Crash-Course No. 11: UltraVoxyCars, From the '70s Into the '80s

Behind the scenes, Sirens.

Another week, more tweaks to the format; the benefits of having a tiny platform never stops giving, really. Moving past that tiny pile of rubble...

Background
Learning a bunch of cool shit about Hall & Oates triggered a very specific and personal childhood memory. When that coincided with the recent passing of Ric Ocasek, the lead singer and public face of 1980s legends, The Cars, I decided to make this The Cars Week. Like most people, I comfortably karaoke at least a half dozen Cars songs, maybe even more, but I didn’t know much about them. There was the thing how googling “Ric Ocasek” reliably extends to “Ric Ocasek’s wife,” something that wouldn’t surprise anyone who knows anything about either Mr. Ocasek and Paulina Porizkova. (What so many failed to recognize: Ocasek had talent.) As for that memory…

Throughout my childhood, other kids, my older sisters, just society kept telling me that this band (e.g., Simple Minds for reasons I can neither recall nor explain) or that band (Split Enz?) started as a “punk band.” The angularity of The Cars’ sound (I borrowed that adjective, btw) made me wonder they fit that bill. The Cars arrived into the music world more or less fully-formed, as it turns out. Ocasek, along with the earlier departed Benjamin Orr, hit the ground running; some of their biggest hits – e.g., “Just What I Needed,” “My Best Friend’s Girl,” and “Good Times Roll” – appeared on their debut album. While I’m sure they have more ins, outs and points of interest than my cursory dip into them turned up, the only ones that feel worth mentioning are, 1) Orr and Ocasek starting in a Midwest-based folk act called Milkwood; and, 2) does anyone still represent for the band’s third album, Panorama. (For the record, I didn’t, but I also only gave it one, semi-distracted listen.)

So, ruined as I was by that Hall & Oates experience, I shifted to thinking about other bands. The time spent on The Cars wasn’t a total waste: I kept “Bye Bye Love” from their debut for the playlist plus the title track and “Let’s Go” from the follow-up, Candy-O. And The Cars are one of those bands that no one else really sounds like, and that’s admirable. Just not what I was after...

On Finding What I Wanted Across the Pond
Because I watched MTV from the get-go, I associate The Cars with a bunch of bands from the same time that got lumped under the label, “new wave,” most of them English. As happens with genre labeling, the filing gets complicated from the get-go, but I stumbled across a nice key-word definition in the Wikipedia entry on “new wave” that lays out a good, broad outline:

Crash-Course, No. 10: Daryl Hall & John Oates. Not Hall & Oates. A Little Respect.

It's still a stupid question.

Personal
If you grew up in the early 80s, you couldn’t avoid these two. At the same time, I might have bit a few dance moves from “You Make My Dreams.” It is very, very hard to lose the rhythm on that one.

A Little History
Daryl Hall and John Oates met very accidentally in Philadelphia, PA. Fate still had to throw them together at a late-1960s “battle of the bands” kind of event at the Adelphi Theater. They showed up separately, Hall with The Temptones and Oates for The Masters. When gunshots chased people from the event, Hall and Oates bumped into one another in an alley, introduced themselves, realized they shared enough inspirations and influences and, by every account I read, the rest was history.

They roomed together at Temple University, then various places across Philadelphia. One key person noticed them early – Tony Mottola, the managerial legend (who later married/managed Mariah Carey) – and they became his first act, and he their first manager. Atlantic signed them before they found their feet musically, or maybe just before they had the status to push-back. Atlantic connected them to producers, and fairly big ones (Todd Rundgren, I recognize, Arif Mardin, I don’t), and they churned out an album per year: Whole Oats (1972), Abandoned Luncheonette (1973), and War Babies (1974). The sound bounced between folk (B-side of Whole Oats, especially), soul, pop, and, by the time Rundgren got his hands in their production on War Babies, something closer to rock even...(gasp) hard rock. Nothing charted in the Atlantic years (“She’s Gone” did all right, and Minneapolis/St. Paul liked ‘em), and Atlantic dropped them after both they, and their fans couldn’t figure out what to make of War Babies. In an infamous-to-anyone-who’s-read-it Rolling Stone article in 1985, Oates offered this thought:

“That was our first test right there. It would have been easy to make Abandoned Luncheonette II. That would have set our entire career, but we didn’t do it. And people walked out of our concerts when we didn’t.”

When it comes to Hall & Oates, that sentence contains multitudes. Moving on…

Crash-Course, No. 9: Husker Du, Literally.

Fun. And those aren't umlauts.

Personal
While Hüsker Dü was on their last legs by the time I got to them, they were one of those bands that the people I looked to as cool kids liked. I never owned any album besides New Day Rising, but a week of listening to them demonstrates the retentive power of a half decade of hearing an album played at a party, or when a roommate falls a little too much in love with a band. If you can sing snippets 10, 20 years after the fact – and from the verses – you heard that album on heavy rotation at some point.

A Little History
Hüsker Dü hailed from St. Paul, Minnesota, during the boom years that saw them, The Replacements…and Prince gain national attention. (Yeah, yeah, Prince was on a different level.) They met at area record stores – first Grant Hart (drums/vox) and Greg Norton (bass/future restauranteur), and later Bob Mould (guitar/vox) – and they came up in the Minneapolis/St. Paul punk scene, with their personal emphasis on St. Paul. (A 2017 interview with a Minneapolis member-supported radio station, before Hart’s death at 56, is the best, if one-sided, origin story I found.) They showed off their hardcore roots on 1980’s Land Speed Record and that heightened aggression carried all the way up to their first full length album, 1983’s Everything Falls Apart. Like flowers in a field, however, some melodic inflections started coming through as early as the Metal Circus EP from the same year (hear the guitar on “First of the Last Calls”).

They swung for the fences almost immediately after that with the release of 1984’s double album, Zen Arcade. More musically eclectic than anything that came before (as measured by the distance between “Never Talking to You Again” and the explosive “I’ll Never Forget You”), it’s a loosely-held together concept album, a narrative about an anonymous protagonist leaving home from a barely-more accepting world. Before that album went out into the world, Mould spoke to the band’s ambition:

Crash-Course, No. 8: Weezer, A Franchise

Just off the beaten path, yet still familiar.

Personal
Both my wife and I liked well enough that they became a way to call “truce” to end a fight over which CD to play next. We never really ventured beyond Blue and Green (the Albums). I bought my wife Pinkerton for _____________ (birthday? Christmas? anniversary?), but she never really listened to it. I lost interest in the one song at a time since.

Band Bio
I don’t think anyone would argue if you called Weezer the vehicle for Rivers Cuomo’s songwriting; I’d dub his playing credits as guitar/vox/spirit animal. Cuomo bounced around a few bands (Avant Garde, Zoom, Fuzz) before bumping into Patrick Wilson (drums) and cohabitating with him and Matt Sharp, the band’s original bassist. Given that Weezer has fronted their albums with photos of themselves (did anyone else’s mom collect their succession of school photos in the same frame so you can walk through the years?), it’s incredible (no, really) that I missed the fact they’re now on their third bassist: it’s been Scott Shriner since 2001, with Mikey Welsh pitch-bassing on the Green Album. Brian Bell is the other guy, guitar/backing vox/keys. Oh, and the other members pick up projects of their own (e.g., Special Goodness, Space Twins, Rentals; Homie ) whenever Cuomo freaks out and paints his room black and puts insulation all over the windows to keep out the light.

Fun Details
The main thing I wanted to know going into “Weezer Week” was the love/hate tension that surrounded their second album, Pinkerton. The short answer: confessional meets creepy meets misogynistic, but it all panned out in the end(?); even Cuomo admitted he never wanted songs from the album heard or played again. I don’t think much of the album – I barely liked “El Scorcho,” and can’t remember the rest – but I also think art needs to be confessional, even when it’s creepy and, no matter how much I cringe through it, misogynistic. To borrow a favorite thought from Fred Rogers, if it can be mentioned, it can be managed.

Weezer opened for Dogstar, Keanu Reeves’ band, for their first show. They blew up following their debut (Blue) and the pressure of the follow up, combined with surgery to lengthen Cuomo’s leg and depressive isolation, explains why Pinkerton was so raw. The Green Album put River’s demons back in their cages, a sort of offering to their fans when they came back from hiatus. They tapped into technology/primal social media for Maladroit by letting fans download the mixes for Maladroit and giving feedback (“…the band said that this process was something of a failure, as the fans did not supply the group with coherent, constructive advice.” “Slob,” the worst song on the album, demonstrates the benefit of songwriting by (entitled) committee). Also of note:

“Weezer has sold 10.2 million albums in the US and over 35 million worldwide.”

In tipsy...uncharitable moment, I translated that as follows: “It sums them up: commercially successful, but largely unmemorable.” Related, it's a statement of some kind that they willingly rephrased "We're All on Drugs" to "We're All in Love" because someone asked them to.

The global hive-mind likes Weezer more than I do, and that’s fine. They’ve given them 25+ years as professional musicians. They put out two albums in 2019 – the Teal Album, a collection of covers (thus immediately forgettable), and the Black Album. They worked with Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio on the latter, and I give him/them credit for playing around with different sounds and instrumentation. Since it’s new, I rummaged around the ‘net for reviews of the Black Album and found a few (e.g., theneedledrop, Rolling Stone and Pitchfork). After a week of listening to Weezer, I got the most out of A.V. Club’s review, not least for including this passage:

“Cuomo and company are at the point where even their throwaway larks, like that surprise covers album of ’80s and ’90s songs, are scrutinized for signs of how or why Rivers intends to torture those who love the 1994 Blue Album most of all.”

I find that equal parts ironic and accurate for reasons I’ll get into below, but the Black Album still feels like Weezer, and basically sounds like them. I only kept one song from the Black Album on the playlist – “California Snow” – and that one got knocked pretty hard across all those reviews, so…

Last Words After a Week of ‘Em
Because I didn’t want to spread myself too thin, I focused on Pinkerton, Maladroit and the Black Album. If I had to call one of Weezer’s albums their best right now, I’d go with Maladroit for its thicker production (“American Gigolo”), doing a handful of hooks a little better (“Dope Nose”; good video, btw), and for the odd curveball (“Burndt Jamb”). It’s not a big curve. Based on those three, and what I already know from the Blue and Green Albums, the essential experience of listening to them boils down to waiting for them to be their “best possible Weezer” – i.e., to land the rock-kick moments (e.g., “Hash Pipe”) to pull off the clever turn of phrase that’s not too clever.

That’s where Weezer lost me originally and loses me still. They resort too readily to cute or quirky phrasing (ahem!) – e.g., using the verb “moonwalk” in the Black Album’s “Byzantine,” or the line about "your sick dance moves" instead of something more meaningful, or even ordinary. In general, I fault them for building a career around talking over sincerity. Then again, Pinkerton…

For what it’s worth, I’m told the Red Album is their most experimental, while the White Album is their best for their “new sound” (which, at time of writing, includes only that and the Black Album). Ultimately, I believe Weezer enjoys success for the same reason…let’s go with Dairy Queen does: they give their audience what they expect, and therefore want, but without playing in the same markets as, say, McDonald’s.

And that could explain why their fans tend to mutiny when they don’t get what they expect.