Crash-Course, No. 7: Wild Flag...Ooh, And Who's That Behind Them?

It was a fleeting moment in time...

Wild Fang was a short-lived, cross-country super-group, a mash-up of members from Helium, The Minders, and Sleater-Kinney – but mostly Sleater-Kinney. The latter had disbanded about five years prior (2006 to 2011) and, in her very thorough telling (this is the source for a lot of what's below), Carrie Brownstein had even stepped away from music. At some point during 2010, she, Janet Weiss (both of Sleater-Kinney) and Rebecca Cole (The Minders) got invited to contribute to a project called “[!Women Art Revolution]” and a quirk in the creative process made Brownstein think of Mary Timony (Helium). Over the next several months, that accidental collaboration lead to a couple handfuls of songs and, eventually, touring. Extensive touring, as it happens, and with a mission:

“I think one of the reasons we toured so much before the album came out was because we almost wanted to give people a chance to reject it.”

Based on what little I read Wild Fang, different members brought different motivations to the project. As alluded to in the quote above, Brownstein got to a spot where she missed music (Weiss, probably less so; she stayed busy), but didn’t want to go through being Sleater-Kinney again. With 13 years between Helium’s last unplugging of the mics and Brownstein’s phone call, and after burning out on solo projects, Timony was already thinking about collaborating when Brownstein reached out. Cole, meanwhile, had looked hard enough for something to do to find graduate school. They got together in the end, put out an album, and held together for three years, or thereabouts.

When they called it quits, Brownstein blamed logistics, but maybe Cole outlined the future we she talked about the excitement about the work that kept Wild Flag going. They only managed the one album. It’s a decent album, certainly not offensive, but I can barely remember the two songs that I posted on the weekly Spotify playlist (and grudgingly, more “plus-ones” than invites; the songs are “Endless Talk” and “Racehorse”). If you find it (username: snackyd), you’ll see plenty of Helium and Sleater-Kinney on there, so this probably has less to do with the artists involved, than how they fit together.

July 2019 MAME Playlist/Post: A Review, and the Last of Its Kind

This has multiple interpretations, but I have only one...

Hola, and welcome to what I think will be the last post of its kind in over-arching MAME project. Due to the simple fact that the way I was posting ate up too much of my time, I’m going back to writing band/artist-specific posts – and this time with the emphasis on the artist. For the record, those will come out as I get them done, and that’s something that depends quite a bit on the artist and my relationship to them.

That’s another thought for another day, and this post is about the old/former model I’ve been using for these posts/playlists. I actually wrote five (5) of them this month (holy shit, I had time?), and they’re all decent. Moreover, they include links to…I think over 150 songs, and by almost as many artists. (I kid, I kid; the people I really like get up to a half-dozen songs, while some others get two, three or four.) I’ll post the 50-song playlist I created from that collection of songs to Spotify – and, if you like the balance of that selection, and have Spotify, my handle is snackyd.

That’s all I have to say for this post. And, for anyone who’s curious, Wild Flag will be the next band I review. For what it’s worth, I bought that one, but don’t think I ever cared for it that much, so it shouldn’t take too long for that post to go up.

That’s all the editorial content. In the event you haven’t read (or listened to) any of the earlier playlists, links to the playlists/posts are down below, identified to the artists/free festivals I reviewed for each week in July 2019. Here goes:

Yo La Tengo, A Subtly Addicting Band (yes, I’m totally cheating, but they’re fucking amazing!)

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, A Thing for B-Sides

Celebrating PDX Pop Now!

Gaytheism, and PDX Pop Now! 2019

X, Punk Rock for the Heartland

That’s it for this piece of Middle Age Music Express’ history. I hope the next phase goes better. And produces more coherent posts. I’m groping toward a useful future. Join me!

Crash-Course, No. 6: X, Punk Rock for the Heartland

Heroes/legends.

Los Angeles punk legends X have only one member actually from LA – drummer DJ Bonebrake, and it turns out even he’s a valley kid. The rest of band hail from Tallahassee (Exene Cervenka, vocals/spirit animal), Illinois (Billy Zoom, guitar/style), and Baltimore (John Doe bass/vocals/anchor). The better your feel for American geography, the more those starting points align, but there aren’t many things more quintessentially American than chasing dreams in the City of Angels.

Over the past week looking into X, the fact they actually tried to get famous surprised me as much as anything. After the reasonably polished More Fun in the New World failed to gain enough cash and attention, Zoom threatened to leave the band if they didn’t get big enough returns on the next album. The band handed production over to Michael Wagener, the same guy navigating the hair metal scene for Stryper and Dokken, and 1987's Ain’t Love Grand came out on the other side. It’s a stunningly awful album, the first side in particular, one that “sounds like it was recorded in a strip club for a strip club.” The pay day didn’t come either. Whatever his role in the entire snafu, Zoom offered this perfect riposte to anyone who ever accused the band of selling out:

“Selling out is when you get a bunch of money. If you didn’t get a bunch of money, you didn’t sell out.”

X did, however, push against the heart of their appeal on Ain’t Love Grand, of what made them feel so authentic. I pulled a lot of the above from a 2019 retrospective on X in an outlet called The Outline (with some filling in from a 2017 Rolling Stone retrospective on the band’s 40th anniversary). Anyone curious about how X formed (poetry classes, through the classified ads), whether or not the girl from the song “Los Angeles” was real (yes), how their sound evolved will do a lot better to stop reading this, and go read both of those. The Outline piece, however, gives the best and fullest account of their sound, inspirations and influences. The author, Andrew Holter, also knows what to borrow, as when he lifts a quote from a 1987 review in The New York Times on “American rock-and-roll” in the mid-1980s, and lumps X in with that sound: