.” On cassette. OK? In La Canada, California.
Pure pop-metal splendor, catchy choruses, big hair and make-up. For a kid enamored of the look of Cyndi Lauper and Boy George and the soundtrack to “American Graffiti,” the hair metal-lite of Poison was absolute confection perfection. (Secret confession: I still love it!) Poison was very visual and just naughty enough. Rowdy Sunset Strip glitter glam. Lipstick, lame, and peroxide. Not quite nice and still very fun. Just the thing for an eleven year old from a good home baby-stepping into rebellion.
Fittingly, then, my first concert was also Poison (opening acts Slaughter and Warrant) ca. 1990, Riverfront Stadium, Cincinnati, Ohio. For a rather sheltered seventh grader, the scene was shockingly sexual. Too many slutty women (how else to describe a lady in jeans with a ripped up butt?) and a few creepy, lecherous older guys. Overall, though, it was a great time. Going to a rock concert felt grown up!
There were bright lights; it was loud, and in a stadium. My parents weren’t there. My friends were. It was downtown. It was rock ‘n’ roll. I sang along every word; my girlfriends and I had “rehearsed” the lyrics days before, making sure we knew every word to every song from every album. We had also argued over “who got which band member”; I “got” lead singer Bret Michaels! (We can’t all go for the same guy!)
These were innocent, little girl crushes, though it felt very important at the time.
I bought the Poison tour book at the merch stand (don’t know what ever happened to it) and – I think it was at this concert – Poison underwear. GROSS! But true. I have no clue where those are, either. I didn’t buy a T-shirt because I was already wearing a Poison tee I bought at the Wherehouse music store at the mall. Tragically hip, literally.
P.S. This past year I stood in line behind Poison guitarist C.C. DeVille at my local Rite Aid pharmacy. I am taller than him. He still dyes his hair blonde, but it’s dirty. How excited would I have been to be in that position fifteen years ago! I would have freaked! I thought about tapping him on the shoulder and telling him everything I just told you. But I didn’t.
Erica Easley co-wrote, with Ed Chalfa, the recently published book Rock Tease, about the history of Rock t-shirts.
Another Fein Mess
AF Stone’s Monthly
January 2007
Foot In Mouth Disease
When I visit Walnut Creek, where my in-laws live, I always seem to say something innocent and get in trouble.
Xmas a few years ago I was at a posh store and asked a clerk to wrap a present quickly: I had raced to this department ahead of my wife so she wouldn’t know what I was getting her.
“I had to beat my wife here” I said. The woman froze. Then I started laughing and her frown turned to a glower. Why must I be misunderstood?
This year I was walking downtown there and my shoe started swallowing my sock. I stopped, and raised my right foot athletically high on a low wall and a woman, seeing my amusing position, smiled.
“I had to straighten out my hose” I said innocently. Her smile vanished.
Lost Opportunity, Good Time
I had the address for the church for Swamp Dogg’s wedding 1 November 11th in San Jose, but not the coordinates. I was in Walnut Creek and my friend Bob was in San Francisco (also visiting, as I was, north of SJ), so I called Bob and asked for the route and the freeway exit. But I failed to greet him with “Do you know the way to San Jose?”
The tragedy is that this would be the only time I would ever be able to use that phrase. We live in L.A. Everyone knows the way to San Jose - you go north on the 5 or the 101. To need instructions in this unique case was my golden chance to utter that line, and I muffed it.
The wedding reception was really something, though, with smoothe soul from the Moments, Guitar Shorty’s blues, Swamp’s mother, chanteuse Vera Lee, belting out a couple of numbers, and Swamp himself singing “Since I Fell For You” to his new bride, Dr. Beverly Green Williams.
1 Swamp’s longtime wife Yvonne, whom he venerated in person and in song, passed away in 2003.
If You Wanna Be Happy 2
I like Bob Dylan as much as ... well, not as much as people who still like him. I lost interest after Blonde On Blonde, then was reinvigorated with Blood On The Tracks 3. Then lost interest again.
What’s with this guy’s current career? He sings .... that’s not the right word, he croaks, his voice is shredded. Tom Waits sounds better. The new songs? Good lyrics, important to rock crits and English majors, but where’s the musical rush? It’s supposed to be about feeling, not meaning.
Nowhere, but nowhere, does a rock crit write about the lack of ENTERTAINMENT he provides, unless you call screwing up his old songs entertaining. The Emperor’s New Clothes are pretty shoddy. 4
I like being entertained - so shoot me. I like blues that entertain, too. Louis Jordan, not a blues guy, is full of life and laughter even when addressing sad notions. Tampa Red, a guy with a guitar accompanied by a guy with a kazoo, slays me, bringing joy to downbeat topics. Jimmy Reed’s blues are musical, carry a tune and a punch with (unintentional?) joy. I love Wynonie Harris, Roy Brown, rollicking guys who rock. Gals? Lil Green is great. Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Helen Humes. Memphis Minnie. Ella Johnson. People delivering songs whose lyrics, while great, take a back seat to the happiness they convey.
Criticizing Dylan is outside my normal positive stance. But I’m entitled -- only a person who likes an act can criticize it. And hell, it’s just me and he’s Dylan. Everything I read says I’m wrong.
2 “Jimmy Soul’s Greatest Hits” contains many cool songs! “I Hate You Baby” is especially wonderful, reminding me of ‘Grandma’s Lye Soap’ from Johnny Standley’s “It’s In The Book.”
3 This album is the parallel to Brian Wilson’s 1988 solo album: a late-coming summary of the best elements of his style. And a stand-alone.
4 Reading Jon Pareles’s 11/22/06 NY Times whitewash of a Dylan concert gave me shpilkas. “He chanted ‘Boots Of Spanish Leather’ in staccato bursts of one note, cramming in syllables before the chord change, and he rattled off ‘Tangled up In Blue’ like an elocution test, clear and perfunctory. Those old romances were over and done with.” He spits at his audience and Jon laps it up! He also lauded “arbitrary vocal approaches” which sometimes “unveiled new glints of meaning.” For me, “You Can Do No Wrong” applies only to Carl Perkins.
Followup On IBM Selectric Purchase, Early 2006.
Took the jammed $45 thrift-store purchased IBM Selectric typewriter to the Swiss guy who repairs them. He said that strings and a cable had snapped because works were all gummy. “It hasn’t been lubricated. The machine is perfect but it needs a chemical bath.” That was $150.
He is a professional typewriter guy who loves and respects the magnificent IBM Selectric. He said it should go in the trash. Every piece was shiny and had been well cared for, but it was a basic model, without correcting or pitch control, and if it was cleaned it still would be substandard. So I told him to throw out. A reconditioned loaded one would cost $275, and I’m thinking about it.
He said he’d recently paid a guy to haul away 85 typewriters from his storage room. “Did they work?” I asked. “Who knows?” he answered. “It doesn’t matter. I could be here for 50 years and not sell 85 typewriters.”
Illusions Shattered
Reassembled from the New Yorker:
When actor and Second City founder Del Close died in 1999, he asked that his skull be used in productions at the Goodman Theater in Chicago so he could “stay in show business.” For a couple of years now the skull has been in use, but someone cast doubt on its authenticity, owing to its teeth being different from his and the screws in the jaw rusting, indicating great age. Turns out that the people assigned with the task of getting his head boiled and then set upon with leeches couldn’t get the skull from the mortuary, and besides couldn’t find anyone who wanted to boil a human head, Jefferey Dalmer having passed on. So they bought one from a medical supply house.
Bulletproof
Who’s above criticism? Plenty of people in the rock world - Springsteen, U2, Sting, X (in L.A. at least), Brian Wilson and most women 5.
But, regarding Brian, why is the Rock Crit cabal now warm to “beautiful” music? Sentiment and softness have been pummelled since the emergence of rock-scribblers, who drubbed the Carpenters, John Denver - to paraphrase (?) Dionne Warwick, “anyone who had a heart.”
Everyone’s a softie when it comes to Bri. I like his Smile opus, but if I was true to rock-crit tradition I’d summarize it as bits and pieces of nostalgia interspersed with sound effects, some Four Freshmen vocal calisthenics, some clip-clops from Ferde Grofe’s “Grand Canyon Suite” and familiar songs to bring the audience comfort.
Cynical? Not hardly. It sounds good, it’s just that I wonder why it hasn’t been lashed as “sentimental” or, if you’re real deep, “lachrymose.” I’ve seen it applied a thousand times to other emotional artists. So are the gloves ON now, and past upuses (opi? opa?) such as, say, Days Of Future Passed by the Moody Blues, rising to repute?
Nah, they lack the mystique of the damaged artist.
5 How else to explain Christina Aguilera’s re-emergence in a new suit being hailed as a cultural tsunami with front-page 4-color coverage in Rolling Stone, NY Times, L.A. Times and others?
Music Notes
I’d wondered how a famous songwriting team could have written “Kansas City” for Wilbert Harrison when it had been out 5 years earlier, written by Little Willie Littlefield. The World’s Most Famous Record Producer told me that Doc Pomus told HIM that Ray Charles said “Kansas City? Hound Dog? I used to hear those songs when I was a kid!” And that was years before Bob Dylan wrote “Rollin’ & Tumblin’ ” .... Bobby Rydell 6 hosts a half hour infommercial for an oldies package for - old people. Instead of setting him in the malt shop surrounded by girls in poodle skirts and guys in black leather motorcycle jackets, it’s filled with people waiting for their space at the hospice. Yoiks! .... Because I’m a little, oh, cynical, when I drive up Lankershim Blvd in North Hollywood and pass both Jimi Hendrix Street and Buddy Holly Way (both ‘internal’ streets emanating from Universal Studios) I don’t smile .... Bob Lind was OK on my show, but declined to do “Elusive Butterfly.” That record was a ‘wall of sound’ production by Jack Nitsche, with all the L.A. session players. It’s funny, but mention ‘Elusive Butterfly’ to anyone not from that era and you get back a blank stare. I guess it’s not on too many oldies stations .... When I went to the Mint, on Pico Blvd, in November to see England’s gift to Austin, the great Ian McLagan, I spotted Shel Talmy (L.A.’s gift to England) and said hello ....
6 Bobby Rydell’s records were GREAT. “I’ll Never Dance Again” stands up against any Roy Orbison track, “Do The Cha Cha Cha” soars above its subject, “I’ve Got Bonnie” is terrific, and I have a thing for “Don’t Be Afraid,” which does not appear on the Cameo hits CD, as doesn’t the great rocker “The Third House.” When I had Gordon Waller on my tv show, one thought that floated into place at the right time was my memory that Capitol Records released “World Without Love” by both Rydell and Peter and Gordon on the same day, May 9, 1964. “The damned publisher promised it to us exclusively” Waller grumbled, not that the Rydell version seriously threatened P&G’s.
Now That Things Are Easier, They’re Harder (Pt. 1)
We have various phones scattered around our house. My wife recently bought a Panasonic base unit with a total of 5 handsets, so we can get both phone lines on every phone and, she tells me, an intercom.
The upshot -
* The 36-preset standing phone I had in the kitchen is gone. I am faced with either pressing (and, too often, first looking up) entire phone numbers now, or setting 50 speed-dial code numbers different from my cell phone! (House calls are different from cell calls.)
* Within the first hour the handset from the kitchen was gone, walked out of the room, so I had to use the speaker-phone. The former unit had a handset attached to the base on a cord, as God intended it. Arrgggh.
Death Throes Music My Way
I was driving past Tower Records in Concord, California on December 21st and saw a banner that read “Last Day.” I pulled into the lot. The sign on the door said “All CDs 25 Cents.”
My daughter and I bought seventy-five; Jessie chose many by covers and names. I did so not without misgivings, not only for dancing on the open grave of the Tower chain but also because many were independent-label CDs not returnable for credit so the makers felt the loss. To assuage the kharmic damage I stuck three dollars in the clerk’s “Losing My Job” jar.
Of Jessie’s 30 she kept 15. Here are some of my forty-five.
And What Have I Done With My Life?
Jessie’s school-fr Chris, 15, was adopted by a single-mom who’d fled Hungary as a child in 1956.
Chris has two older siblings, adopted. They’re in college. And 4 years ago her mom adopted kids 4 and 5 from Uzbekistan and Russia. Those kids spoke no English but “Hello” but now are fiercely American and deny they’ve ever been anything else. This 5-foot woman makes me feel small.
You’re A Goodman, Steve
Clay Eals of Seattle, writing a bio of Steve Goodman, sought stories, so I told him about my writing his bio for Elektra in 1977.
I disliked Arlo Guthrie's "City Of New Orleans" bec he didn't jump the octave on "I'll be gone five/hundred miles" like Steve did. So when I did his bio I wrote (in the shamefully evasive style I now savage critics for) that "some fans" found Arlo’s change disappointing. Goodman took me to task in the office, mildly but crossly, and said that Arlo had done him a huge service, he loves Arlo, and this was not right! So we took it out. So my final impression of Steve is of him upbraiding me.
Incredibly, Eals responded that he had both the November 1977 and February 1978 bios, but hadn’t previously noticed the difference.
PHOTOS
AF, PF (Sloan) at diner before tv show, sometime last year
Pulitzer Prize-quality photo, Gore Vidal being wheeled out after speaking at Kirball Center, L.A. 12/5/06
Dirk Hamilton, AF Art Fein’s Poker Party 12/8/06
Public Enemy signing comic books at Golden Apple Comics, which recently moved to Melrose just east of La Brea. 12/20/06
Jessie Fein knitting. She never sees this column so won’t be able to object to my running her pic. 12/22/06
Spotted at gas station, Walnut Creek, 12/24/06. Teenage girl said that her mother likes to sew. My formative SOFEIN plate, obtained in the earl 1980s, was stolen by “Jumpin’” Jerry Sikorski in 1996.
Gay Banter
Elton John made “Daniel” and “Tiny Dancer” but nobody called him on it.
And the Beatles “I’ll Get You In The End” caused no flap.
But I was startled when I heard “You’re The Top” 11 and noticed that “But if baby, I’m the bottom, you’re the top” sounded like gay capitulation.
This isn’t what you’d expect if your notion of Cole Porter comes from his portrayal as a ladies-man in the 1946 flick “Night And Day.”
11 For many years I thought this was an Edd Byrnes song. The flipside of ‘Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb’ inelegantly altered the opening to “You’re the top, You’re a Presley sideburn.”
Living In A Vacuum
Regular people don’t care about music like we do. On “Jeapordy,” January 1st, the category was (once, and nevermore) “Record Labels.”
$200 easy question: Elvis Presley recorded his first five records for this Memphis label. NO RESPONSE
$800 question: Kiss made their first album for this label founded by Neil - not Humphrey - Bogart. NO RESPONSE
I forget the others. Maybe we should move to another country, or form one here. Nobody understands us. Since election ballots are printed in Eastern and Western Tagalog, we could speak Record-Ref:
“I’ll have a shot of - The Champs.”
“Atmospheric conditions indicate there’ll be a - Martha & The Vandellas!”
“Hurry up, don’t - ‘Darlin’ Be Home Soon.’ ”
“I was born in - “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.’ “ 12
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Mark On the Move
I’ve long been aware that I burn the candle at both ends and in the middle. I get too little sleep and will sacrifice vast amounts of time to hear live music. Some days I wake up and immediately feel tired, but I start my day anyhow and just push through it. I’ve gotten used to living most of the time on the edge of exhaustion.
I like to share my enthusiasms for certain artists and venues, and wanted to indoctrinate my new girlfriend Vicky, who like most normal people likes music but doesn’t make it the center of her life. When I was briefly in L.A. recently we attended three concerts in 24 hours. First was a Saturday night at The Jazz Bakery to see Dave Frishberg. I’d interviewed him for BAM in the early eighties during the brief vogue for his song “My Attorney Bernie” that swept the NPR nation. He was living in Van Nuys at the time (he moved to Portland soon afterwards, complaining that the L.A. scene was too thin to support him) and I well recall he insisted upon playing me his favorite Brazilian LPs after we were done with the formal interview. Dave was dumbfounded that anyone (me) didn’t like Brazilian stuff, he said all great jazz musicians worshiped it. I found him to be the same kind of music nerd as me and my friends, with the crucial addition of massive amounts of songwriting and performing talent.
He’s now 73 years old and maintains his slightly curmugeonly demeanor on stage, telling apt stories about how the songs came about. He’s a reedy, often tentative singer, technically not impressive, but his sound fits perfectly the collection of wry, wistful, jokey and plain sad tunes he’s built up over the years. His piano playing reflects his worship of Waller, Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton. At the Jazz Bakery, in a couple dozen songs he encapsulated everything that can be done with “classic” songwriting, including crossword-clever, unexpected rhymes (intrigue/league, purist/tourist, ventures/debentures). In a Frishberg song, the words are the rhythm: “He’s got Dodger season boxes/and an office full of foxes”) is a samba.
There were many highlights, but I especially dug “Slappin’ the Cakes on Me,” in which a guy is amazed to find himself being picked up by a fast but puzzling woman in a bar, “You are There,” a tentatively hopeful tune Dave wrote with Johnny Mandel about the way we keep loved ones alive in our minds when they are gone, “Another Song About Paris,” which simultaneously manages to squeeze in references to a dozen Paris songs and sites, critique them, suggest the very song he’s writing is a waste of time, and still show his love for the city, and “Oklahoma Toad,” which he wrote in the fifties when a cigar-chomping Brill Building publisher told him to write country & western tunes that “didn’t have to be good.” (Dave says another publisher asked him during an audition what a particular chord was. Dave said “That’s a B-7 chord.” “Aah, dat’s where you lose ‘em!” was the enigmatic reply.) I’ve seen Frishberg a dozen times and there’s never a dull moment.
The next afternoon it was Walt Disney Concert Hall to hear Sarah Chang play Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 (composed 1866) with Jiri Belohlavek conducting the LA Phil. The attractive and svelte Ms. Chang came out in slinky form-fitting gown and serious high heels, and I thought we were in for a performance of form not substance. Instead, tears came to my eyes in the first ten seconds as she poured herself emotionally into the opening bars of the piece, which is based on a Jewish folk melody and sounds to me like someone chanting in synagogue (Bruch was Lutheran actually). I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. Every passage was intense. Chang occasionally swayed, danced and stomped her feet as she played, her focus on the music uncanny, seemingly engulfing her entire being. (And I’m still amazed by the superhuman effort required to memorize and play perfectly, with gusto, a complicated piece of such length – how exactly do these classical stars do it?) The program called the piece “lush and passionate” and “devilishly difficult” but that’s not the half of it.
The whole audience, I felt, was truly being enraptured by her. I forgot to breathe for whole sections. She got a standing ovation, with many shouts of “Brava!” from the crowd. She was beaming as she took her bows.
This was her 4th performance of the piece on consecutive days. Holy cow! Is she this great every time?
That night Vicky and I were in the pit at the Wiltern for jam-band favorite Trey Anastasio, who I think is one of the great guitarists of today, and who has been wobbling for the last few years since the demise of his band Phish. His songwriting has turned anemic and he changes musicians each tour, experimenting in a way that doesn’t always work for me. I was especially ticked during his last show at the Wiltern when he let another guitarist solo at length and waste valuable jam-space.
For some time Trey’s been obsessed by groove-based funk, Africa/Brass-type Coltrane and especially African masters like Fela Kuti, but I find a lot of the grinding-along-on-one-chord stuff boring. In Phish, he was an outstanding improviser, spinning songs out to up to 40 minutes when the fire came, but I think that combination of musicians challenged him in a way his current configuration doesn’t. For this show he’d thankfully ditched the extra guitarist, included a good keyboardist, and featured a horn section which included the great Peter Apfelbaum. I think I detected the influence of Frank Zappa’s short-lived Grand Wazoo band. Trey seemed to be in great spirits, grinning and jumping up and down much of the time. Unfortunately, I thought it was an off night. During one long solo in the first set he was clearly lost, and when he finally found some great material to develop, he brought the tune to a close instead. The second set was better, including a massive jam medley of “Low” and “Last Tube” and a “Mud City” that caught fire, with multiple exchanges in the horn section and some virtuoso Trey Zappa-esque soloing. The crowd in the pit (most of them half my age) was toking and boogie-ing along just fine while I vaguely swayed or tapped my toes. Hey, dude, maybe that old fart was just too tired to enjoy it, or, uh, he didn’t get high enough!
-- Mark Leviton
(Mark’s sixties-themed radio show Pet Sounds can be heard alternate Mondays 4-7am PST on KVMR-FM 89.5 in the Sacramento area and streaming at www.kvmr.org )
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AF Letter to the Romeneseko journalism site at Poynter.org:
After I was graduated from journalism school more than 30 years ago, I held onto a precept of plain speaking. We were taught to not use attention-getting or stylish (“trendy” was then still a pejorative) words.
I wonder what they’re teaching now. This headline from the 12/29/06 L.A. Times: “The buzz on Japan’s new premier: too old-school.”
Buzz. It’s been new for about 20 years, yet still used enthusiastically without editorial censure.
Old-school. So avant-garde that Target was selling hat/t-shirt sets emblazoned with it last spring.
So are they cliches? That would be my definition.
It’s been more than 30 years since “Jaws,” yet not a day passes without a story opening with “Just when you thought it was safe to....” (Younger readers. “Just when you thought it was safe to go in the water..” was the “Jaws” advertising grabber.)
Today’s cliches come a-cropper.
What is a paradigm, and how is it different from a plan or framework? Who and what today ISN’T ‘iconic’? Why does everything today spike instead of take a sharp increase?
The paradigm of contemporary journalism is a spike in iconic buzz words.
Everything today wafts and melds and morphs and upticks and spikes. Why? What is this race to show hipness - a quality incompatible (oops, should have said “oxymoronic”) with newspapers - when the end result is slavish followship?
Art Fein
sofein.com
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12
Tequila
Heat Wave
The only song that contains the word “dawdle”
1964
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