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:

Crash-Course, No. 5: Gaytheism & PDX Pop Now! 2019

Fine. Mid-40s probably.

[Ed. - Full disclosure: I don't own any Gaytheist albums, so this kind of violates protocol, but I wanted to look into them, they just played PDX Pop Now! and I wanted to learn about them...I regret nothing.]

It’s sometimes easy to forget that there are more or less purely local bands. Whether it’s a question of what they play or…let’s call it personal aesthetic, some bands will never grow much beyond its immediate market. When you’re a three-piece playing under the name “Gaytheist” and you’re (guessing here) pushing 50, your shot at the big time probably passed a while back.

I assume Gaytheist is pushing 50 based on the names its front-man, Jason Rivera, dropped as the bands he saw growing up in the Pacific Northwest – e.g., ““Nirvana, Mudhoney, Yankee Wuss, Hazel, Tad, The Accused, Whermacht, Hitting Birth, Sissyface, The Need, Sicko.” (Fun story: I’ve knew the latter from their time in Pullman, WA; and I’ve fucked up their guest list at least once by being over-polite.) That said, I suspect it’s what and how they play more than their age that will always keep them at the local level. To borrow the phrasing that lingered on the tip of my tongue as I listened to them last week:

“It's not quite metal, but it is heavy.”

While they have “metal” passages across multiple songs – e.g., “Let’s Get Astrophysical” is solid sludge metal, also see the boiling riffs in the middle of “The Glory of Love, Part 2” – but, regardless of what they do on the guitar sound, their rhythm components sound more punk than metal to my ear. Once you add Rivera’s fairly eclectic, and specific lyrical choices – i.e., what drew me to them in the first place on “Post-Apocalyptic Lawsuit” and “Into the Trap” – you have a band built for a certain audience, and it ain’t a huge one.

Tim Hoff (bass) and Nick Parks (drums) round out Gaytheist, and they’ve had the same lineup since they started. Of all the things I learned about this week, none of them gave a sense of who they are quite like Rivera flat-out stating in a 2013 interview with Performer Mag that he writes with Parks in mind. And, as I’ve found across multiple (scarce) interviews/reviews, Gaytheist is a band built on co-writing (this is Rivera):

Crash-Course, No. 4: Celebrating PDX Pop Now!

Eh, they do pretty well sometimes.

With PDX Pop Now! 2019 happening over the weekend, I threw together this wee tribute to Portland, Oregon’s DIY, highly-affordable (it’s free) outdoor music festival. It’s been going on since 2004, it’s always been all-ages, and some of the bigger local names have given songs to the compilations that fund the festival each year.

I have far from a perfect record of attendance – think I’ve been to just three of ‘em, most recently in 2016 – but it’s usually fun. The current location isn’t the best - the organizers center it under the Hawthorne Bridge, with North and South stages on each side – and, unless they’ve got tarps this year, it’s largely uncovered. The crowds have been sparse during the day every time I’ve gone, which hurts the atmospherics a bit (it has looked downright desolate here and there), but the crowd fills in nicely when the sun goes down; it feels like a solid, regular music festival starting right after dinner.

The first year I went – this would have been 2006(?) – they held it at least partially at an indoor venue (think it was Loveland the year I went) and, if I could have one wish, they’d go back to that, but I get it at the same time.

Anyway, the coolest thing about PDX Pop Now! is the range of artists you can hear. An entire day spent there almost guarantees exposing yourself to something you normally wouldn’t listen to and that’s the festival’s strength. You get that on the compilations too – something that comes through in the 50 songs selected down below (and included on the Spotify playlist I’m posting with this). Last, but definitely not least, here’s information on where to find and, crucially, where to buy the compilations – and that gets you access to all of them. That helps with the funding for what is a goddamn cool event, however you take it in.

Some of your bigger local artists have contributed songs to past compilations and some of them (but not many) show up on the playlist I compiled. One thing I noticed as I was getting them onto the Spotify, a lot of the songs submitted for the compilations aren't the best-known works by many of these artists. In many cases, that happened because I'm pulling from older compilations (as old as 2005), and they've put out more, sometimes better work since that time. Best case, people can use the list and links below as a first step for exploring the local music scene. That's the goal here, and god knows I'll be doing that going forward. Just this post gives you/me about 47-48 bands/artists to work with, so have it.

Crash-Course, No. 3, ft. Yeah Yeah Yeahs: A Thing for B-Sides

Aw. L'il scamps. (Like circa 2000.)

“Karen is great because I just believe her when she sings, which is very, very important.”
- Brian (“Danger Mouse”) Burton

Given how much just about anyone to whom I’ve mentioned Yeah Yeah Yeahs refracts the band through the person of Karen O (aka, Karen Lee Orzolek), I’m equal parts surprised and happy that they never wound up as Karen O & Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The marketing arm can’t win ‘em all.

While I had the same personal entry into Yeah Yeah Yeahs as everyone else – e.g., “Maps” (purposely excluded from the playlist) – how many of those same people would have missed that song entirely unless they bought Rock Band 2 (spending all that time in the 2000s being a dad meant not getting out much)? When it comes to band like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, that apparently meant missing one hell of a live set. An interview that came out around the time Karen O was touring to support Crush Songs (2014) – something she referred to as a collection of demos – contrasted that person with the Karen O most fans know:

“…not what I was expecting after three years of watching her screech across stages in wrecked Chuck Taylors and tattered mini-skirts, pumping sweat and posturing with a devilish grin of smeared lipstick, her glittery eye shadow smudged and on the move across her face.”

A later Q&A with The Guardian makes that sound like what happened after she slowed down (fwiw, that’s the best source/history I found for Karen O or Yeah Yeah Yeahs).

Yeah Yeah Yeahs (“YYY”) have as many members as words in their name, and the other two are Nick Zinner (guitar/keys, and an impressive history with collaboration) and Brian Chase (drums, but also (possibly) the biggest musical chops of the bunch). The band formed in New York in 2000, by way of Oberlin and Bard Colleges. Zinner and Karen O found Chase after their original drummer backed out, and after they “decided to ‘shake things up a bit’ by forming a ‘trashy, punky, grimy’ band modeled after the art student, avant-punk bands Karen O was exposed to at Oberlin.”

Crash Course, No. 2: ft. Yo La Tengo, A Subtly Addicting Band (+ 5 Others!)

This one....

After several weeks of concocting plans and schedules (and scrapping them the next hour), a new five-year plan and this playlist came together. It’s built mostly around songs from the 2000s-era music-philic teen drama, The O.C. and a couple bands I found through Matador Records compilation that came out in ’97. I doubt that’s the first place I heard this week’s featured artist, but it’s possible.

Yo La Tengo, A Subtly Addicting Band
“In the context of Yo La Tengo, ‘just right’ means the noise ended up being soothing instead of grating, beautiful instead of ugly.”

The author of SPIN’s review of Yo La Tengo’s 2018 release, There’s a Riot Going On, executed a tidy two-fer with that sentence, summing up both the band and the album. He (assuming “Andy” is a he) fleshes that out a little more poetically in the next sentence: “Yo La Tengo have found tenderness and soul in the sound of humming speakers and overloaded amps.”

Hoboken, New Jersey’s Yo La Tengo has out-lasted scores of their contemporaries while never achieving anything approaching mainstream success; their “peak” came when their aptly-named 2009 album, Popular Songs, clawed its way to No. 58 on Billboard’s charts. And yet the band’s two founding members, Ira Kaplan and Georgia Georgia Hubley, persevered through 14 bassists (a detail that always comes up) before bassist James McNew backed into the band and, by general agreement, completed them as an act. McNew’s arrival coincided with the band signing with its long-time label, Matador Records, and creates a very clean B.C./A.D.-style split in its career/catalog. If you’re gazing over Yo La Tengo’s catalog, Painful (1993) is the first album of the band’s long “A.D.” era. Even with Kaplan and Hubley being married almost as long as Yo La Tengo has been around (1984 versus 1987), the band is an entirely collaborative effort. They’ve given “Yo La Tengo” writing credit since 1995’s Electro-Pura and, based on McNew’s description of how they compose, that’s fitting:

“But I had never been in a band where it was like, ‘The next section of the song begins when we decide, when we’re ready.’ It was always, ‘Count to 16 and then change.’ That’s just who Ira and Georgia were, and it’s who I became. It’s a huge part of the way we play music: a real open approach.”