Sad Discovery

I was rather sad to read, in an interview with Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin, that Paul Simon didn’t actually write most of the songs on Graceland, took credit for writing them, and then told Los Lobos to sue him and see what would happen. Although I think what probably happened was that Los Lobos wrote a lot of the music (along with the African musicians on the album) and Simon came in, dicked with it, and wrote his own lyrics and melodies over it. I mean, most of it just sounds like Paul Simon anyway.

But that’s still really fucked up and sad.

links for 2008-04-18

In Which I Turn Once More To Sunday's Clown

I got a call from Las Vegas CityLife editor Steve Sebelius today.

“I’ve got some not-so-great news,” he said.

I started writing a column for the CityLife back in, oh, late 2000 or early 2001. Originally called “Cyber Spyder”, it was a sort of basic technology column. I did so at the request of then-editor Matt O’Brien, who had seen me rant at poetry readings at Cafe Roma, but wasn’t (I think) aware that I was already a professional journalist, of sorts.

When I was living in Seattle in 2001, I was wooed away from the CityLife by the Las Vegas Mercury, mainly by the method of offering me more money. My column for them — another tech-oriented column — was called “Paranoid Android”, because editors Andrew Kiraly and Geoff Schumacher didn’t like my original title, “All Tomorrow’s Parties”.

I enjoyed writing the column, but over time I realized I was tired of just writing about technology. I wanted to expand the column — something which the powers-that-be at the Mercury were unwilling to do. So I talked to Matt O’Brien, and I returned to the CityLife in the winter of 2001. My new column was called, as I’d wanted my Mercury column to be, “All Tomorrow’s Parties”. (For those of you who are unaware, “All Tomorrow’s Parties” is the name of one of my favorite Velvet Underground songs, as well as a book by one of my favorite authors, William Gibson.)

Originally, the column was supposed to be generally technology and futurism-oriented, but that soon went out the window. I wrote whatever the hell I wanted. To the credit of the various people who oversaw my column over the years — Matt O’Brien first and foremost amongst them” — I was rarely edited for content, though Matt would occasionally remove an extraneous “fuck” or “cocksucker” from each week’s installment.

I got fan mail. I got hate mail. In those early days, right after 9/11, someone once sent me an envelope full of white powder. (I almost snorted it.) I got endless mail from people telling me I was going to burn in hell, which I loved to read aloud.

I wrote a few cover stories for the paper. Two of them — a two-part series that Matt and I wrote about the homeless people living under the city — got national attention. We were nominated for a Pulitzer — by our own company, admittedly, that’s how Pulitzer nominations work — but still, it was pretty cool. (Matt has, of course, expanded those stories into a book, which by all accounts is doing pretty well. I went off to found an online music store instead of writing it with him.)

One July, some lunatic began calling my house and leaving messages that he thought we lived in the Matrix, that I was his guru, and that he was going to see if my powers were real by seeing if I could dodge bullets. The calls came from a downtown motel. I bought an air pistol, in the theory that if he came to my door, I could shoot him in the face with it and then lock the door and call the cops.

People recognized me — in restaurants, in clubs, at the corner grocery store in the middle of the night. I was a minor Vegas celebrity, not quite on par with that Australian guy who does the goofy car commercials, but close.

I won Nevada Press Association awards — a few of them. Some of my pieces got syndicated nationally and internationally.

Then Stephens Media (owners of the Las Vegas Review-Journal) bought the CityLife, folded the Mercury and brought their staff in to run things. They decided my column should run monthly rather than weekly, in rotation with a group of other “Slant” columnists. I’ve been told by several hundred people that it was this decision — as well as the decision to fire columnist Saab Lofton — that led them to put the CityLife down and never pick it up again.

But people still came up to me and told me how much they loved the column, how I had gotten them to think about things in a new way, how sometimes I’d given them comfort and made them feel not so alone.

And along the way, I wrote some of the finest things I’ve ever written — the column entitled “Meteors In A City Sky”, dated August 15th, 2002, for example, or the column “I Grieve”, about the Columbia tragedy, from February 2003. I talked about politics and the horror of the Bush administration — and, if I do say so myself, predicted a lot of the turns of political fortune that happened in the last eight years — and nanotechnology and transhumanism and reality television and rock and roll and a lot of other things. I pissed all over Las Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman, which I did and still do take great delight in. I angered people. I amused people.

And maybe I did some good. God, I hope I did some good.

And now it’s done. My column this past week was the last — fittingly, it was a story about transhumanism in the guise of Thomas Beattie, the man who’s having a baby. Back to my roots a bit. There will be no swan song for “All Tomorrow’s Parties”.

And I’m sad about that, because it has become so much of who I am. No matter what other shit I’ve done with myself since the planes hit the World Trade Center, I was always “Joshua Ellis, CityLife columnist”.

But all things do and must come to an end, and I’m happy that I had the run I did. I’m pretty sure that I’m the longest running columnist CityLife has ever had. The last seven — make it eight, with the original column — years have been a hell of a ride.

Since I cannot do it in the paper, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who read my columns over the years — those of you who loved it, who hated it, who came up to me at the coffeeshop or in the street or in a bar to talk to me about it, who wrote me letters telling me to keep it up, to fight the good fight. Thank you for reading. More importantly, thank you for giving me the chance to make you think about things, even if you disagreed with me, because at least I got you thinking. And that’s what I always wanted to do. Thank you for those endless, sacred days you gave me, as the Kinks once said.

I’ll still be here, of course, and I may soon show up in a couple of other places. I’m not done yet. Not by a long shot.

Turn it up. Bring the noise.

Reasons Why The Violent Femmes Are Not As Revered As The Pixies, And Some Reasons Why They Ought To Be; A Life Memoir

Part The First

  • The Femmes were not a coastal band. I’ve always thought of the Violent Femmes as being a Midwestern band, and all of the evidence I’ve seen over the past twenty years suggests this is true. People out here on the West Coast like the Femmes, but they don’t have that obsessive love that we had in places like Texas and Montana, and that I see in my friends from Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, etc. etc. I also think that the Femmes sound better in the Midwest. They sound awesome in LA or SF or Seattle or Vegas, as I can attest…but there’s something about Gordon Gano’s voice that resonates when it echoes against cornfields or amber waves of grain or the gray water of the Great Lakes. The same is not true of The Pixies. The Pixies, perhaps, are more universal — “Wave Of Mutilation (UK Surf Mix)” is fucking awesome when you’re driving down PCH from LA into Orange County, even though The Pixies were originally a Boston band. But as in all things, it’s the coasts that matter when it comes to the psychogeography of indie rock. That’s where most of the people who write about rock and roll live, and it’s certainly where the vast majority of people who care about the mythology of a few relatively obscure underground rock bands tend to live. So maybe that’s part of it.
  • People in the Femmes’ songs aren’t cool. They’re not. They’re sexually frustrated, creepy, paranoid, nervous, kinda retarded, occasionally homicidal. They’re pale and skinny, and not in that way that gets the H&M girls wet. They smoke too much. They wear ugly clothing. They’re full of loathing and self-loathing and obsession.
  • The Femmes weren’t cool. Gordon Gano’s a goofy-looking little Jesus freak. Collectively, in fact, the Femmes look more like a team of Wisconsin road-clearers than they do a rock band. They played acoustic guitars. They sang songs with titles like “American Music” and “Jesus Walking On The Water”. They were Rust Belt geeks. Now, this is a point of serious contention for me, because the Pixies weren’t cool, either. Ever. Black Francis was a chubby nerd. Kim Deal is awesome, but she looks like a waffle waitress. They didn’t do cool videos — the video for “Here Comes Your Man” is funny, but it doesn’t go anywhere. But both bands come from an ancient and bygone era when it was okay for underground rock bands to look like a bunch of plumbers on their weekend off rather than a) a pack of homosexual French bikers or b) a Burning Man camp. Neither the Femmes nor the Pixies made their career on clotheshorsing for the cover of Spin. (By the way, those sparks hitting you in the face? Totally coming off that axe I’m grinding. Sorry. But it damn well needs to be said.)
  • Nobody ever wore a Femmes shirt to prove they were cool. This is even true of Your Humble Narrator, who represents his indie cred with a Trompe Le Monde shirt but does not have, say, a Hallowed Ground shirt. I am very sad about this. But nobody ever needed to big-up the Femmes, because you just know they’re awesome. As one announcer once pointed out (captured forever on the band’s Add It Up collection), you cannot fuck with the Violent Femmes. You cannot fuck with this band.

Part The Second

I don’t know if this is still true, but I can tell you that the Violent Femmes were Our Secret when I was a teenager, a decade after that first album came out. They were one of the things you had to know about to be cool, like Love And Rockets (the comic, not the band) and ‘zines and David Lynch movies and Douglas Adams. You listened to the Femmes and you dropped acid and you talked a bunch of shit about the nature of reality and had trip sex with your female friends that usually didn’t go anywhere, afterwards. You would sit and shriek “Ten, ten, ten, ten for everything everything everything everything!” and air-guitar Brian Ritchie’s badass bass walk. (And Brian Ritchie is still one of the best rock and roll bass players, like, ever.)

One of the saddest things about the Internet era is that it provides us with instant access to information. This has, in some sense, limited the ability of disaffected teenagers in culturally arid places to form taste tribes around hoarded bits of shared culture. I don’t know if that moment still happens when the kid takes the dubbed copy of The Velvet Underground And Nico or Bossanova into her room, shuts the door, turns off the lights, lights up a clove cigarette, and has her mind blown forever. Now it’s just MP3s. I am a digital music guy and I’m the last one to bemoan the instant availability of almost the entire recorded musical output of humanity…but when one door opens, another one closes. Maybe they just have MySpace groups now, I don’t know.

But I still remember when Jeremy Snyder first put Violent Femmes in the tape deck of his shitty sky-blue European station wagon and played “Kiss Off” for me. I remember feeling like it was part of some world I never knew existed. I remember it sinking into my DNA and twisting it forever. I remember Gordon Gano singing “Why can’t I get just one screw / Believe me, I know what to do / But somethin’ won’t let me make love to you” and feeling it completely, all that lust and desperation. I had the Pixies, Concrete Blonde, Jane’s Addiction, Nine Inch Nails, and, yes, Nirvana. (I remember smashing up my bedroom once to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, in some adolescent rage thing.) I had Oingo Boingo and the Screaming Trees and the Pump Up The Volume soundtrack and the Lemonheads’ It’s A Shame About Ray and They Might Be Giants’ Flood. These were the birdhouses in my soul.

And I was desperately uncool. I wasn’t the rad indie rock kid. I wasn’t a beautiful loser. I was just a loser. I dressed poorly and I was awkward and acted weird and felt uncomfortable and horny and scared all the time — scared of the kids who beat the shit out of me, scared that I was really genuinely crazy, scared that I was never gonna get out of these horrible little towns where I found myself, places where the highlight of Friday night was hanging out at the Town Pump gas station and trying to get someone to buy us Schlitz, and maybe get some stoner chick to let me touch her tits.

And I’d go home and sneak in and go into my little bedroom and put on the Femmes and it was okay, because I wasn’t alone. There was some other twisted weirdo nerd out there, singing songs to me. And I was cooler than the jock assholes and the rednecks, because they just liked whatever stupid shitty music was on the radio, and I had this secret thing, me and my uncool friends. They didn’t have Violent Femmes albums at Wal-Mart. They weren’t on MTV (except on 120 Minutes, another secret lifeline). You couldn’t find out about them on Wikipedia. You just heard things, or read them in ‘zines. (Gordan Gano was this crazy gay dude who was also a teenage preacher. Every one of the Cure’s albums was about a different drug, and you could figure it out by looking at the liner notes and decoding the hidden messages. Juliana Hatfield was Evan Dando’s girlfriend, but she was still a virgin. They totally didn’t do it, because he loved her that much.)

And what significance does all of this have, in retrospect? Very little. No more than whether Carlos D has herpes, or whether Jenny Lewis really has gone out with every single dude whose band is signed to Saddle Creek Records, or whether the frontman for Red State Soundsystem really is a tantric sex god disguised as a sort of low-rent douchebag nerd Buddha. (Two of these, I know for a fact, are absolutely true.) It’s all just pop culture, ephemeral as dew on early morning grass. It keeps rolling. Every day, new mysteries, new obsessions, and new people to have them.

But it was part of my cultural mythology, part of what kept the boredom at bay, like believing that Brandon Lee was killed by Triad assassins or watching Blade Runner and Aliens with my friends on weekends and reading Umberto Eco and Jack Kerouac and sitting in diners all night long, chain-smoking and drinking fifty cent coffee with two creams and eight sugars until the waitress made us order something. (Cheese fries with a side of ranch, generally.) It kept me from killing myself because I couldn’t see any options, like my friend Sarah Harms.

So in that sense, the Violent Femmes saved my life, and maybe that’s worth something to you, worth enough to go pick up that first album and go sit in your bedroom in the dark and put it on and try to remember when every day might be your last, and how it didn’t fucking matter, because you were never going to die.

The clove cigarettes are optional, but recommended.

links for 2008-04-15