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Friday, February 17, 2006
JILTED JOHN
Jilted John EP
Graham Fellows
Rabid : 1978
[Buy It]
SONIC REDUCER
The Dead Boys
Sonic Reducer 7"
Sire : 1977
Available on: Young, Loud, and Snotty
[Buy It]
DUST IN THE WIND
Kansas
Point of Know Return
Columbia : 1978
[Buy It]
At Rocks in Your Head, the record store on Prince Street, Ira and his clerk, Bob, tolerated our frequent but completely tightfisted presence with thinning patience: me, Josh, J.Z., Chris, Brant, Patrick; kids with the run of Soho when there wasn't much there but light industry and trucks and furtive looking loft-dwellers tossing keys tucked in a sock to visitors six flights below, and it was a relief when J.Z., recently returned from a visit to his cousins in London (actually an outlying suburb, he admitted later under duress), actually parted with a couple of bucks to buy "Going Steady" b/w "Jilted John," a single that rose to number 4 in the UK and probably signaled the end of yet another Golden Age of Punk to some purists but came like a blast of fresh air to American ears trembling under the ponderous weight of offerings like "Dust in the Wind," a song which imparted, highly lucratively but without nearly enough concision, the lost philosophy of the brontosaurus. All we are is dust in the wind, drops in an endless sea: it's an "idea" you collide with after putting in serious time with your favorite bong.
I have always looked for a kind of galloping, irrelevant joy in rock and roll, an admission that states, baldly: I can't groove, I can't really play, I'm not quite grown up, I'm wearing all my influences, don't try to see beyond my excitement, because I'm excited by my cereal, and the rain, and this girl here, and how much I hate, and what it looks like when I get the hair right, and here would be a good point at which to turn up the volume, or mash your foot down on the gas, or both, which is best. And that's why I can prize dumb-dumb songs like "Ev'rybody's Gonna Be Happy," and "Lies," and "Run, Run, Run," and "Stealing People's Mail," and of course "Jilted John."
It wasn't as if I was looking for any particular subject matter, for use of the vernacular, for stripped down instrumentation. Strictly speaking, "Jilted John," by the eponymous Jilted John (aka Graham Fellows) wasn't really punk at all; to this day it's considered a novelty hit in the UK. Fellows himself was and is an actor, exploiting the craze - albeit a Holy Craze - of punk. But here we have a tune that speaks of take-out food and bus stops, of living room TV dates, not of loving a woman and getting her, but of smashing in the face of the moron who did. That glorious chorus! "Gordon is a moron, Gordon is a moron, Gordon is a moron, Gordon is a moron!" Hosannas! "We" are dust in the wind? No, Gordon is.
*
For a less sunny view into the rear bedroom where teenage boys whack off and dream of killing things, there's "Sonic Reducer," a species of the I'm Really An Omnipotent Colossus, You Fuckers school of rock. So devastatingly vague and violent, drawing on such a grab-bag of imagery, it could have been the theme song of the Columbine High shootings. The rumor, which we never bothered to check out, was that a sonic reducer was some quotidian, bourgeois, specialist's piece of sound engineering equipment, hardly "punk" in the way we were meant to understand punk as being manufactured from broken guitars and razor blades, the raw materials of the true heart. We'll show you what a sonic reducer does, the Dead Boys supposedly said, a bit of apocrypha that nicely bookends the story that flangeing got its name because George Martin was so tired of explaining things to the technophobic John Lennon that he simply described artificial double tracking as putting Lennon's voice through a "double vibrocated sploshing flange." The Dead Boys were originally from Cleveland, their motto was "Fuck Art, Let's Rock," which in retrospect is not a terribly surprising motto to grace a Rust Belt coat of arms, but at the time it was a mystical call to action. The meat of "Sonic Reducer'"s lyric involves not needing mom, dad, or the girl either for that matter (unlike poor Jilted John), but the wonderful paroxysm it builds to ("I'll be a pharaoh soon/rule from some golden tomb/things will be different then/the sun will rise from here/I will be ten feet tall/and you'll be nothing at all") delivers the purgative, rather than redemptive, violence often lurking at the core of American punk.
We saw the Dead Boys at what I guess was a reunion gig, around 1980 at a doomed place called Heat. We stood up our friend David, who embarrasingly liked to wear a handknit sweater his mother had made him that was supposed to look like Rick Nielsen's checkerboard pullover. I suspect Stiv Bators was high as a kite on something; he was lingering in the entrance gently applying the club's re-entry rubber stamp to the foreheads of all the cute boys and then kissing them.
He died of internal injuries in 1990, having refused medical attention after being struck by a car in Paris. A few months later two of us were walking down St. Marks when we saw a sandwich board outside a bar announcing, mixed in somewhere amid the drink specials, Cheetah Chrome's live appearance there. We went in and there he was, playing an acoustic while seated on a three-legged stool. Like good old punkers we started hammering on the table and shouting, "'All This And More'! 'All This And More!'" Yes, old punk poseurs holler requests like any drunken businessman. He looked away, shaking his head. "There's always a couple of you assholes."
. . . . . . . . . .
Christopher Sorrentino's most recent novel, Trance, was a finalist for the
National Book AwardLabels: christopher sorrentino, writer's week
posted by Alex
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