Repo Man

San Andreas Records, 1984

Remember when I was talking about Joan Didion and  Tom Waits, and saying that perhaps I’d rather be from his California than from hers? I’d like to add to that by saying that this is also the California I’m from.

Repo Man is a cult film made in 1984 by Alex Cox. It’s about a guy, a car, capitalism, drugs, the possible end of the world, LA, some unseen powers, and a lot of punk rock songs. I’m sure it’s about some other stuff—it’s been forever since I saw it—but in my teenage memory, those are the things that stick. I had friends who were absolutely obsessed with this movie. I loved it, saw it many times, but I never knew all the lines like some guys did.

“Ordinary fuckin’ people. I hate ‘em.” –Bud, Repo Man

Pretty much anyone I knew in high school that was obsessed with this movie hung out across the street. You know what across the street is in high school, right?  It’s the steps of that big old wooden house with the big gate and the shading vines that provide a nice cover for lighting joints. It’s the small alley around the corner whose curbs cradle you when you’re making out or coming down or just having a break from the constant barrage of authority known as the high school experience. In some schools, it’s the parking lot, or behind the church, or under the bleachers. It exists in every teenage world: the place in high school where kids who are a little bit outside hang out.

I liked to move around in high school — I hung out across the street, and I also didn’t. But some of my favorite people were usually there. People who weren’t from perfect one-story craftsman family homes on the West Side but instead grew up in the mountains, by the beach, in ramshackle family situations, in unheated garage bedrooms, a little closer to the edge than other people liked to acknowledge.

In high school I didn’t do drugs, didn’t even smoke cigarettes, was fairly tame in my sexuality. I was from a comparatively sane family, I did theater, I worked hard, and I wore interesting clothes. But I had friends who were far more adventurous than I was. And I loved them, and I hung out with them. Across the street.

Get outta line, next neck on the block –Circle Jerks, Coup D’Etat

Once my high school principal actually tried to talk to me about hanging out across the street. I was in his office for something unrelated, and he mentioned that it seemed like I was hanging out “over there” with “the wrong element.” My parents worked at the university. I used to be friends with (actually, date) his own son. I was a bright girl with a bright future and I wouldn’t want to, well, you know… I stared at him, at first honestly not sure what he was implying. Then I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about, and my friends were some of the smartest people I knew, and I walked outside. And across the street.

People who have had to fight for their identities—and especially people who have had to do this as children and teens—guard them with a mixture of unwavering pride and a sense of underlying vulnerability that never goes away, no matter how black your clothes or scratched your arms or loud your culture. If you are a teenager and someone puts you down, hits you, ignores you, or even just doesn’t really notice you – or if you feel in some other way (culturally, sexually) disenfranchised, it shows.  If you can find something that somehow, with its mix of intelligence and fuck-you-ness and bitter humor, speaks to your feelings, you memorize it. It’s punk for a lot of people, or movies like Repo Man, or theater or video games or whatever culture catches you in that moment of vulnerability and allows you in.

I’m not crazy / you’re the one who’s crazy / you’re driving me crazy –Suicidal Tendencies, Institutionalized

Listening back, this music sounds much mellower than I thought it was at the time. Punk. It is so angry and so about rebellion. But it is also just, really, rock ‘n’ roll, no? Sometimes faster, sometimes yelling-er , but always about a guitar and a kid who wants to be heard. I must have heard these songs when I first saw the film – probably in junior high, considering the fact that I had an older brother. I know that I loved Suicidal Tendencies and their dirty lack of tact or melody. I loved The Circle Jerks even though I wasn’t even really sure what their name meant. Black Flag was a presence that invoked Cool even if I never got super into them – channeling disaffected teenagers everywhere with we’ve got nothing better to do than watch tv and have a couple of brews, dude. And just today I realize that this soundtrack album contains the first version of “Pablo Picasso” I ever heard, long before I knew who the Modern Lovers or Jonathan Richman are.

I’m glad to have listened to this music young. I’m glad to have identified, even tangentially, with the cultural place this record represents. This place of rebellion and humor all at once, this cult Hollywood outsider status of whatever was happening in the 80s and 90s in California that left such an impression. And I’m glad people listened to me when I was a kid. I wish they’d listened to more of my friends.

Because this record is about them. Kids. About the way it sounded to be a teenager in this place, dreaming of access to a car or money, avoiding the crush of pressures large and small, feeling acutely aware of our impending-apocalyptic era, the hot California pavement shaking beneath our skin every day, trying to understand and accept and get the hell out of and fall in love with where we were from. Across the street, in a cul de sac, or on the open radioactive road. This is California, too.

Abandoned Meander

Peaking Mandala, 2006

Today I start slow. Writing through the desire to not-write is hard. Writing every day, whether you feel like it or “feel it” or not—no matter if it’s beautiful poetry or heartbreaking prose or Dear Diary or a somewhat uneven pop culture blog—is very, very hard. Writers learn this if and when we set out to create a daily practice. I relearn this every time my schedule shifts, or my habits or my jobs, and my writing work falls by the wayside. My guitar over there in the corner, all dusty, learns it every day courtesy of my myriad other artistic pursuits and the time they take up. There are only so many hours. Dinner must be eaten. Friends and lovers connected with. The posts start coming later and later in the day.

You know who else writes every day? Musicians. Even if they don’t play every day, they’re hearing the sounds of nascent songs in their heads when they’re walking to walk or doing the dishes or whatever it is they have to do all day in order to make doing music possible. They see pretty paintings or landscapes or horizons and they are on fire with sound. They hear everything. And they write it, every day, inside their heads, whether it gets outside their heads that day or not. For this I admire them, and in this practice I empathize with them.

My friend Andy is a musician. He’s fairly quiet about it – quiet yet intense. He’ll talk about music, whenever and wherever, but he’s not one of those I’m-A-Rock-Star dudes who drive me crazy with their perceived artfulness and their dreams of unlikely fame. Andy used to be in some pretty good, pretty popular bands – Slaves, VSS, Pleasure Forever. But in recent years he’s segued into more solo work, less interested in touring and performing and more interested in just… writing and playing and recording. Making a narrative of songs. Most days.

For a couple years, he was working on an album. I would hang out with Michele, his partner and a close friend of mine, and she would mention gently, “Oh, Andy’s recording something now” and I’d say, “Oh, cool,” and then forget about it. After a couple years, in 2006, on one of our hangouts, perhaps having tea in their kitchen in the Haight Ashbury or catching up for a walk on a windy Bay Area weekend, Michele finally handed me a DVR and said, “This is from Andy.” The first in a projected quintet of albums about places and sounds and sensations and whatever else Andy writes about all day long, every day.

Whenever I listen to a record made by someone I know, I feel as though I am (hopefully) allowed a greater understanding of that person and their perspective on the world. It’s a terrific and sometimes odd feeling. But usually when I sample my friends’ art, I’m not all that surprised. I kind of already knew what it might be like and could basically guess where they were going with it while they were on the way there.

When I listened to this album Abandoned Meander, by someone named Andrew Douglas Rothbard, I had no idea who this recording was made by. It blew my mind. And yet, as soon as I heard it I also knew instinctively that it was so completely in line with what I would expect from my friend’s personality and artistic preferences, so totally Andy, it thrilled me in a new and unusually profound way. Because when you realize that all along, this person who you love and know somewhat well and are friends with but don’t really interact with all that profoundly, is a fucking closet genius? That’s a nice day.

There are contemporaries you can place Andy’s records next to. He doesn’t listen to them. Young guys, often white, often really well-educated in pre-1980s music. Guys who like to layer guitar loops on top of one another with those cool pedals that let people sample themselves. These guys, and Andy, too, often contain endless musical and trivial points of reference that speak to sixties psych, current-day experimental music, and other vintage sounds.

I wouldn’t say talking about the West Coast Experimental Pop Band or some farther-out late-60s acid folk pop is out of place here. I also wouldn’t say the cacauphonic spirit of experimental groups like the Boredoms or the skills of contemporary low-fi guitar acts like Six Degrees of Admittance are unrelated to this work. But because I know the person who made it, and I know the apartment in which he made it and the tape loops which he used to make it and I’ve seen that laptop open so many times on his desk–because I know how perceptive a student of music he is and how insightful his taste—I don’t even feel a need to spend too much time comparing Abandoned Meander to its sonic peers (which is, usually, the way most of us write about music).

This is a record I would buy on CD and vinyl and repeat, even if I didn’t know the person who made it. This is a record I’d blog rapturously about. It loops you in from the start, a true meander across a constantly expanding and imploding landscape that seems to only to climax only to come back around. It assaults the senses with highs and lows and cycles that mirror the violent, tender march of the fog that so famously barrels in to San Francisco from the Pacific, drawing a dividing line of wet grey across the city right about where Andy and Michele’s apartment sits. There are layers that never end. Guitars and vowel sounds and trip upon trip. If I were doing that record review thing where I compare music to other things, I might try to talk about this record in reference to a Buddhist mandala or a Russian doll set: ever unfolding, re-manifesting, rolling through sonic movements, and—oh, yes—rocking.

So have a listen. Then buy it and its cyclic sequel, Exodusarabesque, and wait, like me, for numbers three, four, and five of Anrew Douglas Rothbard’s closet opus. In the meantime, drink some tea, listen to some vinyl, and let the fog wrap around you in the middle of the day. It’s so worth it.

Forever Changes

Sundazed, 2001 (reissue)

“Psychedelic” is a word I’m going to try to avoid using today. I think it gets over-used in record-geek circles, and I’m not even sure what it means. Instead I’m going to try and describe the music of Love a little bit, as though I’ve never heard the hype about them as a seminal psych-rock band. As though I’ve never driven down an open highway in the middle of a weekday blaring Forever Changes out the windows into the hot California sun, seeing colors take shape in the air around me.

This is rock and roll, made in California in the 1960s. It is rock that is heavily influenced by and was heavily influencing of its peers. It’s also rock and roll made by a multi-racial band headed by a black man, which is still a pretty rare thing 5o years after this record was made. It’s rock music that had a moderate amount of commercial success and then earned a tremendous following in subsequent decades. It’s music of and about its era, the late 1960s.

And it’s really, really good.

You know that I could be in love with almost everyone    –“Alone Again Or”

These songs breeze through the room like they’re tossed on the violent spring wind that rattles my windows today– uneven in strength and force, yet still, constantly alight. Meandering yet tight guitar licks, acoustic/electric juxtapositions, strings and horns and flutes and other hippie-style instrumentation invoke the ambiance of eras long since past, from the Renaissance to the 20th century. Stoney bass high in the mix. Layered vocals impart lyrics that tell of seeking truths universal and small, good and bad. It’s all in there. All Love.

They’re locking them up today, they’re throwing away the key
I wonder who it’ll be tomorrow, you or me –The Red Telephone

Of course, it ended up being leader Arthur Lee, the original “black hippie,” who was locked up in 2001 on a gun possession charge thanks to California’s draconian three-strikes law. Even during its heydey Love was disjointed at best, often shifting rosters of frequently smacked-out musicians. But the connective tissue was always Lee, who for decades tried to keep some semblence of Love going while acting out the stereotype of the eccentric, drugged out, far out, summer-of-love-style rocker. Lee often tousled with bandmates, and the situation behind the scenes was “classic” rock and roll — the requisite (and somewhat contradictory) drugged-out, drama-filled, hippie-values-espousing rock lifestyle of the “Sunset Strip” era. (After getting out of prison in 2006, Lee mounted a reunion comeback of sorts, which received mixed reviews. He died of lukemia in 2006. There’s a decent obituary here that discusses his life, work, and influence.)

At my house I’ve got no shackles
You can come and look if you want to –A House is Not a Motel

From the first strains of the driving, freewheeling “Alone Again Or” to Lee’s dark welcoming of “the other side” as life voiced in “The Red Telephone,” this record is packed with visions. It’s also packed with potential, a potential I sense the band never fully realized. The reasons for this could be many. There were complicated circumstances, and there are also many larger contexts that were behind those circumstances. A bunch of young dudes trying to get together and make rock music. The culture of drug addiction embraced and encouraged by the rock scene at the time. The often unachievable “dream” of fame and fortune for musicians. Whatever personal demons were going on for these people at the time. Our culture of racism that leads to more and heavier consequences for people of color, particularly when it comes to addiction and incarceration. And the endless succession of myriad other obstacles throw in the face of young artists, particularly artists who are not white and not mainstream.

So, yeah, when I listen to this record, I hear the drugs. I hear flowers on the wind. I hear young people struggling with the excitement, promise, and scariness of a world that is really, constantly, forever changing. And I also hear all the stuff that made these guys crash and burn. It’s the sound of rock and roll. The sound of the summer before the summer of love. And I think Arthur Lee heard it too. Do you?