Night Beat (32 page)

I have my own view of the subject, which is simply that when you’re trying to act out dreams of desperateness in a place where those dreams aren’t intrinsic, then you just have to act a little harder and a little tougher. After all, it’s a great kick, a great fancy of revolt, to feign hopelessness in a place just drowning with hope. When the passion and the moment faded, the punks could always kick back and settle into the subliminal, lulling rhythm of the city—and many of them did. That cadence of insensibility has been what’s always kept time here: it even, in its own way, gave the punks their momentum, and eventually it outlasted them. Undoubtedly, that made some of the scene’s detractors fairly happy. But for the rest of us, those few voices of outrage that startled this vast, unconcerned cityscape are something we miss terrifically.

ALONG THE WAY, the L.A. punk scene produced a handful of bands that were seen by some as great hopes—including X and the Go-Go’s (I know it’s hard to believe, but the Go-Go’s really
were
a punk band once upon a time, until A & M Records signed them and fixed that problem for good). Of those two groups, clearly X was the more considerable (though vastly less popular) force. Indeed, X made definitional, high-reaching, great punk records (especially
Wild Gift
and
Under the Big Black Sun
) and also played definitional, high-reaching, great live shows. In concert, guitarist Billy Zoom, drummer Don Bonebrake, bassist John Doe, and vocalist Exene Cervenka took songs like “Sex and Dying in High Society,” “Johnny Hit and Run Pauline,” “The Once Over Twice,” and “Your Phone’s Off the Hook, but You’re Not” and pushed them to their limit, as if they wanted to punish the structures of the songs in order to strengthen their meanings. At the same time, the group never abandoned its sense of essential unity. X was, after all, a band about community—for that matter, a band that asserted the ideal of family as a loving but practical-minded alternative to personal dissolution and fashionable nihilism—and for all the tension and frantic propulsion in their music, the individual elements of the sound hung together like firm, interconnected patterns.

But by 1985, X’s sense of family—and perhaps a bit of their spirit—began to fray. John Doe and Exene Cervenka not only sang the best team vocals in punk’s history, they had also been a real team—husband and wife. But then that marriage suffered a breakup, and though the pair’s creative partnership remained intact, the romantic disunion took its emotional toll.

In most ways that count, the album that came from that rupture,
Ain’t Love Grand,
was an album about how fiery love comes to rugged and embittered ends, and how, after the ruin, it can sometimes forge new bonds of esteem and comradeship. Of course, before one can arrive at any such understanding, one has to cut through the remembrances of romantic hell: all the charges and admissions of infidelity (“My Goodness” and “Little Honey”), all the mourning of a lost, ideal union (“All or Nothing” and “Watch the Sun Go Down”). At one point, in “Supercharged,” Exene delivers a taunting account of the feverish and relentless sex she enjoys with a new lover, and John Doe sings along with her, like a grim witness to his own exclusion. One can’t help but wonder, what must Doe have been thinking at such a moment?

Perhaps he was simply thinking that this is what one must do to get past the bad truths. After all, the band survived this rupture, and somehow emerged with one of its bravest works yet. It’s as if, in the place of children, Doe and Cervenka spawned a certain artistry that demanded a continued fellowship; they worked and sang together not merely for the sake of their music, but because of the knowledge that they could make music this grand and fulfilling and revealing no place else but in this band, with each other. The two no longer shared the same home or same love, but they certainly shared the same harmonies—an affinity they could find only in each other—and that’s worth whatever the cost of their continued alliance. Of course, this time it meant something far different for the two to sing together, and not surprisingly, they pulled off their most memorable performances in a trio of songs (“All or Nothing,” “Watch the Sun Go Down,” and “I’ll Stand Up for You”) where they stepped away from recriminations and faced the challenge of their abiding friendship and partnership. “When my friends put you down, I’ll stand up for you,” Doe sings to Exene in the album’s most heartening and generous moment. “I’ll stand up for you, and you’ll stand up for me.”

In their music and their forbearance, Doe and Cervenka asserted that some traditions should withstand the necessary negation that comes along with modern times and new values. X never made this claim more meaningfully than in
Ain’t Love Grand.

As for the Go-Go’s—I have to admit, I had a hard time liking them. The band’s first album,
Beauty and the Beat
(1981), was an eager though savvy attempt to meet commercial expectations of new wave diffusion, and their second
(Vacation,
1982) was merely the obvious follow-up attempt at cranking out
more
surface-fun fare. But the third record, 1984’s
Talk Show,
proved to be something more than their vindication—something closer to a self-directed work of vengeance, as if the group had something to make up for by upsetting their former pop refinement. In any event, some twist of thinking—or perhaps just the internal friction within the band during that season—occurred to make
Talk Show
a surprisingly hard-edged revelation. In fact, the record was so good it had the effect of splitting the group up—though not forever. When the band returned in 1994 with
Return to the Valley of the Go-Go’s,
they sounded like they were playing just for the mere fun of it. Yet “mere fun” can also be its own deep truth—especially in Los Angeles. As Greil Marcus noted in
Mystery Train,
L.A. is a city where Nathanael West’s and Raymond Chandler’s dark version of urban realism are no more reflective of deep truths than Brian Wilson’s fun-in-the-sun view of the city’s ethical climate. Pop, as a medium of fun, and fun as a purpose of pop, is still an inevitable and necessary tradition in the L.A. scene.

LOS ANGELES in the 1980s also produced two other bands I’d like to comment on briefly. One is the Minutemen, a three-man outfit made up of guitarist D. Boon, bassist Mike Watt, and drummer Mike Hurley, who were part of the scene nearly since its inception. In the early 1980s, they released what were two of the most impelling of all American hardcore albums (and perhaps the most inventive punk-style recordings since the Clash’s debut LP):
The Punch Line
and
What Makes a Man Start Fires.
They were politically and musically involving works, full of quick, hard thinking, and quicker, harder tempo changes.

The Minutemen were at once both the thinking listener’s and thinking musician’s hardcore band—which is to say they wrote and performed art-informed music from a singular and committed political point-of-view, and they played from a funk-derived punk perspective. Big, hard, fleet shards of bass guitar cut across the contending structure set up by the impetuous guitar lines and eruptive drum patterns, and in that vibrant webwork, surprising references—everything from Chuck Berry to Sly Stone, from Miles Davis to James “Blood” Ulmer—exposed themselves and took on new identities, and, in the process, new histories. Seeing them live, they made me feel I had finally seen Moby Dick onstage, and had finally understood why Ahab lost. Some things are too big to get over or around, and too irresistible to ignore.

On December 22, 1985, D. Boon was killed in an automobile accident, and the Minutemen necessarily came to an end. The loss was immense. In his quest with the Minutemen, Boon clearly worked more as a comrade in action—an equal—than as a lead figure. In fact, sometimes on record it was hard to sort out his particular songwriting style from that of Watts and Hurley, which may be a tribute to the sense of unity and functional democracy that the trio achieved—much like that achieved by groups as disparate as the Band and the Ornette Coleman Quartet. Onstage, though, Boon often seemed the more central and commanding figure in the Minutemen, and not merely because of his obvious physical bulk, nor because his vocals tended to sound a bit better humored and ironic than Watts’. Actually, what made him such a dominating performer was that he seemed to have some kind of imperative physical involvement with the music. I can recall shows in which he seemed to be wringing his guitar, pulling and twisting wondrous, complex clusters of notes from it, then reshaping them into new patterns to fit the vaulting rhythms being served up by Watts and Hurley.

D. Boon and the Minutemen left eleven albums and EPs and one epic-length cassette, comprising some of the most probing, resourceful, and continually surprising American music of the 1980s. Watt and Hurley went on to form fIREHOSE with guitarist and vocalist eD fROMOHIO, and in 1995, Mike Watt released a widely respected album,
Ball-Hog or Tugboat?,
featuring contributions by Eddie Vedder, Henry Rollins, Evan Dando, and members of Nirvana, Screaming Trees, Sonic Youth, Meat Puppets, and Soul Asylum.

PERHAPS MY FAVORITE 1980s L.A. punk group was the one that, at moments, also disappointed me the most: Dream Syndicate. In the early 1980s, I was working evenings in an L.A. record store, Westwood’s Rhino, alongside a young, friendly guy named Steve Wynn. I learned that Wynn had formed a band, Dream Syndicate, and he invited me to catch their maiden appearance at a Valley spot, the Country Club. From their first moments onstage, I was in love. They had that ideal mix of reference sounds—part Bob Dylan, part Velvet Underground, part Neil Young, part John Fogerty—but they also had something all their own: a willingness to take their music anywhere it might go at any given moment, even if that moment resulted in chaos or decomposition. They also had spirit and humor. The audience that night—who’d gathered to see some no-account new-wave headliner or another
—hated
Dream Syndicate on the spot. They booed the band, pelted them with beer cups, spit on them, and demanded they GET OFF THE STAGE. Finally, Wynn said, “I’ve got some good news for you: This is our last song of the night,” and for the first time in Dream Syndicate’s set, the audience erupted in a cheer. “The bad news,” he added, “is that it goes on for a
really
long time,” and the audience groaned as one. And the song
did
go on for a long time—about twenty-five minutes. By the time it was over, there were only maybe five people left seated in the hall, myself among them.

Dream Syndicate’s first full-length album,
Days of Wine and Roses,
was one of the best works of 1983—boisterous and reckless, and full of a weird and stirring beauty. That was when Dream Syndicate caught the ear of A & M Records (you remember them from the Go-Go’s, right?), and suddenly something went terribly wrong. Some said it was outside pressures, some said it was internal problems, but whatever the cause, Dream Syndicate seemed to freeze up right before our eyes and ears. The group’s A & M debut,
Medicine Show
(1984)—which had taken months to make and had cost a fortune—ended up sounding more drenched in attitude than meaning, and was utterly without the spark of spontaneity that had made their earlier music so riveting. Worse, the group’s live shows, which had once seemed so chancy, degenerated into pat, heartless performances. What had begun as an inspired vision had turned simply into another guileful career, and it was hardly surprising when, a few months later, we learned that the group’s leaders, Wynn and guitarist Karl Precoda, had parted ways.