Shrieks of Paradise, Correspondence&Rails#20, Dear Maximum RocknRoll

3923 Run of the Oaks Drive #G
Austin, TX 78704

Editors, Maximum RocknRoll
PO Box 460760
San Francisco, CA 94146

10/4/11

Hello-

Punk rock doesn’t mean anything anymore.  If you were there or part of it, sure-it means allot to you and for the rest of your life.  But this generation doesn’t get it.  And I fear they never will.  They’ll only think of punk rock in Guitar Hero terms, as a fashion or hairstyle.  Kurt Cobain.

11 years ago a band came out of Philly that was the real deal.  Seeing The Bad Vibes play meant you’d get your whole body chopped off in just under 15 minutes.  There might be bottles broke and basses through windows but you welcomed this annihilation.  It was rock and roll.  You had to find a way to get the world off your neck.

2002’s Hate Your Everything was propulsive-fast.  Furious and full of hate.  It was punk rock with as much virulence and nihilism that could be cranked into a 10 song, 15 minute album.
2005’s All The Right Ways To Do You Wrong took strides in being something exceptional within the genre.  It was post-punk but had lost none of the original ire.  I Smell A Rat, for example.  The song conveys vulnerability in a bitter, hands up way that many of the band’s contemporaries can’t touch.
After 6 years the guys are back.  They’re getting ready to release an EP and start playing the kind of shows that scare off the phonies and help us kill it in our heads.  I’m hoping you’ll consider running an interview I’ll be doing with them in a couple of weeks.

When I reviewed Hate Your Everything in 2002, I wrote that The Bad Vibes were Anti-Core Core.  They were against any kind of movement, even the one they were creating.  Reminds me of The Business, singing about being on the wrong side of whatever side there was.

Hail, hail rock and roll.

Yours,
Jim Trainer
Austin, TX
jimtrainer.wordpress.com
jimtrainer.net
verbicidemagazine.com

#LetterDay, send me your address and I’ll write you a letter.
P.O. Box 49921
Austin TX 78765
#goingforthepost—we’re all mad here.

Music Journalism

How can a 64-year-old John Lee Hooker song lure me into one of the douchiest bars on W.6th?
Rock and Roll that’s how.
Maybe I can hear the black voodoo in a sharecroppers heart, up from the delta and his first time in a big city anywhere, pluggin’ in and talkin’ bout the Henry Swing Club, probably terrified but certain he would take over Detroit and the World with rock&roll motherfucker.  yeah
b/c I was born in a small town just outside the City and the blues always sounded alright wit me and felt even better.
I truly believe that Johnny Lee was the first punkrocker O.G.  Maybe him&Wolf, certainly Son but perhaps not Muddy.  I shudder anytime anyone mentions the Stones, their eyes glazed over in dumb reverence to industry dogma.  I shudder when these folks are my people, in my country b/c
don’t you know those half-a-fags were listening to American folk music?  Slave hollers and r&b, barn burners and jukejoint stompers that had been blasting in shotgun shacks of the developing rural ghettos of America for decades?
We gave the world rock&roll.  Well, the blackman did.  And all he was listening to was the whiteman’s blues-music from other disenfranchised agrarians, downsized by the Industrial Revolution, singin’ they sad cowboy songs by campfires in the new wastelands of America.
America gave the world rock&roll and took everything else.  We did.  We gave it to the World.  And Europe.  So lower middle class snots can support heroin addictions and cruise liners to the Spanish country side with their super model girlfriends.  So their vapid phony rock&roll can pervade mass consciousness until its way past obsolete and meaning anything (if it ever did), but by then they’ll have books to write that’ll be bestsellers that are really nothing but more stroking off in our faces.  Fucking cunts.

The blues is why I don’t like:
Jack White, The Black Keys, Any Blues Revisionist Band, Eric Clapton, Bono/U2, The Rolling Stones and etc. etc. etc.  The classic rock catalog should be retired.  Anything contemporary that offers nothing but whiffs of classic rock that amount to nothing but farts should remain in the pop end of the spectrum, run their course and be flushed&forgotten.  And don’t worry about them, America.  They’ll catch a bump in about 20-30 years w/ generational biopics and books about nothing while we boogie wit Iggy&Zevon&Randy Newman&Hot Snakes&Cory Branan&Lovey Dovies&Thee Nosebleeds.  Don’t worry about them, punkrocker.  They will get fooled again.

Hey hey, my my,
rock and roll can never die.
-Neil Young

 

How To Become A Music Critic

A Herbsaint bender ain’t bad, per se, but this one was. I felt like I was paying for something I did in my past and I deserved it. That’s why&how come that rueful thick green bottle was in my kitchen, counter-side, for 7days and nights.
I was shacked up at the Fox Den, laying down with a squat glass full of the yellow stuff  and cigarette ash on my cargo shorts when the door blast open. She stood there, 6’1 and ba-boom to the floor. She wore black heels, a knee-length, knit black skirt and a black female-tux top. Her hair was done up in a serious bun, two blonde curls struck down her forehead like fists. She came into the place swinging her buxom around.
Her lips were blood red&full. Everything about her said that she was not fucking around.
“But…,” I started to say as she towered over me.
She threw up her hand and dropped a bag of CDs down on me.  They bounced off my crotch and I was ashamed and turned on.  Then she turned around and walked back out. I loved watching her go. I heard her heels crank down the stairs and she was gone.

That’s how I became a  music critic.

Even though you’re wearin’ those
up-town high heels
I can tell from your giant step
you been walkin’ through the cotton fields
-Old Crow Medicine Show, Down Home Girl

Give Us Your Heart

The kids today, maybe they the like the smug “joke on everybody” that contemporary rock bands perpetrate.  Rock and roll is serious business for me though.  The joke ain’t funny, rather, it feels like the joke is on me when I have to suffer some of the acts kickin it in the underground postNevermind.  Conversely, I am profoundly affected and appreciate rock and roll with the element essential of any great band: heart.  I want the heart and I need it bad.  I don’t care about fashion or irony when it comes to rock and roll.  Give us your heart or go home.
What gripped me the first time I saw NOLA’s Lovey Dovies was their heart.  They play LOUD.  There must be something in the water in New Orleans because the Lovey Dovies have that big, thick&ominous, sludge-like sound so common in bands from the Big Easy.  The guitar is thick, crunchy, distorted, heavy.  The drummer is just bashing his kit. He lays down some of that sloppy, destructo-swing that comes naturally when you’re playing from the heart.  The bass has a high, trebly and punchy tone.  Its melodic and obnoxious in a pop punk way.
I was riveted by their set during SXSW last March but it wasn’t until I got home and listened to their CD that I discovered what I love so much about the Lovey Dovies.  They could be a pop-punk band, if said pop-punk band had to trek through the ruin&mire of the swamp state to play a show to 10 people in the Live Music Capital of the World and mean it.
They’re raucous and loud but underneath it all is a real vulnerability.  The melodies this band plays, that guitarist/frontman James Hayes sings, that the underground could dismiss as pop in disgust, they’re full-on and out in the open.  It’s not campy or sentimental.  It’s not weak.
These guys sing about heartbreak the same way that bands like Tad from Seattle did before that Great White Hype of grunge in the 90s. They come and bleed with a sincerity that reminds me of Promise Ring warehouse shows back in Philly.  These guys are the real deal. James lays his heart out for her.  She doesn’t want it, he gets hurt.  Then the band explodes into it.  They bore through sadness in such a punk rock and adolescent way, without a hint of irony and couldn’t care less how it looks to be heartbroken.
Their eponymous debut is the soundtrack to the end of my lonely summer.  I had just got back from the pool when I put the CD on.  I took off my summer shirt, my shorts.  I hung them with the towels on the terrace outside.  It was getting cold out there and the sun was setting.  I put on my longsleeve blue sailor’s undershirt and my black knit cap.  The summer was over and I’d lost the only person who meant anything to me in the whole damn town.  That’s what the Lovey Dovies sound like to me: the sound of summer being over with no one around to care.

(Please read the interview I did with the Lovey Dovies here.)