Crash Course, No. 13: Ezra Furman, You've Already Missed Too Much

Is there a trailer for Transangelic Exodus?

Believe it or not, this post will be the first time I’ve had to publicly manage gender pronouns (yes, I probably need to get out more). So, to both address it early and explain an editorial choice, Ezra Furman is a gender-fluid musician, and someone who has taken a very thoughtful approach to the entire question of how to identify. Based on what I’ve read, it was only this year (2019) that Furman started identifying as transgender.

As for the pronoun choice, I’ve read one interview from this year that used “he,” and another interview that used “she.” Next, there’s Furman’s twitter bio: “my pronouns: he/she/him/her.” More than anything else, however, I to take my marching orders from this direct quote (from “one interview” above; good one, too):

“Sometimes I wonder what there is to say about it. Or maybe I feel tired of obsessing about it, caring about how I said it, worrying about people’s reaction and such. My dream has always been that it could be a non-issue, or at least, as much of an issue as any cherished part of who I am.”

The Independent went with “he/his,” and I will as well for the remainder of this post. If Furman ever puts his foot down one way or the other, I’ll honor his choice. More than anything else, I find Furman’s specific gender identity the least interesting about him. Because I think he/she kicks 20 asses, dammit. And I think the world of his/her music…and, yes, I’d struggle with “him/her,” because, clunky, but I would still respect the choice.

OK, on with the rest of it.

Personal

As much as I shit on Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist, I owe them for a lot of my new crushes. They fed me Furman’s “Tell Em All to Go to Hell,” a screed of a song that layers garage-rock production on a classic 50s tune (as the garage-rock originals did). The vibe borrows from punk – a culture that’s very much part of Furman’s work – but, as he often does, he drops in a blast from a saxophone that gives the track another dimension. I loved it the first time I heard it, and tagged him as someone to go deep on in the future. The future arrived the day after Spotify passed on “Evening Prayer aka Justice” (great, yet challenging protest pop) and the lacerating, “Thermometer.” Both of those came off his latest, Twelve Nudes, by the way.

Crash Course, No. 12: T.Rex, The Dinosaur That Boogied

It's funny what turns a man around...

Personal
While I’d heard of them before a decade ago, my own personal T.Rextasy (BP Fallon TM; that was that publicist’s second-bite evocation of “Beatlemania”) didn’t hit until a friend passed off Electric Warrior, The Slider and Futuristic Dragon. Besides ripping, oh, about a dozen favorite tracks (or north thereof) onto a handful of CDs, the only fully-formed thought I could offer on T.Rex was “Marc Bolan.” That phase lasted a couple years – a rarity for me, even before Spotify really messed me up – and it’s ridiculous that I never learned anything more about a band I fell for that hard.

A Little History
“Audiences had screamed at plenty of pop stars before, but Bolan was the first pop star to make it abundantly clear that he knew exactly why they were screaming.”

I didn’t scour the internet for every last detail and oddity about T.Rex – nearly all the notes and details below came from either T.Rex’s Wikipedia page and the BBC documentary I (the wonderful quote above excepted) - but still feel comfortable saying that the band happened because Marc Bolan, the lead singer and the one and only songwriter (by fiat), wanted to be famous very, very badly. It took him a lot of networking (the BBC doc is strong on this), studying, a little worshipping (see: epiphany watching Eric Clapton), and a couple inartful stabs at fame through the wrong vehicles before he found the formula that launched him to “a popularity in the UK comparable to that of the Beatles.” Once he figured out how to get what he wanted out of an electric guitar after years on acoustic, he juiced it with sexuality.

Bolan’s ample ego had to wait on the right vehicle and/or persona. He started as a pre-electric Bob Dylan knock-off (and would later get hit with his own version of “Judas”), before getting inserted into a band called John’s Children, an “interesting, if minor, blip on the British mod and psychedelic scene,” because they shared a manager with Bolan, and they needed a guitarist. They blew up big enough for The Who to invite them on a German tour…and it was in the middle of said tour that The Who kicked them off for either trying to upstage them, or causing a(n actual) riot, depending on who was opining. When John’s Children broke up almost immediately after performing at the “14 Hour Technicolor Dream” in April 1967, Bolan carried his notes from that experience with him (with a detour past Ravi Shankar).