Smells Like Pop

The 1980s in San Francisco, and Heyday Records – An Interview with Pat Thomas by Alexander Laurence

This week is another Noise Pop in San Francisco. This is a yearly event where for five days many of the main venues in the city have nightly shows featuring some worthy bands. They are celebrating their twenty-year anniversary in 2012. Noise Pop was once a beacon of local Bay Area talent and new interesting indie bands. Over the years though it has become more mainstream, expensive, and dumb, and less specific, less focused on new exciting voices in music. Before Noise Pop, San Francisco had an interesting punk scene, and in the 1980s, there was an important post-punk folk revival. Many of the “Paisley Underground” bands from LA and relocated to SF in the mid-eighties.

The SF scene in the late 1980s/early 1990s was ripe for a new label to come in and give it a focus. I wanted to remember those times. The 1980s in San Francisco was the last time when rents were cheap, bohemianism ruled, and you could live in SF on nothing, and be an artist or a musician. This resulted in some real uncompromising music, some noise, and some real visionaries. To help me remember this time I spoke to Pat Thomas, of Heyday Records, who was definitely the man on the scene back then.

Pat Thomas is a writer, musician and record label boss. When I met him, he had just moved to San Francisco and started Heyday Records. From 1988 to 1992, Thomas released the debut albums from Barbara Manning, Chris Cacavas (Green on Red), Jack Waterson (Green on Red), Steven Roback/Viva Saturn (Rain Parade), Sonya Hunter, and the Bedlam Rovers. He filled a vacuum in San Francisco with his label and achieved worldwide success. Over the years he has been involved with Water Records, 4 Men With Beards, Light in The Attic records.

Over the years Pat Thomas has also performed with several bands. The most constant one is Mushroom, who continues to be active in 2012. His book “Listen Whitey – The Sights and Sounds of Black Power” is due out in March 2012 from Fantagraphics Books. 

Alexander Laurence: You have this website “Room One Two Four.” What does that mean?
Pat Thomas: It doesn’t have any significance. It’s always hard to come up with a name for a website. People have a lot of questions about music and academia. I can send them there and find out more.

AL: You are a journalist. You have been in the music business for thirty years. You play in the band Mushroom. You wrote this book Listen Whitey. You do it all. You are the renaissance guy.
Pat: Yeah. I joke about that. But I decided that I am a renaissance guy. There are people who are a lot more successful than I am, but they are people who are focused on doing just one thing. They may or may not do that well. One of the disappointing things about some of my favorite musicians from the Eighties is that they have never deviated off that path. I am not saying that they should become novelists. I just think that some of the bands keep making the same record. My band Mushroom doesn’t sound like anything I did with Heyday. Mushroom is this Miles Davis / Soft Machine jazzy prog rock thing. Heyday was Dylan /Lou Reed influenced stuff. I don’t want to get into a situation where I am doing the same thing. That is the reason I went back to school. I did this book about the Black Panthers. Life is too interesting yet too short to say to yourself that “I am going to do this one thing.”

AL: People do the narrow thing because it makes money. The Cure are in town this week playing their first three albums. Robert Smith has never strayed from path of The Cure, and done some weird record.
Pat: I was referring more to indie rock. I don’t expect Robert Smith to break the mold. But if you are a band who are not making any money at all, why not go off and do something else?

AL: And there is Greg Shaw and Bomp Records. I think that Greg Shaw focused on garage rock and you knew what you were getting when you bought a record on Bomp.
Pat: Yeah. I think that what I was doing was a wider scope.

AL: How did you end up in San Francisco?
Pat: It’s a long story. I was born in 1964. I grew in Rochester and Buffalo, NY. I went to college for a few years. Then in 1986, I moved to Copenhagen for a year, just to be a bum. I was reading Kerouac and Burroughs. At that time, most of their books were out of print in the USA, but in print in the UK. On my way to Denmark, I stopped in London and bought all the oddball books by Kerouac and Burroughs. I spent a year in Copenhagen and read them all.

AL: When did you get to SF?
Pat: I met some Americans in Copenhagen. They asked me if I had ever been to the west coast. I said “No, but I have always dreamed of going.” In the summer of 1987, I came out to San Francisco for a one week vacation. I fell in love with the place and just stayed. Most of us growing up on the east coast have a mythological view of California. We think of everything from the Johnny Carson Show to the Jefferson Airplane. We also think that LA and San Francisco are three hours away from each other. It’s a fantasy of one big wonderland.

AL: When I met you in 1987 or 1988, you had already started Heyday Records. How did that start?
Pat: When I am bored and lonely: that is when I start to feel creative. When I moved to San Francisco, I only knew a couple people. I was sitting around my apartment on a Saturday afternoon, and I couldn’t find a friend or a party. I said to myself: fuck it, I am going to start a record company. I am going to put out my own record. I was really obsessed with Barbara Manning. I was a fan of her first band 28th Day. I knew that she had a solo record halfway recorded. I didn’t even have a phone in my apartment. I called Barbara Manning on a pay phone. I told her “I am going to start a record label and I want your record to the first release.” And she said “Whatever dude.” That is how the label started. And I was obsessed with the Paisley Underground. That was one of the reasons I moved to California. I loved Green on Red and Dream Syndicate. I put out records by Chris Cacavas, Jack Waterson, and Steven Roback. The Paisley Underground was fizzling out, but I was determined to put out all the solo records.

AL: When did all these LA bands move to San Francisco?
Pat: Most of the bands were LA based. But the drummer of Green on Red had moved to San Francisco. Chuck Prophet was already a SF native. Steve Wynn was visiting San Francisco all the time in the 1980s. He loved going to parties on the weekend. The Dream Syndicate spent six months in SF when they were doing The Medicine Show. There has always been an LA-SF connection. True West was from Davis, California. I was a fan and friend to all these guys. Some of the bands had broken up. So I helped them get solo acoustic gigs at the Albion and the Paradise Lounge. [...]

Without any evidence of conflict between the former members of Sleater-Kinney, here at SLP we’re all about possibilities. After Carrie Brownstein got our hopes up last year with the announcement that Sleater-Kinney might get back together “in the next five years,” we were taken aback when they launched their separate ventures shortly afterward. Corin Tucker took off with her namesake project, and a few months later Brownstein and third member Janet Weiss scrapped together their own group—as if to say “Oh yeah, take this”–and walked right onto stage at SXSW and into fanfare across the country. So, like über-cool fantasy footballers, we decided to match up the hypothetically estranged bandmates from their debut albums – mano-a-mano, boca-a-boca. And we have to say, with the differing strengths of both albums, it’s something of a toss-up.

Corin Tucker arguably had the more difficult task of defining a unique sound, as her voice is so distinctively Sleater-Kinney, wailing and raw. But from the start of 1000 Years, the listener is confronted with a stripped-down guitar-and-vocals approach that is bare, even vulnerable: “My own family didn’t know me/ Anymore/ Who is the zombie/ That is wearing Mommy’s clothes?” While her backing instrumentation picks up the tempo, for the first part of the album Tucker is seemingly restrained, with lyrics and tone evoking Kristen Hersh at her most down-beat (but decipherable). Wild Flag, on the other hand, kicks off in the listener’s face with Brownstein’s herky-jerky vocals. “Romance” demonstrates its pop single-aspiring quality with keyboard and guitar straight out of 60s Britpop, sporadic echo, and an 80s girlgroup chorus complete with hand-claps. While the lead shifts to ex-Helium’s Mary Timony and back again, the tone is consistently driving and insistent, blazing through the addictive sugary-punk number “Boom.”

It would seem that the two albums go in opposite directions, with Corin Tucker playing the more somber note to Wild Flag’s easy joviality. But somewhere in the middle, these two albums cross paths. In “Doubt,” Tucker lets loose with her familiar vocal range, rising up and slamming down against a fast drum and electric guitar backdrop. The sound and intensity resonates with that of Wild Flag, a glimpse of the two bands’ common language and history. The chorus of Tucker’s “Riley” sounds a lot like the early verse of W.F.’s “Glass Tambourine.” But the latter song veers off onto a 60s Nico-esque psychedelic side-street, raising the question of whether this and other parts of Wild Flag should be taken with a grain of salt (“Play the part of the dragon slayer”??). While it’s not much of a stretch to imagine such lines in an ironic episode from a certain Brownstein TV project–and the band’s music videos do little to dispel such a notion–even if the songs were entirely tongue-in-cheek it wouldn’t negate their captivating frivolity: “Let the good times toll.” Tucker’s project is a stark contrast; enjoyable, yes, but far from frivolous. With stuff like “Thrift Store Coats,” a song that could be an anthem of the Great Recession, The Corin Tucker Band asks for a bit more.

In reality, it’s hard to imagine these talented former band-mates in much of a dispute, even with the enviable bombshell reception greeting Wild Flag, for whom the attached descriptor “supergroup” is already overused. The two bands recently played nearly back-to-back dates at the Doug Fir, and as some of Portland’s most admired public personas, the former band-mates surely cross paths. But for all the fine qualities of these two albums, to this writer the real supergroup was without a doubt Sleater-Kinney. If these two bands need assistance in working up to touring together, I’m sure there’s a mediator out there who could help them decide which plays first.  Just for the possibility of getting them back on stage together again.

Wild Flag– s/t: ★★★★★★★★★★
Corrine Tucker Band – 1,000 Years: ★★★★★★★★★★

I really like Steely Dan.[1] Over the past ten or fifteen years they have served a welcomed role as a recurring interest that unexpectedly returns every other year or so, always bringing new lyrics to unpack, unusually crafty musical phrases to discover, a previously buried yet thoroughly riveting guitar solo or even an entire song[2] that, for some reason, chose to remain hidden on previous listens.

Liking Steely Dan is not as divisive as it was a ten or fifteen years ago. Through the 80s and 90s, most everyone I knew dismissively grouped Steely Dan with the soft rock excess of the 70s (Fleetwood Mac, Seals and Crofts, etc.). Superficially, this is understandable. Steely Dan’s songs rely heavily on one or another of lilting sing-song choruses, ubiquitous 70s Rhodes piano (truly the paragon of offensive inoffensiveness), stiff white funk and, at times, even the slightly fey use of pseudo-exotic textures (bongos, light bossa nova rhythms, fake sitar, etc.). Somewhat surprisingly, however, time slowly rehabilitated Steely Dan and they are now regarded primarily in contrast to their inoffensive contemporaries and, as such, enjoy a general respect across the spectrum of outspoken music fans and critics.

But such rehabilitation inevitably resulted in a compromise that reduced Steely Dan to two fairly anemic signifiers: (1) an academic pursuit in the immaculate performance of complex song structures; and (2) a needling, biting sarcasm.[3] In other words, Steely Dan was welcomed back to the club of “serious” pop music so long as it assumed the role of the sardonic, pot-smoking prodigy in band camp who never lets you forget that he has a cooler record collection than you.

The musical aspect you have to appreciate (or not) for yourself. I am not sufficiently versed in music theory to do more than pretend to understand the true extent of their infamous unorthodox time signatures, what is really meant by “jazz chord progressions” or even how odd the elusive “mu chord”[4] really is. That said, a disproportionate number of my favorite guitar solos can be found in Steely Dan songs.[5]

Though easier to access, I posit that the true nature of their lyrics and, by extension, their twisted gestalt, is equally hard to put your finger on. Suffice to say that, dismissing Steely Dan as simple peddlers of “dark sarcasm” oversimplifies and soft sells what are, at heart, truly deranged songs.

Consider the following:

1. Their Name

Trivia time!  What do the bands Steely Dan, Soft Machine and Thin White Rope all have in common? That’s right!  They were all named in homage to beat writer William Burroughs.

“Steely Dan” was the name of a dildo that made a brief appearance in Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch.”[6] For a long time that was all I knew about Steely Dan the dildo and my hunch is that there a lot of people that know this piece of trivia that have never actually read “Naked Lunch.”  That is not intended as a slight — the book is simply hard to read.  It is a defiantly nonlinear shock piece with blatant button-pushing that can seem almost quaint in its dated and singular pursuit in alarming straight America.  Still, the book’s overall impact is impressively squalid, and it has a drug addict-as-nocturnal-amphibian motif that is uniquely unsettling.

But what of Steely Dan the dildo?

I don’t know if it is due to the slow normalization of pornography into the mainstream, but, to the extent that I thought about it, I think that I assumed that said dildo was relatively innocuous, perhaps repurposed as a non-sexual MacGuffin, neatly distanced from its lurid origin – perhaps filled with cash, state secrets or jewels.

It was only when I finally read Naked Lunch, that I realized both that this was my expectation, and just how wrong it was.  Steely Dan is a dildo.  Plain and simple.

As it turns out, we know a fair amount about “Steely Dan III from Yokohama.” For starters, we know the untimely fate of Steely Dan I (the victim of vaginal dentate) and Steely Dan II (chewed to bits by famished Candiru[7]). We also know that Steely Dan is rubber and, from context, we know that it is a strap on.

There is more.

It may give some readers comfort to know that Steely Dan III was used for heterosexual sex, somewhat of an anomaly in the cross-section of Burroughs’s writing that I am familiar with. “Whoosh!” I hear you exclaim. “I am certainly not homophobic, but I am glad that I can continue imaging Steely Dan as a traditional, innocuous suburban marital aid.”

Not so fast! In addition to squirting milk (huh?) in the brief time we know it, we see that Steely Dan III was used for….

…wait for it…

…wait for it…

…pegging.

Not that there is anything wrong with that.

[...]

Live at Brick and Mortar, San Francisco – July 23, 2011

Edge retired this year. One of the better modern-era professional wrestlers, he was consistently good in the ring, but even better on the mic doing promos. He had memorable runs as “The R-Rated Superstar” and as a surfer dude, and looked something like a juiced-up Jorma Kaukonen. Had he formed a band with the wrestler Sting, they might easily have bested both the “musicians” using the same monikers. But for me, Edge will always have a special place for his theme music, a sort-of generic grunge piece that starts with a girl whispering “You Think You Really Know Me.”

*      *      *       *

In 1977, I was working as music director for a small community radio station in Worcester, Mass. (Hello, WCUW!) One day, an odd manila legal envelope postmarked from Endicott, New York crossed my desk, hand addressed and customized with a pasted-on photo of a young man dressed like a prep school student offset by wholly inappropriate cat’s eye sunglasses and randomly affixed bandages. It contained a notification, in what looked like the scrawl of a demented six year old, that I would soon be receiving an LP by the man pictured on the envelope. This was Gary Wilson. I was intrigued.

When the LP arrived, and I gave it a spin, I went from intrigued to floored. I had heard nothing quite like it, and to this day it stands unique in the pantheon of recorded music. It was called “You Think You Really Know Me,” and clearly we didn’t.

It’s not hard to make the case that all music is simply a recombination of previous musical elements, and that musical evolution is a process almost as gradual and incremental as actual evolution. Occasionally, however, someone makes a distinct great leap forward, or, as in this case, recombines elements in such an unexpected and novel way as to shake the foundations of the evolutionary tree.

“You Think You Really Know Me” shockingly grafts the kind of smooth pop-jazz one normally associates with airport lounges to the outer reaches of avant-garde electronics. That may not seem a stretch to modern ears, but in 1977 no one, to my knowledge, had made that bridge. As if that wasn’t enough, Mr. Wilson sang his songs in a way that recalls Bill Murray’s SNL lounge singer (though I believe Wilson predates that character), but with a more nervous, distressed monotone that made his delivery of the lyrics entirely believable.

And oh!, what lyrics. The songs all center on an unhealthy obsession with high school girls by someone who clearly lives a vivid fantasy life in which he actually talks to them. But it is clear that nothing is further from the truth. This is a stalker, a loner, a perv, a sicko. The girls all bear generic names (Karen, Cindy, Linda and the like) and Wilson’s fetishizing of them comes off as the dark underbelly of the songs by that other Wilson, the sunshiny Brian.

Wilson had actually recorded an album of good but unremarkable instrumental jazz prior to “Think,” and followed the masterwork with a few singles, but nothing much happened with his career, and he disappeared. Cults are sometimes slow to build, and in his case people did not start to wrestle with the “outsider” genius of his record until decades later. In the Oughts, a few indie record labels, and contemporary musicians like Beck, started to buzz about this record, and, by happenstance and diligent searching, he was found, playing (of course) lounge jazz on the other side of the continent and working the night shift at a porn emporium. And he has started to record again. [...]

With the recent announcement of preproduction plans for a Shaggs biopic starring the Fanning sisters, it is high time to start relistening, or, for most, listening, to their milestone LP Philosophy of the World. Released in 1969, this record stands alone in the world of pop music. There is nothing, seriously, nothing, quite like it. The Shaggs were a trio (and sometimes quartet) of sisters from a small New England town who, soon after forming their band, were ushered into a studio by their father and, despite the incredulity of the recording engineer, recorded this accidental masterpiece.

Released on a micro-label, it received virtually no attention for over a decade. Frank Zappa made mention of it early on in an interview as being one of his favorite records; Lester Bangs wrote a short piece on it in the early 80s. Eventually, the smarties in NRBQ reissued it to some fanfare and even cobbled together a second LP out of outtakes and live performances.

…the Shaggs were a great band. They were incompetent, wincingly awful, and probably talentless. And pretty damned brilliant.

That’s as much of the facts as I am going to give you. In the case of the Shaggs, facts are beside the point. Sure, go ahead and look them up on the web. Find out who they were, where they went, who their father was. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that record. And here’s why.

Philosophy of the World has oft been regarded as the World’s Worst Record, much in the way that Plan Nine From Outer Space has been dubbed the World’s Worst Movie, and Ed Wood the World’s Worst Filmmaker. Wood is not the world’s worst filmmaker, of course. Michael Bay is. Plan Nine is endlessly entertaining, charming and full of joy that makes you glad you’ve seen it…every time you see it. Wood was, in fact, an auteur. And a savant. But he was, in the end, a great filmmaker.

Similarly, the Shaggs were a great band. They were incompetent, wincingly awful, and probably talentless. And pretty damned brilliant. Again, what I am about to impart is not the truth. It is not fact. It is merely true.
[...]

Just over a year ago, I learned about Vic Chesnutt’s suicide on the radio:  “Those of us who work on Fresh Air were upset and shocked…” The usually unflappable Terry Gross sounded shaken by the news, having interviewed the enigmatic singer just a month prior. He had told her the story of his southern childhood and its sudden about-face when he was partially paralyzed in a one-car accident. He had played “Flirted With You All My Life,” explaining that the intensely personal and bittersweet tune was a “break-up song with death.” He had even told her about his past attempts at suicide, joking, “it didn’t take.” Vic’s ability to craft stories with quirky wordsmithing and self-deprecating humor came through just as much in his interview as in his song-writing, and Terry Gross, like so many fans he left behind, was clearly charmed.

I first came across Vic Chesnutt in 1993’s Drunk, a carousing album that showcases Vic’s style in full-blown fury. An acquired taste for some listeners, for me his strained vocals over minimalist guitar chording (both aspects were due to the physical consequences of his accident) created a mesmerizing effect. This album swings from eccentric musings to raucous outbursts, and it brought to mind what would happen if David Sedaris were locked in a room too long with Tom Waits and Shane McGowan of The Pogues. Witness the fucked-up glorious spectacle in “Gluefoot”:  “Cross my heart/ Cross my eyes/ Stick a needle in my thigh/ Drop kicked my unscrewed lid and fiddled fiddled fiddled with what’s inside/ A rusty mass of mechinations….” The title track that follows is what might result if that same crew crashed an AA meeting. Denial it ain’t.

I was lucky to see Vic in concert several years later, sharing the stage with his friend Kristen Hersh (of Throwing Muses and 50foot Wave). They took turns playing acoustic songs, one building on a theme from the other.  Both were remarkable, but even Hersh would acknowledge that her poetic mania seemed dim alongside Vic’s scintillating wit, as he joked with the audience and sketched stark images with his lyrics. It is perhaps this latter quality that has attracted the most attention over the years—some have likened his songs to classic southern novels. Whether this is apt or not, he certainly was able to evoke a sense of time and place as so few of his contemporaries can (my favorite example is 2009’s “Sewing Machine,” recalling a childhood in a simpler time).  His songs are sometimes melancholy testaments to decay (as in “Degenerate”), at other times veering toward the downright goofy (“…we were laughing at Dapper Dan/ We were happy as giant clams…We were bumping our birth-marks/ we were happy as lilting larks” –“Society Sue”). As Michael Stipe pointed out, it is the unusual turns of phrase at the core of his songs that make them so oddly compelling. [...]

Death With Zolar X, Slim’s, San Francisco, February 25 2011

Sometimes rock is better when it’s weird.

Death was a 1970′s Detroit rock trio (the three Hackney brothers) who wrote and performed punk rock songs before it became fashionable, and remunerative, to do so. They didn’t make it big.  As lead singer Bobby explained to the audience, it was impossible for them to get their songs played on the radio. They were told by a friendly DJ, “Once corporations start running the radio stations, local bands are taken off the playlists.” That was back in 1975. Cut to 2009, and the re-release of their seven recorded songs on “For The Whole World To See”, and Jack White and Mos Def are championing the band. Not that you’ll hear them on the radio…

Death delivers the goods. The two surviving Hackney brothers play bass and drums, and close friend Bobbie Duncan shreds the guitar parts. The crowd ate it up, and the band were clearly enjoying their first-ever (!) trip to California. It was a Proto-Punk Revival Show. The band stuck around afterwords to shake hands and meet the people.  Awesome.

But that was only one of two acts.  Opening for Death were the original Glam Punk Pioneers Zolar X. It is difficult to describe how different these two trios are from one another, but the evidence is in:  punk rock is awfully freakin’ diverse. The elfin spacemen (and woman) transported the whole room to a truly strange planet that was definitely not Corporate Radio Earth. Standing in front of the stage next to Jello Biafra, whose Alternative Tentacles record label has released several Zolar X records, I was truly grateful for the chance to watch this performance. After the show, I spoke to some humans who looked suspiciously like the aliens playing the music. They were friendly enough to sign the LP I bought and pose for a photo.

This show cost only $16.

Rock is better when it’s weird!

As a FaceBook addict I have learned some surprising and terrifying truths about old friends of mine that might never have been revealed were it not for the safety of temporal distance and loosening of social mores. Amongst the most startling things I have learned about all my comrades from the early days of punk rockers is that we all inhabited the same closet. We were all secret proggers! Oh sure, we may have prattled on about the relative merits of the Damned and the Stranglers, but it turns out we were all going home and listening to King Crimson!

I imagine that there are many of you kids out there for whom the term “prog” is either new or results in a knee-jerk reaction of dread and nausea, like the announcement of a new Michael Bay movie. For you, a brief overview of the genre is in order.

“Prog” (short for “progressive rock”) had its golden age from approximately 1969 through 1979. The term covers a very wide swath of artists and styles, but can be loosely un
ˇderstood as an outgrowth of psychedelia that featured increasingly complex compositions, grandiose (and sometimes grand) ideas, technical virtuosity, and an affection for odd time signatures. Related genres include Space-Rock (Hawkwind, Tangerine Dream, and Pink Floyd reside here), which traveled the same sonic avenues, but in a less complex fashion, and Fusion, which tended to feature jazz-trained musicians seduced by the power, volume and fiscal possibilities of rock. Fusion tends toward extended improvisation over extended composition. Examples of note include the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Miles Davis.

These three bands have some similarities: a flair for showmanship and spectacle, a taste for pop tunes and hooks buried beneath the pomposity, and the tonalities and compositional tricks of pre-20th Century “classical” music, with nary a hint of modern serious music.

Of course the heavy hitters of Prog were Yes, Genesis, and ELP (Emerson Lake and Palmer). These three bands enjoyed huge followings among suburban teens who knew they didn’t care for disco, thought glam a bit too too, and spent a little too long staring at Boris Vallejo calendars.

Keith Emerson

These three bands have some similarities: a flair for showmanship and spectacle, a taste for pop tunes and hooks buried beneath the pomposity, and the tonalities and compositional tricks of pre-20th Century “classical” music, with nary a hint of modern serious music. I have a theory about these bands and their keyboard players and vocalists. I think (and this is purely conjecture, but see if it doesn’t make sense) these musicians were, through their obvious talent, forced into music lessons as children. I’m guessing they didn’t love the music, didn’t explore outside their musical academics, and became terrific players through no fault of their own. Thus, their music tended to be harmonically conservative and rigidly formal. They resented every moment at the keyboard and away from girls, liquor, girls, football, and girls.

I am guessing that by now, you’re onto the fact that I think their music is by and large dreadful. That’s true, but there are some exceptions: Yes had some great material on their early records before they had fully left their pop roots behind, and Genesis were often interesting when Peter Gabriel fronted the band, culminating in “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”, the finest entry in the typically yawn-inducing rock opera genre. Even ELP, that most egregious of all prog bands, had a lovely pop song, “Lucky Man”, as their first hit.

The sad truth is that these three bands spawned (and I use that word in the most satanic of senses) countless imitators, offspring, and wannabes, too numerous to list. Let us simply say, then, that if you come across a prog band new to your ears, spin that sucker before you drop the big bucks.

[...]

Back in the late 1970s, when the Knack was getting lots of (deserved) attention for “My Sharona,” a zillion other bands were putting out chunky pop songs full of muffled eighth notes played on Gibsons, which automatically made a song seem “new wave.” A standout in this category was a band whose main songwriters hailed from Oklahoma, of all places. After moving to L.A. and joining the scene on Sunset Strip, 20/20 put out one notable album (called 20/20) on the instantly cred-conferring Bomp! label (Greg Shaw, R.I.P.). It’s way out of print, but worth snapping up if you find it!

The Dandy Warhols have recently resurfaced in Portland, giving their fellow townies a chance to catch up with the prodigal band. A show at the Crystal and a sold-out set with their original line-up at Satyricon raised the question of whether The Dandys were on the verge of getting the adoring reception they found in so many other places but home. And, finally, with the fall’s release of The Capitol Years: 1995-2007, they have provided an excellent opportunity to take a look at where they have been all this time.

As an anthology, the album is frustratingly uneven, which in itself is a fairly accurate representation of the band’s trajectory. The Dandys show us glimmers of genius, then hit us with head-slapping whiplash. But even if the compilation doesn’t lend itself to a whole-hearted embrace, somehow it leaves the listener wanting more.

The album starts with selections from the band’s first album with Capitol, 1997’s Come Down.  Songs like “Boys Better” and “Everyday Should be a Holiday” come strong out of the gate, demonstrating why the label gave its stamp of approval (even after deep-sixing every song from the band’s first production in their studios).  It’s with “Not if You Were the Last Junkie,” however, that the Dandys reveal some of the spunk that brought them attention in the first place. Presumably a slap at their contemporaries–Courtney Taylor belts out “Heroin is so passé” in a voice that echoes a lot of Cobain’s gravel—the documentary “DiG!” suggests that the song was a futile “wake up” message to Courtney’s hero in the trainwreck that was the band The Brian Jonestown Massacre.

As it shifts to 2000’s 13 Tales of Urban Bohemia, the collection unveils the big sound that eventually brought the band wider attention. “Godless” ushers in the new approach, with Taylor’s breathy vocals over lazy brass, an enticing effect that makes it the best track of the album. Commercial success, however, was to wait for “Bohemian Like You.”  The song proved irresistible to Europeans—presumably the tongue-in-cheek nature of the lyrics, with reference to slacker foodie types (a la Portlandia) was not lost in translation.

From the heady days of massive outdoor German concerts and sweaty French discotheques, the album finds the band at the height of its success when it released “We Used to be Friends,” a middling song from a puzzling album, 2003’s Welcome to the Monkey House.  Its cover art sampled The Velvet Underground, adding a zipper for an extra phallic highlight to the banana in Andy Warhol’s famous piece. Whatever their whimsical intentions, the following track, “Scientist,” led me to pull over and dig out the original album’s CD case from under the car seat to see if the band had lost its collective mind. Even learning that the song has some connection to David Bowie doesn’t rescue it from the unfortunate resemblance to the theme from the movie Weird Science. Painful ear worm. Trying to recover, however, The Capitol Years jumps abruptly to “The Last High,” the sensual hit that served as an appropriately inappropriate anthem for the naughty-indie movie 9 Songs. [...]