Many years ago, I used to write for the Morning Call newspaper in Allentown, PA. And I still refer to it from time to time.
The newspaper, like many small provincial operations, was mad to publicize any and all locals, no matter how odious they might be. If they were from town, the reasoning was, they had to be great. Plus they’d always buy a couple copies of the newspaper if they could see themselves in it.
The news about the arrests of the Christian white identity nuts looking to spark a revolution for the bringing down of the US government took me out to the website of the Hutaree.
There — right up front — was a link to the Hutaree’s favorite rock band, Poker Face.
My colleague, Chuck, also noticed on the I Love Music chat board (link in the Blogroll section). He pointed out the band was from Bethlehem and that he’d listened to a number of promotional CDs from them over the years.
Now, this ain’t gonna be the rare occasion of me making nice. It’s another example of how the Lehigh Valley is home to a large assortment of far right kooks with views on politics and anyone who’s not like them characterized only by fear and unreasoning hostility.
The Morning Call newspaper had a free-lancer review Poker Face in November of last year. It’s here.
Poker Face, explained the newspaper, was making a political statement in hard rock.
Here’s a ‘political statement’ on the Hutaree, such as it is — a no-comment with comment, from the Poker Face website yesterday:
At the present time, Poker Face has no comment on the situation developing/unfolding with the Hutaree folks.
But given the governments track record against we the free, it makes us suspect government motives first, not the Hutaree.
The band, the website explains, “has been dubbed the leading truth/freedom band in the Union … this four piece band has made it their mission to expose the lies & scandals coming out the Union’s Capitol.”
For the Morning Call, Dave Howell wrote this unintentionally hilarious bit:
There is a goofy brilliance on “Peace or War: Songs for the Revolution,??? and I mean that as a compliment. In a time when so many bands sound alike, these guys are following their own road.
Having worked there this is not really a surprise.
The Morning Call is a place where many, but by no means all, of the employees are half-assed shucks incapable of noting even painfully obvious details about the subjects they choose to cover.
Yes, Poker Face is definitely following a unique road, one many decent people might choose not to even tepidly recommend.
Sparked by natural intellectual curiosity, colleague Chuck spent more time than was perhaps wise on Poker Face material.
And I defer to him, on I Love Music, for this:
As for Poker Face, what I called “flirting with Anti-Semitism” above might be understating things, given their complaints about “how many treasonous dual loyalist Jews have gotten away with their SPYING crimes,” not to mention, uh, “the fraud of the holocaust.” (And in re: Oklahoma, they call [Tim McVeigh], “Tom McVay,” say he was a Patsy.)
Lyric snips, displayed on the website, taken from various tunes:
ABC, CBS, NBC CNN…. AP, UPI, BBC LIE THE LIE
Litton, Merck & Glaxo, Phizer Lilly J& J…. CDC, FDA NIH & AMA Time, Warner, AOL, Viacom & Disney ….. Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Texaco Ford, Rand, Heritage, Rockefeller, Carnegie ….. Illuminati, Fabians, Jacobins, Club of Rome Darwin, Karl Marx, Gramsci, Albert Pike ….. TriLats, Bilderberg, CFR are the whores
GATT, NAFTA, IMF, World Trade, & World Bank .. WACO, OKC Gordon Khal,& Ruby Ridge WACO, OKC Gordon Khal,& Ruby Ridge, Were JFK & RFK murdered by our CIA Were JFK & MLK murdered by our CIA, Were JFK & RFK murdered by our CIA
It’s actually Gordon Kahl — the organizer of a chapter of the anti-Semitic group called Posse Comitatus, one responsible for shootouts with government men in which two of the latter were killed.
From “FinCen,” a song apparently aimed at the US government’s financial crimes enforcement unit:
I think we’ve had just about enough
It won’t take to much to set things off
Down, you’re going down
I know my brothers back me up
Don’t, you, tell
Tell me what to do
You suck the life force from men’s souls
You offer nothing, to the fold
From “Freedoms on the Run”:
Welcome to this New world Circus
Coming to a homeland near you
Jack Boots and Billy clubs are GAY fashion
Marching to Obamas Commie-Fascist nation
Help me to stuff these fucks in a box
They wont, they wont be missed at all
Imagine, this world free from their disease
Some day, there will be true rest and peace
Another great line from Dave Howell is this:
Far from churning out the usual banal relationship and partying songs, this rocking foursome concentrate on politics, which are libertarian to the max.
If only.
Libertarian isn’t quite the word one reaches for upon seeing that a violent old dead member of the Posse Comitatus is a hero. Or for people who think heavily armed white Christian identity fanatics are always being framed by the government.
And anyone who sings about ‘commie-fascists’ is just a little too dumb for that political categorization.
It’s disrespectful to the Cato Institute people, dontcha think?
Cherie Currie’s “Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway” is a series of close escapes.
I remember it as an autobiography aimed at teenagers, originally published in 1989. Back then, it was also a string of short-of-death misadventures, collisions with drugs, alcohol and unpleasant sex without a suitable ending.
As the basis for the indie movie, “The Runaways,” it’s received a radical face-lift, one without which the movie would have probably been either undoable or unwatchable.
Currie was a striking young girl when she was picked by manager Kim Fowley to front the Runaways. And the best parts of this life story have to do with her time in the band and its successes rather than failures.
The book also serves as something of a cathartic score settler. A lot of people get theirs.
And that’s the good thing about being given the opportunity to write. The long arm of the word can reach out and collar those who may have thought they were beyond a good rattling.
There’s Runaways guitarist Lita Ford, portrayed as a humorless ranting bully, ever more angry at the difference between her looks and Currie’s, the latter always getting the lion’s share of the photography. There’s an awkward moment where Currie attributes this to Ford’s love of cheeseburgers and beer while on the road.
Best seat in the house?
A lot didn’t make it to the movie.
There are two totally skin-crawling episodes of violence and rape and one slimy adventure in which Currie is inveigled into going back to an English pop star’s apartment by manager Fowley after an important gig.
It’s a jump-on-the-grenade-for-the-team moment and readers can guess what’s involved. It’s white satin sheets and that time of the month and if you have the book, you’ll feel uncomfortable and splashed with a bit of collateral filth. No punches are pulled in this one.
The pop star in question sounds suspiciously like Cliff Richard, who had the hit “Devil Woman” in the US in ’76 which puts things in the right time frame, although I may be guessing wrong.
Returning to Fowley, he’s again the villain set in cartoonishly bad incident after incident, with one chapter devoted to a sex education tutorial for the band, conducted in a seedy motel room.
This part contains the most arresting if vulgar line in the book:
He looked like he was trying to crawl right up inside of her.
Now you don’t see that everyday in something from HarperCollins.
Remember what I said about much of the book not being doable in the movie? And many reviewers commented on the daring kiss scene between Currie and Jett in the film — something not in this book.
While not elegant in the slightest, a literary cup of tea, or even among the best biographies in the world, it’s a vivid, entertaining and brutally honest read. One imagines that consultations, careful wording and much negotiation have made it almost lawsuit proof. Plus it has a happy ending: Currie has a new lease on life and the opportunity to build on whatever the book and movie may send her way, something that just wasn’t there when the first edition was published.
Until Joan Jett does the same, this is the you-are-there history of the Runaways in print.
Currie will be at Vroman’s in Pasadena tomorrow, Perhaps more on it over the weekend.
As for the soundtrack CD to The Runaways, it’s a good introductory to the band for complete novices, an idealized musical anthology. Four Runaways tunes out of seven were redone for the movie.
Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart sub vocals for Currie and Joan Jett on “Cherry Bomb,” “California Paradise,” “Queens of Noise” and “Dead End Justice.” The songs don’t suffer for it. Inspirational singing was never part of the appeal of the Runaways.
In “Neon Angel,” Currie said Fowley put it this way while in session for the debut LP:
Don’t think that because we’re in the studio you have to start trying to sing in tune or anything … This isn’t high art. You aren’t a fucking opera singer or some dog shit like that.
The songs only needed to project “rock and roll authority.” And they did.
Still do. “Dead End Justice,” in particular, sounds even more slamming done in 2010. It’s a killing riff. If you don’t hear it, you’re not much for raw rock ‘n’ roll.
One of those homemade fan videos with the CD cut glued on to a couple photos is here on YouTube. It probably won’t last long.
Kim Fowley wouldn’t be Kim Fowley if he wasn’t ready for The Runaways movie promotion with some product of his own devise.
And more’s the pity, the mainstream press has declined to bite.
All this falls under the name of Black Room Doom, Fowley’s newest project — a fake rock band/movie/art/music shtick — starring young girls. And the man himself.
Even though you might not, I’d buy a record with stuff like this on it. Well, maybe at least half of it. It occurs I may be admitting too much here.
The pieces are short bits of dirt rock art for discerning porn store shoppers, suitably inappropriate and uncomfortable, as much funny and catchy as they are icky. (No X-bits but may thematically be injurious at work if caught viewing them.)
Iggy Pop can’t make stuff this entertaining these days, you betcha.
If Joan Jett and The Runaways can have retrospective packages, surely there must be room on the plate for “Cheerleader for the Damned” and “Road Hog,” too.
And this — “Kim Vincent Fowley” may be the best autobiographical rock song, ever. At least this week, easy.
A lot of people are not even aware of the Runaways,” Jett said of the all-girl teenage band. “This will introduce them. They can go back to the music and hear for themselves.” — UPI
Fair enough.
About ten people were in Pasadena’s Laemmle 7 on Firday afternoon when DD went to see the first showing of “The Runaways.”
Almost everyone was younger than your host but none seemed disappointed by the pic.
The Runaways were always obscure. The only reason most big city newspaper pop writers know of them now is because they’ve seen Joan Jett.
Surprisingly, writer Sia Michel couldn’t even get the punch line in Creem’s infamous review of the band’s ’76 debut into a recent New York Times feature on the movie:
“These bitches suck,” courtesy of Rick Johnson. “Their vocals recapitulate the history of minor mouth pain …” it was added.
In 1976 The Runaways was a raw and underproduced record at a time when many hard rock LPs were rapidly escalating in terms of overproduction and bloat.
It was virtually perfect, tonally, for what was delivered. By modern standards of sex appeal, and what’s delivered in The Runaways movie trailer, 1976 photos of the girls in the band on the back cover were even gamey looking.
One of my favorite parts of the original record is “Dead End Justice” — a short skit which has appeal if you like a bare parable about bad girls breaking out of SoCal juvie and one of ’em going down on the jailbreak. The extended ‘act’ part of it is cut out of the version of the movie although the re-enactment keeps the grimace-worthy lyric: “He beat me with a board, it felt just like a sword.”
Everyone scream!
“Cherry Bomb,” “American Nights,” “You Drive Me Wild” and “Is It Day or Night” are other stellar tunes on it. They work off good hooky riffs and and have a brutality that wasn’t on a lot of hard rock records that year.
If you want an acting experience from The Runaways movie, only Michael Shannon as Kim Fowley, the band’s artistic director, producer and manager, delivers one. He’s the movie’s villain, a piece of shouting and gesticulating twisted steel, overbearing show business and glam rock fashion.
At one point, the actress playing Cherie Currie’s twin sister, Marie, comments on his sleazy character: “I heard he even has a jacket made of dog fur.”
That made me laugh.
By any standard, Fowley must be delighted with the way he is portrayed. Near the end of the movie, Shannon plays him in gay pinkish suit and lipstick, crossing his legs suddenly as an exasperated elegant woman might while making a point. He steals whatever scene he’s in.
As executive producer, Joan Jett did Fowley a solid favor.
In the mid-Seventies Fowley indeed was a colorfully arch and oily side presence in rock magazines, when either pushing the Runaways or aggressively promoting related nobodies like the Hollywood Stars or Venus & the Razorblades. (Inspirational lyric: “Let ’em eat cake, I’ll eat dog food!” from, logically, a song called “Dog Food.”)
The movie writes out bassist Jackie Fox for on legal CYA-ism, omits Kari Krome and pre-Bangles Micki Steele and pretty much skips the entire US experience outside of one introductory tour in favor of going to Japan, where the band was met with hysteria.
It’s worth noting this was around the initial discovery of the curious fact that all American hard rock bands were met with Beatles-like hysteria in the land of the rising sun — something which was cannily employed as a morale builder for major label acts down on their luck.
From start to finish, the music in The Runaways is great. Although there’s nothing really new on the CD except for a couple Runaways tunes sung by Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart, it will — by default — be one of my favorites this year. And that’s because nobody performs hard rock like it anymore.
Except Joan Jett, which doesn’t really count for the purposes of this post.
How does Dakota Fanning do as Cherie Currie?
She pulls off what’s required but she’s not Currie. Too delicate and willowy to be very convincing. Instead of looking bigger than life, astonishingly unnerving and a bit sweaty in the infamous corset, as did Currie, Fanning looks like a second-tier lingerie model.
Many will still recall Currie as the glammy and loose but doomed girl in Foxes, which still runs semi-regularly on cable. One always had the feeling she wasn’t acting, except for the part at the end where she died by misadventure.
Since ample footage of Fanning and Currie are on YouTube, don’t take my word for it.
After Queens of Noise, their second album, the Runaways were basically dead in the US market. Much poorer hard rock bands were routinely better treated.
Currie would leave and two more records would be delivered in a bit of extended going through the motions. A live album, recorded in Japan, which was quite good, wasn’t even released domestically. Which only showed the record label was interested in cutting losses.
“Cherry Bomb” from the movie.
Note big difference between Fanning and archival footage of Currie in Japan, singing “California Paradise.” The Runaways stomp and boogie as good as the guys. And like any truly decent hard rock band, they weren’t afraid to risk being taken for fools.
Kim Fowley’s “International Heroes” from 1973, the poor man’s “All The Young Dudes.”
Less clownish rock band with pretty girl making Faustian deals. Way less Iggy Pop.
Now, Iron Man 2 is more like it, making better use of heavy metal and rock star metaphors.
Iron Man set to AC/DC.
Mickey Rourke as The Wrestler as the Bounty Hunter as Whiplash, originally one of the “ten crappiest Iron Man villains” ever. Well-explained here.
And Don Cheadle as War Machine. Doesn’t he seem a little small for the part to you? War Machine was big and mighty, like the young Jim Brown. Ah, Robert Downey’s wee, too, and he works splendidly as Tony Stark.
Tipped by Armchair Generalist, someone with a good eye. The second trailer is cooler than the first.
Guaranteed to spawn too many US military officers and analysts telling magazines and newspapers America needs its defense contractors to make something like that. To limit collateral damage in the war on terror, of course.
The SPIN magazine backpages are in Google Books as noted here mid-point through last month.
If you’ve delved the sidebar links you’ll know that at one time DD wrote rock criticism. And I did it on and off for a long time until it became nothing but 50-word advertising blipverts with everyone who could be appropriately supercilious about the release schedule for the week banned in favor of industry tail-chasers.
I wrote about Stryper back in 1988. They wore stage wear with the color scheme of bumblebees. Perhaps it was to get across the message they were as the industrious pure-hearted worker insect, toiling without complaint — for Jesus. One of their records was called The Yellow and Black Attack.
They were made for me to insult.
Brian Carson, drummer for the Highway Kings, really loved Stryper. Paradoxically, it never impeded his playing rock ‘n’ roll for bikers, power drunks and miscellaneous scum in dive bars.
Over the weekend DD ‘discovered’ Kevin Coyne, an old British rocker/singer/songwriter/poet who passed away in 2002.
A colleague on the I Love Music chat board piqued my interest:
Anybody care about Kevin Coyne? Eccentric British guy, early ’80s. The one album I have, In Living Black And White from 1973, is a live one; his guitarist plays pretty loud rock, though his band doesn’t much — come closest in “Eastbourne Ladies” and “Mummy,” maybe. He has a Joe Cocker growl that occasionally sounds a little Ian Hunter, but he doesn’t seem to have much in the way of tunes. (Maybe the studio albums are more tuneful, I dunno.) Sings about insane asylums (used to work in one according the liner notes), suicidal fat girls, burning down the world with turpentine, America being a land of disease, and British class stuff I don’t understand much. Don’t know what to make of the guy.
It immediately sent me off in search of Coyne records from the late Sixties to the mid-Seventies.
Much of his material has been posted to the Internet, so it certainly wasn’t hard.
There are a couple old videos of Coyne at a festival and a Rainbow appearance broadcast on the Beeb, now available on YouTube.
“Strange Locomotion,” from a ’75 Rainbow show shows a young Andy Summers (later famous in the Police) on guitar.
It’s stomping Brit rhythm & boogie. And since embedding is disabled it is here.
“Eastbourne Ladies,” from the 1974 album, Marjory Razorblade, is similar.
Performed in front of a festival audience in the Seventies, it’s boogie with the guys and gals bopping in a polite hippies we’re-having-a-party-in-Blighty
way. The camera pans back to show it’s next to a pasture, the cows grazing unperturbed. Coyne has a pair of Walter Brennan ‘real McCoy’ farm pants on and humps a pole a little. He asks if even the big black cow would give him some money.
This was back when you could look real crappy and the crowd loved you for it.
Another great tune is “House On the Hill,” a compelling country folk whine about what a local insane asylum was like. Coyne was a social worker in the mental illness system and his songs about it capture this bleak part of English life.
“Eastbourne Ladies” is one his career hight points. His gruff voice, occasionally spitting out a Wolfman Jack howl, is backed by a “Highway 61 Revisited” rhythm thing, except the song is about snobby high class dames who look nice.
Coyne wonders if they go to bed wearing crowns.
“Holiday in Spain” — another tune from the same album, is a spoof on Brit package holidays to the title country set to a flamenco beat.
The Spaniard waiting on the table frightens and offends the British tourists, looking to make their white skin turn a little brown on vacation. The vacationers think the man looks like a gangster from an evil side of town. Yes, there’s certainly risk to the sensibilities when holidaying in places where everyone doesn’t look like you.
Marjory Razorblade is a very good album with a unique taste of its own. Coyne gets his country folk blues complaints and japes going but always follows after awhile with a thumping piece of R&B pub rock — like “Chicken Wing.”
Coyne is a master of of these tones and styles, using his idiosyncratic voice and lyrics so well within the spare arrangements that he always sounds natural bending them to to completely odd purposes.
Speaking of idiosyncracy, it would be a hard person who wouldn’t break out laughing at Coyne’s “Karate King” with lyrics like this:
His white and muscled flexing at all the passing girls, smashing his way through the window frame, ripping apart his mother’s pearls — they’re lieing on the dressing table … Chop! Chop!
If you see the Karate King: Help him! Help him! Comment on his pommaded hair, tell him he would have been an excellent kamikaze pilot in the Second World War! That’s what the Karate King wants to hear … in the gymnasium.
Priceless in the context of rock ‘protest’ music, really.
Which brings us, dear readers, to Coyne’s “Good Boy.”
If there’s a theme song that’s better for this blog, I can’t imagine it.
The song delivers sarcasm and class resentment in ways that are beyond 99 percent of American pop music artists. While Frank Zappa comes to mind, it was rare that he was so musically direct. Since it’s a cut off the original Marjory Razorblade record, it probably won’t last long on the video channel.
Closing out, here’s some Coyne fast boogie. Obviously, the older and uglier you are the better you get at it. I’m serious.
The above is a snap from SAC Command Post, a short film made by the Air Force. One fashioned to apparently counter perceived bad publicity from the movie Dr. Strangelove.
It is here at the nuclear archive at George Washington Uni.
It’s a wonderful 18 minute snapshot from a time long gone. You could watch it back to back with Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom!
The end result is something Kubrick could have used as warm-up while the crowd seated itself prior to a showing of Strangelove. Rather than counter anything, it nicely seasons the premise of his movie which is, perhaps, why SAC Command Post never even remotely climbed into national consciousness like the former.
Full of old analog equipment and telephones, it harkens back to a time when the US actually was a world leader with a working government.
The movie opens portentously: The Strategic Air Command has the power to immediately strike back at any aggressor who would dare to start a general war.
The Soviet Union is neither mentioned nor pictured anywhere in the film.
A few teasers:
SAC, guarded by vigilant dogs so no one crazy can interfere!
A general reads his daily paper before being called to alert!
The SAC controller shows a bit of anxiousness under the cameras. Chosen for lantern jaw.
It’s only a test!
That ‘impact’ counter doesn’t go high enough.
Nothing can go worng wrong between the gold and the red telephone sets.
Yes, gentlemen, they are on their way in and no one can bring them back. For the sake of our country and our way of life I suggest you get the rest of SAC in after them, otherwise we will be totally destroyed by Red retaliation. So let’s get going, there’s no other choice. God willing, we shall prevail in peace and freedom from fear and in true health through the purity and essence of our natural fluids. — General Jack Ripper, Strangelove
Dr. Strangelove is one of DD’s favorite movies. It and the mythos of the Strategic Air Command resulted in this song, “Strategic Air Command”, on the second Highway Kings album, Brutality.
At this point, then, Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated, but they’re not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs. And they’re not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan — and there isn’t any plan, except to regain power.
But there is a kind of logic to the current Republican position: in effect, the party is doubling down on starve-the-beast. Depriving the government of revenue, it turns out, wasn’t enough to push politicians into dismantling the welfare state. So now the de facto strategy is to oppose any responsible action until we are in the midst of a fiscal catastrophe. You read it here first.
This is the paradigm set by California mentioned yesterday here.
Paradoxically, the Governator — Arnold Schwarzenegger — was on CNN on Sunday night calling his party The Party of No. And it wasn’t in the context of a compliment.
There is a great deal of irony in that the Reagan-worshipping Schwarzenegger is now just the kind of government politician the great mean of the GOP despises.
While Schwarzenegger will inherit a lasting reputation as a terrible governor, it was his own party in Sacramento which did him in.
In Washington, the blame can be spread around a little more generously. While the GOP blocks everything, the Democrats and President are equally contemptible for allowing them to succeed doing just that.
The world no longer needs a US when the superpower is run this badly.
Many years ago, when Schwarzenegger was made governor, I wrote this in the context of some spoof tunes about the situation.
The Gropinators explain the politics behind the big man’s success, using rock and roll. Our leader’s election came not through reasoned judgment, but a good old angry and mentally ill snapout, a desire of the polity to strike, to lash out, to schlag — someone in government. We weren’t going to take it! Take what? Who cares? But someone, like Gray Davis, had to be made to pay and Arnold was the benefactor. Lyric: You sent him to Sac-ra-men-to; No rotten car tax, no, no! We sent ‘im to Sac-ra-men-to; We’re not gonna take it, no, no! Arghhh! Danger! Get out of the way, we might have to hit you.
Sound familiar?
Schwarzenegger was elected by the public on his promise to eliminate the car tax. He did so and forced a refund for everyone in the state who had ever paid it. The shortfall caused by that overturned the state government’s finances and precipitated the current catastrophe. The California legislature — effectively ruled by the minority GOP, like the US Senate — blocked all efforts by Schwarzenegger to do anything palliative.
The comedy song, “I Think We Should Make a Carla Sandwich,” which was about the publicizing of the governor’s reputation as a serial groper — in particular, one woman named Carla, prior to his installment is here.
Real Arnold vocals, too. If you don’t laugh, you’ll surely have to cry.
