{"id":21884,"date":"2014-08-06T09:20:57","date_gmt":"2014-08-06T13:20:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=21884"},"modified":"2014-08-06T09:31:08","modified_gmt":"2014-08-06T13:31:08","slug":"yesterdays-now-music-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/yesterdays-now-music-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Yesterday’s Now Music Today"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Thanks,

Thanks, Lee.<\/p><\/div>\n

As a teenager\u00a0I couldn\u2019t fall asleep without listening to music. Every night I\u2019d pop in a cassette of one of those King Biscuit Flower Hour concerts I\u2019d recorded off the radio and rock myself to sleep while studying the details of how the Attractions, for instance, could skillfully bring it down behind Elvis Costello on \u201cMotel Matches\u201d and then burst back into the fore with a Pete Thomas snare hit. Or the way Patti Smith Group could sloppily plow their way through their cover of \u201cMy Generation\u201d with not an ounce of finesse or style that the Who brought to the original. It didn\u2019t matter that they sounded like they were winging it. Smith barked out the lyrics as if possessed. I imagined the guys in the band unleashing shit-eating grins after an hour-long set dedicated to the noble effort of performing silted originals that awkwardly attempted to graft Smith\u2019s free verse poetry to musical variations of Them\u2019s \u201cGloria,\u201d their keynote cover song. As a practicing musician, I knew from experience the thrill of sloppily running through those garage-band classics.<\/p>\n

I had to keep my cassette tape collection fresh, so once a week I\u2019d load up a blank cassette and tape the latest King Biscuit concert off WMMR, excluding the monthly forays into up-and-coming Corporate Rock bands like Journey. WIOQ occasionally featured a newly released, vaguely New Wave album. One month I taped both a live concert and the second album by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. They seemed like a New Wave band even the traditional stoner dudes could grasp. For younger readers, I should note, the practice of taping music off the radio was the equivalent of downloading music illegally. We were the first generation to kill the record industry.<\/p>\n

In terms of listening to music for the purpose of falling asleep, an especially counterproductive practice occurred on Sunday nights, when I tuned into the University of Pennsylvania\u2019s WXPN for a low-wattage broadcast of Yesterday\u2019s Now Music Today<\/em>, hosted by someone named Lee Paris. I don\u2019t recall how I stumbled across this underground show. Paris had none of the insider cool of the FM DJs I\u2019d been getting accustomed to. He got nowhere near backstage with the Boss or Jackson Browne. He had no time for the Stones. His enthusiasm and sense of wonder were more in tune with the early \u201870s AM DJs I grew up with, but he lacked their concise professionalism and compressed, booming tone. He raved about the new music he was playing and the underground bands passing through Philadelphia\u2019s small clubs. He likely chatted up some of these bands, but he never gave the impression that he was a confidante of the artists, the way one legendary WIOQ DJ, in particular, did when dropping tales of his latest encounter with the Boss or Billy Joel.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When I first stumbled on Yesterday\u2019s Now Music Today<\/em> I was pulled in by the rare opportunity to hear a song from my own punk rock collection on the radio. Outside of the concert and new record release features, I\u2019d be lucky to hear Costello or the Clash on the radio more than once a month. What am I saying? I don\u2019t think I ever heard the Clash on commercial radio until \u201cTrain in Vain\u201d popped off London Calling<\/em>. (Today, when I need a cultural sign of acceptance least, I hear \u201cWashington Bullets,\u201d a song about US and UK imperialism, playing over the speakers at my local Chipotle, a farm fresh, organic burrito chain owned by McDonald\u2019s, of all imperialist corporations.) Back then, once a month, I might be blessed enough to hear \u201cPump it Up\u201d or \u201cOliver\u2019s Army\u201d on commercial radio. Nick Lowe\u2019s \u201cCruel to Be Kind\u201d was another top-shelf New Wave song that occasionally showed up on the airwaves and made me want to floor my Chevy Nova, the Devil Stallion, in celebration. After that it was a drop-off in the majesty of New Wave content on the commercial airwaves to the monthly broadcast of Patti Smith Group\u2019s \u201cBecause the Night\u201d (By the Power of Bruce!<\/em>) to quarterly airings of stuff like Blondie\u2019s \u201cOne Way or Another\u201d and Joe Jackson\u2019s \u201cIs She Really Going Out With Him.\u201d The Pretenders got played thanks to \u201cBrass in Pocket,\u201d but I wanted to hear one of the fast, hard, dirty songs from their debut. There was no hope of hearing the Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, the Undertones, the Ramones, Television, Generation X, or especially some bizarre band I first heard on Yesterday\u2019s Now Music Today<\/em>: Pere Ubu.<\/p>\n

A quick word about Generation X and their self-titled debut. You probably know this band included a young Billy Idol. I was introduced to them through their star turn lip-syncing to \u201cKiss Me Deadly\u201d in the band\u2019s garage studio in the film D.O.A.<\/em> I still stand behind the rock star power of that staged performance and their debut album, but even at the na\u00efve, yearning age of 17, I sensed that album was as glib and cynical as any bubblegum record I grew up rocking along to. Every few songs I felt a bit irked by the dimestore sloganeering of \u201cWild Youth\u201d or \u201cYour Generation.\u201d Young Billy Idol did a perfect job of projecting rebellious sex appeal, but he was projecting nevertheless. His was a facsimile of rock \u2018n roll cool more than the naturally emanating cool of young Elvis Presley. The entire Generation X package made me a little queasy, as it threw off an unflattering reflection of myself posed with guitar in hand, trying to catch a sideways glimpse of myself looking cool, writing spirited youth culture songs like my heroes. Thank god Generation X occasionally clicked with a truly great Youth Power anthem, like \u201cKiss Me Deadly\u201d and \u201c100 Punks,\u201d offering a more flattering glance at my aspirations.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d be lying if I said I bought into Lee Paris\u2019 vision of the future of rock \u2018n roll lock, stock, and barrel. He favored a lot of theatrical proto-goth, thumping dance club, and Vampire Rock stuff, like Siouxee & the Banshees, Bauhaus, Magazine, and the Cramps. After a few attempts at recording an entire hour of Yesterday\u2019s Now Music Today<\/em> and then having to skip through half the songs, I found it more economical to stop the recording a few measures into each song that wasn\u2019t impressing me, then rewinding to the end of the last good song and keeping the recorder on pause until the next song began. If the opening 8 measures promised a keeper I\u2019d let it roll to the end. If it was going to be another song over which Paris and I parted ways, I\u2019d rewind and anticipate the next song again. As I mentioned up front, the intense concentration this show required was not conducive to falling asleep.<\/p>\n

One night, as a turd faded out and Paris announced the completed set, my finger was poised on the pause button as he talked up Pere Ubu and a special song he was about to play. His tone was more serious than usual; this wasn\u2019t the light, enthusiastic tone he\u2019d use to introduce some obscure Factory Records band. The high-watt, inclusive Lee Paris was getting deep. I let the tape roll as two sparse, sharply distorted, contrapuntal guitar riffs played the intro to the journey that would be \u201cThirty Seconds Over Tokyo.\u201d There was a clear air of classic B-movie creepiness as singer David Thomas warbled in his helium-infused horror-show voice and the song\u2019s frequent stops and starts, but for all the artifice, this didn\u2019t fall to the Saturday morning Creature Double Feature introductory hokiness that turned me off to the occasionally promising Bauhaus. Pere Ubu skipped the warm-up act and got right to the discovery of the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers<\/em>. As the song inched along and built up to an \u201c1812 Overture\u201d-like frenzy, I\u2019d experienced a similar aural representation of a specific, inevitable dynamic in my psychological life. The guitar riffs grated against each other, then exploded. This is how I remember my parents relating to each other when I was a boy. A year later I would have a similar experience hearing the end of the Velvet Underground\u2019s \u201cMurder Mystery\u201d for the first time. There\u2019s that point when Lou Reed and Doug Yule, I presume, are spouting off disconnected parallel vocal lines while a piano plunks our a nursery rhyme melody in the background. To my ears, that part of the song became the musical equivalent the phenomenon of focusing a wheel spinning so fast in one direction that it looks like it is spinning in reverse. My parents\u2019 arguments inevitably reached that absurd degree of disagreeability. It would have been funny, like the voice of Charlie Brown\u2019s teacher in any Peanuts<\/em> cartoon, if it wasn\u2019t actually playing out in front of me, complete with tears, threats, and the occasional sound of my Mom being flung into a wall. But digress.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Lee Paris, I\u2019d go on to buy every Pere Ubu album I could find. I\u2019ve bought their first 4 albums in multiple formats: vinyl, CD, then on CD again, as part of a box set. I\u2019ve seen them live more than any other band, and yet I\u2019d be lying if I said they were My Favorite Band, or even among my Top 10. I love Pere Ubu, but they\u2019re a hard sell. Let\u2019s face it: for all my enlightened musical tastes, I am accepting of the fact that there\u2019s no strictly musical rationale for explaining my love of Pere Ubu to a rational adult. Even if I\u2019d learned to read music, I couldn\u2019t dazzle anyone by charting out their harmonic or rhythmic innovations. Their lyrics are not necessarily to be confused with poetry. With the exception of analog synth player Allen Ravenstine, who provided industrial orchestrations of unusual beauty, there\u2019s not a member of the band that would have inspired feature articles in Guitar Player<\/em> or Modern Drummer<\/em>, magazines geared to chops-aspiring musicians. The music of Pere Ubu taps into an emotional, psychological state that resonates deeply with me and helps me make sense of some difficult facts of life. It rocks, sure, but it\u2019s more than that. Perhaps there were experiences in the late Lee Paris\u2019 life that led him to find inexplicable beauty in the music of Siouxee & the Banshees.<\/p>\n