The 40th Anniversary of The Most Thrilling Mess I Ever Heard

After three decades, I've all but hung up my rock criticism work, but I haven't really, and I don't suppose I ever really could. I just feel alienated from the forms it takes today. Maybe they were always there, and I was just too naive to realize it, but I don't want to write about music academically, I'm lame at boosterism (though my dedication to certain careers may get me labeled that way), and I have never felt my strength was as a consumer guide.

Recently, I took on an assignment to write about The Clash. And all around the periphery of what I'm writing I'm reminded why I started writing about music in the first place, why I cared about music writing in the first place. It was never about rock versus pop or whatever other genre--with some of their grandest moments pure disco exhilaration, bands like the Clash (and the Clash in particular) tore down such walls as soon as someone tried to block their options.

It was about "rock" as something bigger than a commodity crafted by an artist for the appreciation of a knowing audience. It was about rock as a concept that challenged our perceptions of a rigged system and gave us strength to be and think on a bigger scale. With a band like the Clash, you weren't simply a listener, you were part of the action....and that meant everyone....the 16 year old kid I was chording alone with my records on a Hohner guitar my girlfriend bought me, friends who rode together under Oklahoma skies crying out "London's Burning" and folks who wrote about the music, too.

You can hear it in Greil Marcus's voice here as he defends the band's choices against a "sniveling backlash, even if they include objective mistakes, on its second album--the one first released in the U.S., the one that immediately won this Oklahoma kid over to my new favorite band in the world. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/give-em-enough-rope-86673/ 

And it was a world band. Marcus's description drives that home with references to "a world upside down, a world in which no one can be sure where they stand" and "a world in flames." The Clash handed me a bigger vision of the world than I'd ever imagined before, and it was all as immediate as rolling thunder drums and stabbing guitar.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_6UTZb-_vI

I'm not sure whether I read this review before I spotted this album on display at Bartlesville's Siegel Sound or after. I immediately picked it up because, though I'd been hearing about punk rock and the Clash in particular for some time, I'd never seen a Clash record before, and the Sex Pistols still seemed to me more like some kind of media stunt than the brilliant challenge I would later appreciate them for being. American "punk" was either still relatively obscure ("The Ramones") or labeled differently, so I heard folks like The Talking Heads and Blondie as miles from each other much less a movement. Where The Clash did fit in was in some trajectory I'd followed that year from Lou Reed to Patti Smith to Bruce Springsteen while, at the same time, falling in love with the Who moments before Keith Moon's death.

The thing was, when I put The Clash's first stateside release (the second album) on my turntable in January of 1979, I had no idea what to expect. What I heard immediately thrilled me like few listening experiences in my life, maybe like no other. Most things grow on me slowly. Of all of the above named artists, only The Who grabbed me by the throat in a similar way when I saw their video for "Who Are You" on Wolfman Jack or Don Kirshner or something. I was buying records the next day. Opening cut, "Safe European Home" sounded so surprising, so energetic and massive and crackling hot I wouldn't have been much surprised if my turntable had burst into flames.  

Yeah, Pearlman's production was messy--it's the muddiest of The Clash's records--but I didn't know what they sounded like before, so I wasn't going to argue with the most thrilling mess I'd ever heard. It's a huge sounding record, on one level, but it felt somehow more relatable than almost anything else. To those punks who found it a slick sell out, I can only say we have very different definitions of "slick," since that word suggests precision and clarity to me, and nothing about this album sounds particularly precise or clear, but it does hit relentlessly hard from beginning to end. After Marcus points out "the sound seems suppressed: the highs aren't there," I think he zeroes in on why it reached me so directly, calling it "accessible hard rock" that's "fast and noisy....with lyrical accents cracking the rough surface." What he doesn't capture there, he finds in the review as a whole, with lines like, "'Give 'Em Enough Rope' means to sound like trouble, not a meditation on it."

Oh, it did. And it changed my life for that very reason. I would never hear music the same way again, and I would never see the politics of my hometown or the politics of the world our corporate town harnessed the same way again. This was, after all, just a couple of years before a series of massive lay offs that would eliminate half of my friends' parents' jobs.

So, criticism as consumer advice would probably write this record off as something only for the completionist or advise playlists include only "Safe European Home" and "Stay Free." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuYzsrYSQx4 Academics could argue whether it solidified punk's rockist impulses by reaching for an American producer of a major rock band or liberated the music by the very same mechanisms. Those are fine things to do for specific reasons I suppose, but they don't motivate me. I want to thank the band for taking an unpopular risk and introducing themselves to the American heartland with sounds that hooked me and offered me a big chunk of the rest of my life. It was this album that did that. Though it only reached as high as 128 on the Billboard 200, that still means it probably had a similar effect on more than a few other kids, pushing the first album (released second) two positions higher (126) about six months later.

We were a part of the music, too. The fans always are. And that means something new every day (with each new sound and each discovery of old sounds) about who we can be. That's why I chose to write about music 33 years ago, and that's why I can't ever, really, give it up. That'd be like giving up on air or water or life itself. It'd certainly be giving up the path this explosion of righteous noise sent me down back in 1979.  

Joy Inside My Tears--Intocable's Vital Percepcion

               

Singer/accordionist Ricardo Munoz cries out in pain and also cries for joy, often at once, each syllable of his delivery as nuanced as that of a legendary soul or country singer. But, then, the whole of Intocable swings with an equally supple, hard-hitting and precise approach. Together, they turn conjunto “No Van A Entender,” a simple declaration of unconditional love (despite what others may think), into a sage stand for liberation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R2iRbR-hOw. “Beso Incompleto” becomes an epic rocker about not giving up on love, even after it’s clearly gone, “Nunca Volveras,” its signature Intocable ballad equivalent, an exquisite melody tenderly relished https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUS9FYQyIqs.

All twenty-four cuts here are about love and loss, even if the loss hasn’t happened yet, and they are also about everything else in life, sometimes all at once. If you understand the personal as political as this great band has for a quarter of a century, then you hear the love song as all that’s ever really needed—to talk about fighting for community and commitment to that fight, maintaining necessary boundaries and declarations of independence, a celebration of honesty, acceptance and growth. 

Declaring such high aims, the band pushes stylistic envelopes again and again, delivering a menacing bite to “Que Voy Hacer,” a song about dying in a relationship, while beginning with an atonal accordion solo and turning towards simmering funk on “Dimelo De Frente,” a truth-seeking record braced for whatever the answer may be. For these explorations of what seems today’s universal pain, it’s the 2019 record I turn to most—for the strength, the joy and the will to fight.  

Dream Baby Dream: The Promise of Blinded by the Light

 Review by Billy Chin

Staking out our spot in the pit before Bruce’s Nashville show in April 2014, I spotted a peculiar sight: A man of Asian or Middle Eastern descent with dark, curly hair was milling about, apparently by himself. He obviously stood out at a typical Springsteen concert. But he looked vaguely familiar to me, so I asked my teenage nephew Bridger to search on his phone for Greetings from Bury Park, a memoir written by a Pakistani who grew up in England as a Springsteen fan. A photo confirmed it was Sarfraz Manzoor, the book’s author. When I turned back to where he had been with the intention of telling him I loved his book, he was gone. 

I emailed Sarfraz shortly afterwards to relay the incident and pass on how his memoir resonated with me, a Japanese-American who discovered Springsteen during adolescence. In a gracious response, Sarfraz said he was now working on a screenplay based on the book. Gurinder Chadha, the director of Bend It Like Beckham, had agreed to make the movie.

Five years later, Blinded by the Light is hitting theaters across the country, and I took my family to see it an early “fan event” screening in Kansas City. The movie is a natural must-see for any Bruce fan, particularly the chance of getting to see it in a theater with the wall-to-wall Springsteen soundtrack. And my daughter Faith nailed it when she described the movie as “a Bruce Springsteen musical.” It could definitely translate to the stage. (Possibly the next Springsteen on Broadway production?)

But Chadha and Manzoor aren’t just trying to preach to the choir here. Like Springsteen’s music, Blinded by the Light has bigger ambitions with its universal themes of alienation and identity -- of trying to find individual freedom while still connecting to family, friends and a larger community. The main character Javed, in a great and brave performance from Viveik Kalra, discovers the music as a Pakistani teenager growing up in a culturally restrictive Muslim household. The scene when Javed sits alone in his bedroom and puts Springsteen on his Walkman visually captures the internal emotions most of us felt upon hearing the music for the first time. It made me think of both Dorothy’s life-changing moment in The Wizard of Oz, as well as the Big Man blowing down the doors of the Asbury Park club where he first played with Bruce.  

As a Muslim and a Sikh respectively, Javed and his fellow tramp Roops (played by the cool Aaron Phagura) spend much of the movie as outsiders trying to spread the Springsteen gospel in the working-class town of Luton, just outside London. It’s the late 1980s, the age of Thatcher and the National Front, so the parallels 30 years later cannot be ignored. But amid the racism, economic downturn, and cultural and religious roadblocks, Javed finds a way to stake a claim to his life. And instead of using Bruce’s songs as a cocoon to insulate himself from “this shitty world” (Roops's words), Javed ultimately discovers Springsteen’s music is the opening to a bigger and better life, doing his part to create a place where “nobody wins unless everybody wins.” With that universal and timeless message, Blinded by the Light is built for the long haul, making it a vital and joyful entry in the Springsteen canon.     

Author Sarfraz Manzoor, Patti Scialfa, Bruce Springsteen and Gurinder Chadha at Asbury Park Premiere

The Only Light We See: Craig Werner and Friends Making a Way Out of No Way

Group Picture: Last Day, Last Session of Calls and Responses

When I introduced Craig Werner at a Springsteen conference in 2005, my friend Charles Hughes tells me I said, “I could go on about all the accolades this man deserves, but I want to sum up the most important part: Craig Werner builds community.” I knew it because about half of my favorite music writers were either his former students or his associates. I didn’t know it near as well as I do now.

I wrote the draft of this blog after returning from an April conference at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, where a dozen or so of the people I feel closest to in the world (alongside a couple hundred more) were celebrating Craig’s career (alongside Nellie McKay, Tim Tyson, Danielle McGuire, Ed Pavlic and many others) building the school’s Department of Afro-American Studies. Because Craig didn’t want it to be about him, the conference was named “Calls and Responses: A Symposium on Teaching, Writing and Community.” It was a revelation. I didn’t know something like this could happen around academia.

I’ve been in—and of—and angry with academia for most of my life now, and it’s easy to see the limits—the more you know, the harder to see possibilities. I first realized this when I was just about 22 years old in my first year of graduate school. I stayed at the college where I was an undergraduate mainly because I had very little direction (sorta still wanted to be a musician despite nothing anyone would call talent), and my new wife needed to be there for her graduate degree. I had a wonderful undergraduate experience—the only really positive institutional, extended educational experience of my life. But when I went into graduate school, I saw the politics behind the curtain, and it robbed me of any illusions.

No need to break all that down. I liked my school, and loved a good number of my professors. Let’s just say I saw the caste system, and I saw the pettiness, and I saw that people loved rules more than ideas in school at about the same moment I began to understand all the dead ends in the larger political system. The way people are feeling right now, I relate to it from those days because of Iran Contra, Plantation Week at Oklahoma State University, and the fact that my thesis defense came down to a debate over my unconventional use of commas (in works of fiction). The institution I was in seemed obsessed with the trivial while overlooking the big picture.

Writing about music took me out of the confines of academia, and I must admit I’ve never been able to write to academics in any way I find as satisfying as writing to people far outside of schools. I have been most consistently inspired by people who never had “higher” education or were actually thrown out of their schools. So, on the third day of “Calls and Responses,” when travel problems kept several presenters from one session and Craig tapped me to maybe fill in, I knew I had something to say and began taking double the notes I normally take—and I take a lot of notes—just in case. Thankfully, there was no need for me to share it then.

I feel a need to share it now.

I think I can put this quite simply. Most of the people who have inspired me to think I could make a difference work in some antagonism with academic systems. We can start with musicians, who have often sent me driving miles past the turn off to my campus jobs before I turned back around. The writers and editors who taught me how to write included J-School grads and English teachers but were more often and impressively homemakers, homeless organizers, bricklayers, steelworkers, printmakers, and commercial music writers who dropped out to go into the work. These same people—and my students—taught me most of what I do right in the classroom. I teach veterans of many wars and refugees of crises around the world, and they each add something different and essential. When I went to this conference, I was "teaching" a nurse who was my age. She worked all night and attended my class at 11:00 a.m.

Bianca Martin, Riah Werner and Tim Tyson

I suppose I could do that if I had to, but I’m not sure. And she not only showed up every day, she was crucial to how my class worked. She could have run the thing. Maybe she did.

So I was watching this panel that had been somewhat reshaped to fill holes. Riah Werner, a teacher on the Ivory Coast, talked about how she improvises with next to nothing and how she learned to do that and how she learned to work around the system by growing up in and around this Afro-Am Studies Department. Bianca Martin, producer of NPR’s 1-A, talked about how Craig in particular actually listened to her unlike what she’d encountered before and pointed her toward the resources she needed. Sagashus Livingston, who founded the Infamous Mothers’ Project, “an education and media company that focuses on women who mother from the edge,” testified that the department helped her stay in college and then gave her the strength to go out on her own and start this business. Kevin Mullen, who moderated the panel, introduced us to the Odyssey Project that extends college education to those who normally would have no access. I have seen such work around the margins in my life, but it was almost never something supported by the places I work for a living.

I have this quote from Ms. Livingston, “even my professors were afraid,” as a step in the calculus that led her out of college and into her business. For me, that’s it. In the world we live in today, even your professors better be afraid. The fact that students and teachers communicated that honestly and openly in this department defies about 90% of my expectations in the ancient, gatekeeping systems of academia.

During the phenomenal veterans’ panel, the department’s Anthony Black told a story I told every class I had when I got back to my classroom because I remembered all too clearly when I first started teaching and the mantra from on high was “weed em out.” He told how, at the height of the Vietnam War, teaching assistants literally held the fate of their composition students in their hands. The school relied on Comp I as a gatekeeper, and if students didn’t pass, they would face the draft. “The TA’s stood up,” he recounted, touching on various kinds of rebellions led by English teachers in this time of crisis.

The “modern university” dates back to around 1079, and as with all such institutions, it is built to resist any challenge to its hierarchy. However, at a time when changing technologies challenge the very nature of work and never-ending war seems to be just another component of keeping the system in place, the university is facing a call to change unlike anything that’s happened in our lifetimes. (I believe in well over a thousand years.) Before this weekend conference, I assumed all such structures would ultimately crumble and fall. The Department of Afro-American Studies in Madison showed just what a revolutionary role such institutions can play.

Dave Marsh and Chris Buhalis help me make sense of it all

In general, I remain skeptical of existing institutions, but, in April, I saw what I saw and experienced what I experienced. Some of the finest writers, artists, teachers and musicians on the planet took me down a dark country road in Alabama, into the thickets of Vietnam and under the Iraqi desert sky and even the eastern Oklahoma hills of my former Cherokee home, and they played me, among other things, Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me.” As improbable as it was, I not only went there, but I didn’t feel alone. Beyond that, I left with a conviction that we will continue to carry the dialogue outward and bring what we learn back home, wherever that may be. 

Because the words are true, you know, however we find a way to live up their call—

Craig Werner, David Cantwell and CJ Janovy

“When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we’ll see
No, I won’t be afraid
No, I won’t be afraid
Just as long as you stand
Stand by me”

--That there, the secret of the universe.

Special thanks to everyone mentioned above, my friends C.J. Janovy and David Cantwell, who got me up there, and every other person I heard or with whom I talked and laughed and dabbed my eyes.

"Whenever you're in trouble..."