Your Mama Won’t Like Me

Arista Records, 1975

Her voice is rough and sweet at the same time. It possess many qualities of 80s hard rock, yet still sounds deeply entrenched in the 70s-ness of itself. A present pop sensibility, complete with possibly ill-advised trendiness in certain choices, mixed with an un-smoothable quality that remains slightly raw no matter how much it’s produced. Lyrical allusions to pain and prisons, love and imagination, bad reputations and dreams. Hints of power plays without overt political references. Partying hard. Janis Joplin, meet Joan Jett. Suzi Quatro’s on the turntable today.

Here’s who she is: A bass player and singer. She was in an all-girl rock band in the 70s called Fanny. She ended up moving to the UK and most of her records were released there. She got popular in Europe; not so much in the USA. She was clearly a sartorial influence on Joan Jett. This album, Your Mama Won’t Like Me, was not a hit for her, but moderate success came later. My friend Michele introduced me to Susi Quatro in Portland when I was having a girl group moment – listening only to The Runaways and The Shirelles for about a month straight. Michele just was like, hey, if you like that Joan Jett type of stuff you should check this girl out – bass player in the 70s, singer, rocker. And I did. And I danced to it. And I loved it.

I loved how it’s so seventies, complete with wakka-wakka guitar and horn section, but then the guitar gets plain old chunky-bar-chords-distorted-straight-up-punk every now and then, and Susi’s bass comes in and… yeah, it’s danceable, and it’s tough, sexy, and poppy. And a little bit funky. It’s also rather clean sounding – maybe that’s the Britishness poking through, as well as the surprisingly unsexy cover of “Fever” on the second side – for what it purports to be, a hard leather-wearin’ rock and roll record. This record is a classic pop packaging conundrum: all strung up to be one thing – hard-ish rock – but really offering listeners something much more complex by allowing the popular sonic influences and personaly of its era to seep through.

I get the impression that some folks like to like Suzi Quatro these days because she’s a bit undiscovered still to post-70s generations of American indie rockers, and because she’s sort of hip in her not-quite-awesomeness – “Everyone’s heard of Joan Jett, but have you heard of this lady rocker?” And what’s not to like—she is a rock lady in a man’s rock world, a girl bass player kickin’ out the jams successfully decades before Kim Deal stole our hearts, and you can still glimpse the real toughness in her even under all that industry packaging.

I was listening to Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book yesterday, because my friend Paula once said that album is summertime and because it was effing hot here this week and sunshine goes with Stevie. For other people it’s other albums, but for me Talking Book embodies the seventies, musically. (Keeping in mind that I was either not-alive or a baby in the seventies– for people who were actually out of diapers in that epic decade, there is certainly a richer associative thread to broad statements like that.) But Talking Book represents so many of the attitudes I associate with what I’ve learned about that era through my parents’ generation and their cultural artifacts: It’s hope, funk, politics and love in the same spot, new awakenings of selfhood and sunny afternoons and extended solos. Stevie.

And somehow Suzi is a perfect pairing for the Stevie sitting in my head, today. She’s a little tougher than he is; and granted, she’s not as political and not so simultaneously full of positivity and not one of the best singer-songwriters ever. But that guitar sound – that sorta rough melody to the choruses that seems to me a hallmark of good 70s popular rock of a certain type. With that sound pumping out my apartment windows on a hot afternoon, Stevie and Susi can be sister and brother here, in my living room, in the summertime, feeling the lightness of the lack of irony in the room.

So, don’t like Suzi Quatro because she’s a tough rock lady, or a bass player, or a coolly less-popular precursor to Joan Jett. Like Suzi Quatro because she’s got it, that seventies sound, and because she keeps it tight and says things over it like, “when you handed me the apple, I should have said no to you // I guess I bit off more than I could chew” but also just like her. It’s a bit more funk-rock than punk-rock, and accordingly it’s got a bit too much wah pedal and at times (“Paralyzed” and the final fake-folk track, “Michael”) veers almost disco in its leanings… and it’s irresistible.

So pump it out the back of the Nova in the hot parking lot and rock some cutoff denim on your ass. It’s summertime.

Also: I did not know until today that she played Leather Tuscadero, sister of Pinky, on Happy Days. Well okay, then.

Talking Book

Motown, 1972

So.

This week I have so busy with work and so sleepy and so over-committed and so been wanting to write about summer songs, about “Superstition” and Stevie, but when time is under-available and when it rains in late June in California, things get out of whack. Summer and Stevie (and writing) lose out. So I’ll just say this:

Sunlight shines from this man the way only sunlight can, illuminating phrases and lives bright and dark and good and wronged and classic and chillin’ and outside and in and also, brilliantly, embodying its own cliched reputation.

And:

If I was a really amazing drummer, I would say I learned everything I ever knew about rhythm from Talking Book.

I’m still listening, I promise, but that’s all, for today.

Rock Action

Matador/Southpaw, 2001

In the record I hear a scraping sound of my speakers or of something in the mix.

A quiet slow start of piano and …. it’s drums – cymbals or snares or the subway beneath the street.

Guitar that sounds like keyboard, then a keyboard.

The background full, a pointillist puncture in sonic gaps. Everything in space is not space. They fill it.

The sound that seemed like the speakers is now the snare shaking in the wake of us.

Break clean with the real beat, now, young men. And now sing.

*

At the concert you stand and feel as others do, that the mornings of forgetting and the nights of redress are joys. If you were to speak the words would fall from you in the shape of yellow sunrises, pink sunset slints. You feel a bass inside where your organs touch each other, flesh, shaking the room; feel the press of people behind and aside and in front; feel the drizzle of sweat creep down your thigh; feel the one small breeze that breaks into your face every few minutes as though someone has opened a door and let in a slice of the non-rock atmosphere from outside. Shut it again and press closer to the stage.

*

When the pressure of guitars is relieved there is a lightness to the notes, of falcons released, only from atop some tallest canopied peak. They hit the ground with all this weight now, strong now, waves wash us away now and we break,

clean,

into the new force of whatever we need when we stand, close, in darks, noses pressed to the air to hear this circle, around, again.

*

They dive and rise, and do it again.

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Reprise, 1969

There are some albums I’ve been afraid to write about. Entire records that sit, shelved, in infamy and, now, silence. They are famous. They are often my favorites. They are by artists about whom miles and miles of prose have been written. What can I possibly have to add to the world’s thoughts on Neil Young? Bob Dylan? Radiohead’s OK Computer and Nirvana’s Nevermind?

Experience is it, at that point. We all know something about Neil Young. He is a classic rock god who also remains pleasingly lo-fi. He’s Canadian. He had a house somewhere off Highway 17 in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He gives to charity. He wears that hair, those flannels. He writes rock music that should be opera in its storytelling grandness but also is intimate and, just, inside himself. His voice is surprisingly nasal and high when you hear it, and his simple, rough guitar riffs live somewhere between blues and riot girl. He rocks. But the knowledge we don’t share about this artist and this particular album is our ever-individualized experiences of the music.

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere was the first album I owned by Young, though certainly not the first I’d heard or liked, but probably the first I’d listened to deeply, on my own, not just in passing or at the behest of a male friend or as a familiar low-level Rock background. This was Young’s first album with the band Crazy Horse and was recorded in 1968 while he was also still in Crosby Stills Nash & Young, post-Buffalo Springfield, pre-solo fame that arrived with the release of Harvest.

There is a long guitar solo in “Down By The River” that told me everything I needed to know about Neil Young when I first heard it. His playing holds a transparency not often seen in “guitar guys” – a slow pace that allows itself to find the notes, the progressions, the scales, and a tenderness to the picking that belies the roughshod skill behind it. Just a simple concept, iterated: an exploration of a melody. Little ego on the tape– except of course the ego that allows a guitar solo to own most of a 9-minute song. A willingness to leave the sound as it is sounded, and circle back again, and try a new place, and let things sound the way they sound again. This solo sounds… overheard.

When I listen to this music, I have a feeling of being catapulted into a past both my own and born only of myth. It’s like a drive in a hot car through forests, windows down and the sun fearless on top of you, and you hit the dark curved shade-spots around uneven turns in the mountain road and are blinded for moments by the coolness, the deep green flash before you open back up into light of the day. You have been in this town before, you have known these people.

There is a sense of place I have often talked about with certain friends who are from mid-sized towns with strong personalities — towns in California like Santa Cruz, where I’m from, Grass Valley, and San Luis Obispo. We call this sense of place “hometown, not smalltown.”

The designation “hometown” carries with it a certainty of uniqueness, a strong sense of the place and the intimacy the word implies, but also the experience of growing up with the resources and cultural access to know that this home exists inside a particular bubble, and one day you might leave it, but it will always exist. A hometown is a good place to be from, but maybe not to stay. And when, if, you do go back, whether for a visit or because you sometimes get stuck there between stations, your daily path becomes a strong mix of sense memory actions and smells that can alternately drive you up a wall and shore up, support, the very essence of your “self.”

Everyone who leaves the place they are from knows this experience to varying degrees:

This place is what made me; I gotta get outta this place.

And that is the experience I have to add to the discussion of this incredibly famous record. The experience of hometown. For me this album will always be my hometown, and all the times I listened to this music there or all the times this music made me want to go back there, or want to leave. The “Nowhere” of the title track is both “back home” and the place you yearn to escape, the day-to-day running around of plain old hometown life: Santa Cruz and me in it as a grownup in all the ways that has happened, in short and long bursts, since I left at 16.

These songs solos, words, and silences contain the narrative sense of visiting a smallish place where you know everyone, and their parents. Of summers. Of telephone calls you don’t want overheard, hours spent sitting in cars outside driveways just to have some silence, not knowing the names of streets you know better than your own veins, and of the constricting contradictions of family and how they are near us yet far. The sight of Pacific Avenue on a Saturday night when it looks nothing like it looked in my childhood but it smells like home. Seeing old friends thrive, and escape, and not escape, and not be close friends but still be known.

Certain smells, like the wet of redwood lanes when its hot above them. Knowing what time the fog will come in. Now we are older, but we share a past with others in which some drowned and some thrived and some changed shape to suit a new present. And some of us regret some of it, or romanticize all of it, or recognize only hints of it–but we are all equally here and there at the same time. Nowhere.

American Fool

Riva Records, 1982

After hearing it on the radio in a car last week, I wanted to listen to John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses,” because it’s good and because it’s eerily (still) appropriate to “these times,” and because I want to cover it, or I want someone (maybe Ty?) to cover it better than I ever could. But I don’t have that album on vinyl; I have this album. The big record, the master hit maker, the Cougar that came just before, and perhaps came between, a John and his message.

Have you listened to this lately? Can you listen to it, and then can you come over and sit on the couch with me and marvel in the simplicity of the production, the bare honesty of the scarce chords and the sound of a man actually singing?

It’s pretty good. The arrangements get a bit cheesy towards the climax of each song, especially on the less famous tracks. And it’s a little more personal than the subsequent album, Uh Huh, which gave us “Pink Houses,” and so you have to reach a bit deeper into the metaphors to find the disenchanted American dreams that lurk beneath the smalltown stories. But they’re there, and that sweet Telecaster is there, and those hand-claps are there.

Can we talk about the hand-claps?

Hand-claps, fellow listeners of the Internet, are one of the foundational pillars of rock and roll. They hit on the “two-and” and the “four” clap, or sometimes just the two/four, so simple and so elementary and so sittin-around-strummin’ that you might be on the Cougar’s porch yourself, just shootin the shit and putting some songs together. Hand-claps give voice to the essence of what we do when we write songs: we clap it out, together, and then somewhere farther along the way someone else comes in and uses a bunch of fancy other instruments to delineate that most basic of rock beats, and we lose the hand-claps. But not John. Because nobody does a hand-clap backtrack like the Coug (except, perhaps, creepy Phil Specter himself). It’s like the man doesn’t even need a drummer, he’s so rock and roll. It’s like, it makes me sit back and think about the brilliant simplicity of the 4-4 rock beat. It makes me think, suddenly and sharply, about how Gillian Welch finally built up to using drums on Soul Journey and maybe she was actually overdoing it, maybe she should have stuck with some basic hand-claps to more accurately punctuate her American stories. Maybe she should do a duet with the Coug.

I don’t even have much to say about this record other than to ask for a cover version of a song that’s not on it that relates to right now, meander my mind into what a melodic union of Gillian Welch and John Mellencamp might produce in terms of telling truly “country” stories from this particular country, and to point out the hand claps.

And, I guess, to point out that John Cougar Mellencamp is good. So good. And he is one of those Rock Guys (like Bruce) who somehow gathers along the way a countrified, presumably middle-America-Red-State-beer-n-baseball-hat image in the public perception. But then you sit and you listen to the words of his song and he’s red alright, he’s redder than a commie caught with his pants down. He’s a downright American socialist, this workin’ class fool, he’s talkin’ bout the problems and the lives and the stories—Jack and Diane, their story, the Friday Night Lights of their lives—of real, actual, American people. And those people don’t have any little pink houses anymore. Those people are fuckin’ suffering.

So give us a clap, John. We’ll all clap along this time, I hope.