Hold Steady / Minutemen

The Hold Steady perform the Minutemen's "History Lesson Pt. 11" in 2008.

What if you encourage your fans to start their own band and your disciples start the Hold Steady?

I like the Hold Steady but am set on edge by their endless celebration/lament of the good old days. The typical Hold Steady song is a story of carousing and rehab set against a musical backdrop that ranges from Thin Lizzy to Bruce Springsteen. I am not surprised by their choice of the Minutemen's little ballad of nostalgic self-deprecation. The history of punk rock is best understood as a personal history of those who experienced it as a first hand fact in their lives. The music and fashion means little without the shared experience of punk rock as a community of outcasts.

Seeing the Hold Steady involves standing in a sea of people in their late twenties to their early forties raising their drinks and partying, egged on by beer saluting of the band. It ain't no punk show. It's a remembrance of a mythical punk show of the past. Are they celebration their own history of dissolution?

At best, the Hold Steady is about survival. You made it through your difficult years. Hoist a beer and give yourself a pat on the back.

Lincoln Caverns

This door leads to the cave.

Imagine all the things you could be right now if Lincoln Caverns was your mother.

The discovery of both of these caverns was remarkable. The first cavern was discovered in 1931 by road workers dynamiting a hill to build a highway. Pushing a stick of dynamite into a hole drilled in a rock face, they were surprised when the stick fell through the hole. Rather than proceed with caution, they dropped a lit stick of dynamite in and blew the side off a large hillside cavern. The blast revealed a quaint little cave, easily traversed in a half an hour. Opened by the land's owner as "Hi-Way-May" Caverns, the property was soon sold to as Myron Dunleavy, a small time vaudeville, circus and amusement park operator. Dunleavy saw the potential of a roadside attraction that was more than "roadside", it was practically part of the road.

The second cave's 1941 discovery was even darker. Sixteen years old and experiencing the sort of frustration that could not yet be slaked by punk rock and heavy petting, neither of which had yet been invented, teenage caveman Myron Dunleavy Jr., the son of Lincoln Cavern's owner, starts digging into the hills above the original cave. After two solid years of shoveling out a sinkhole, he uncovers the second cavern at the site, naming it "Whispering Rocks". Two years of digging a sinkhole. At age sixteen. And then spending the rest of one's life marketing the hole he had dug into the ground. I heard the rocks whispering "get away while you still can."

Charles Mingus's "All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother" shows the opposite end of the burdens of lineage. In his radical reworking of the standard "All The Things That You Are", Mingus propels his jazz combo out to the fringes.

Charles Mingus - All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother

Prisonshake: The Cut-Out Bin

Prisonshake missed their moment in 1988 and god bless them for that. Right at the critical time when they could have dropped an album (which was not the parlance in 1988) to take the mantel of drunk sloppy rock and roll from The Replacements, they stepped on their own dicks by releasing a box set: CD, LP, cassette, and 7" vinyl all packaged in a green foam stadium seat. By the time they released "The Roaring Third" CD in 1990 their best songs were gone and the moment had passed. And now after a ten year hiatus they come back with what? A double CD. Of course? And it is a brilliantly sloppy collection of rock songs. One that would have cemented their place in the record rack had it been released about twenty years ago. But one that sounds even sweeter today, when it stands alone.

The signature song, the coup de grace, is The Cut-Out Bin. Beginning with an answering machine message (though sadly, not left by or for GG Allin) (could anything be more dated than an answering machine message? Sounds of the telegraph tapping?) the song launches into a melodic mid-tempo corker containing all the truth about rock and roll and Prisonshake's place in it and our place in it.

Lyrically, the song breaks into three distinct sections with three powerful messages:

1. [Back in the day/before songs were numbered/and only bikers and sailors had tattoos/I worked all day, selling records to assholes/and huffing boo/and screwing you.] Has the particular sweet science of record store retailing every been so perfectly characterized? this is the view from the other side of the counter, where that apparently seething self-loathing bastard staring at you lurked.This nostalgic turn concludes with the line [Some say rock and roll has died/and at times like this I wish they were right] So goodbye record store and goodbye records. We have turned our back on the mighty transformative project of rock music.
   
2. [When they bring back the Cut-Out Bin/Save a spot for us right behind the Pretty Things] Did Prisonshake actually look into my record collection before writing this line? There they are in the lineup: ...Powertrane, Pretty Things, Prisonshake, Psychedelic Furs, Q65... Its uncanny how well they know their place in the rock order.
3. [No one gets a twilight to their career anymore/No gets to make mediocre record number 4] Depending on how you slice it, this could be Prisonshake's 4th record. Coincidence?

A more seemingly romantic and unwittingly unaware approach to the record rack came from The Kinks in 1996 with their final released song, To The Bone. [In the back of the record rack/ there's an old double pack/12 inches and black with an old crumbled cover but every track is stacked] The song takes a nose dive into being a pleasant romantic diversion after these towering introductory couplettes, and why shouldn't it? The Kinks had been loading up the Cut-Out Bin since 1973. Still it was nice for them to backhandedly acknowledge the dusty end of their output before packing it in.
Play:
Prisonshake - The Cut-Out Bin

The Kinks - To The Bone


Download:
Prisonshake - The Cut-Out Bin
The Kinks - To The Bone

American Hamburger Club

"Drunk on the kind of applause / That gets louder the lower you sink"
Mark Eitzel with American Music Club from "Gratitude Walks"

The new Neil Hamburger ...Sings Country Greats mixes comedic country songs with a few covers, John Entwistle's suicidal "Thinkin' It Over" and American Music Club's "The Hula Maiden". While I could see Hamburger having a few solo Who 8 tracks piled up by his console stereo, his selection of "The Hula Maiden" shows a certain amount of self awareness. He admits he is not actually a just a struggling comedian doing a country album in a jokey "I can't sing" sing-song style but that he is a guy who could and would select and sing an obscure indie rock number from a very obscure release from quite a number of years back. This may be the first instance of Hamburger winking at the audience. We now know that he is also "in on the joke."

Neil Hamburger's lifetime of misery illuminates the song from the inside, it also submarines the Mark Eitzel sad clown image in a way that all the funny lyrics Eitzel has written couldn't do. But do we want Eitzel to remain a person and Hamburger a character? Can Neil Hamburger be taken solely as a humorous creation? I think a certain amount of empathy has to be formed. Aren't we rooting for him to pull it together and become a successful comedian? Because he can't sink any lower than he has.

Neil Hamburger also sounds a lot like Doc Dart throughout this disc and the more melodic leanings of the Crucifuck's Wisconsin album- a masterpiece. Doc Dart (nie 26) sings country greats is a concept I could get behind.

Neil Hamburger - The Hula Maiden mp3