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Welcome back to Indie Rocker vs Classic Rocker. In this edition the boys rant and rage over Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run and The Hold Steady’s Boys and Girls in America.
Classic
Rocker -- Okay Kurt, so here we are again and we
don’t even know how this went over the first time. But it’s good to know that
in a world full of bad politics and drunken celebrities showing their private
parts on the Internet, we can still get together and discuss something as
trivial as record albums.
Anyway, speaking of trivial, I was listening
to Springsteen’s Born to Run when it hit me that nearly all of the
rock’n’roll made after this 1975 masterpiece is trivial and not worth a dime of
time. Sure, I know that includes the
Ramones, The Clash, R.E.M., U2...and all those disgusting indie bands out there
that wouldn’t know an original bone being puked up by an original dog. That is to say Springsteen hit the peak of
rock perfectly with this album. He
single-handedly took every masterstroke of music from Elvis Presley to Bob
Dylan and distilled it down to 40 minutes of rock poetry about passion, pain,
redemption, being backed into a corner, finding the light after the gloom of a
workhorse shift, all the way to the underbelly of life coming back to bite you
in the ass. Everyone else after Born to Run was just keeping a dying
genre alive, for this is a man, an artist, laying his music and his glory on
the line and declaring the rest obsolete.
The album is about breaking through the
mundane, and it’s about grabbing that lonely girl off of her porch and looking
for something better. Born to Run is
about being stuck in the mud of life while careening 80 mph down the highway
with nothing to lose but a regrettable past. This is no-holds-barred music complete with wailing saxophones,
screeching guitars, swirling pianos, and the driving pound of merciless
drumming. This is the real rock
poetry. Forget Bob Dylan and his chorus
of ghost-like characters, or the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, or even a lot
of those lightweights like Gram Parsons with their ugly country co-opts, and
realize that Springsteen and Born to Run were the culmination of the goals of rock’n’roll from the time Elvis Presley
set foot in Sam Phillips studio and said “I don’t sound like nobody.” Bruce Springsteen sounds like everybody
worth a damn yet he’s absolutely original, like the bastard nephew of Buddy
Holly and Roy Orbsion by way of Chuck Berry and Elvis.
I doubt you’ll feel the same way, Kurt,
because this music is about pure, raw passion. It’s about declaring that “the highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a
last chance power drive/everybody’s out on the run tonight/but there’s no place
left to hide,” and making you believe it. Raw passion. Now there’s
something generations of indie kids and their heroes have never been able to
muster...not once.
Indie
Rocker -- Tell me, Groucho, were you cruising around
Buffalo in an IROC Z with the T-Tops off and nothing but a wife-beater to
protect you from the blustery December elements? I ask this question because
having your better judgment hijacked by the throes of hypothermia is the only
way I can fathom somebody viewing this as anything other than schmaltzy pseudo
working-class clap-trap. It’s
entertaining, I’ll give you that, but you must be on one helluva bender to
qualify this as anything other than the musings of a dilettante…oh, okay, I’ll
fess up; I was listening to Born to Run on my way home from work, and for a moment I almost believed what Springsteen
had to say. In fact during my commute, in honor of Bruce, I managed to write
down this inner monologue. Ready? Here goes:
Right
now I’m just longin’ for love in this rust-colored Chevelle, and the open road
calls me. My momma’s cryin’ and
clutchin’ rosary beads, and all the while my foot’s to the floor and I’m a
wishin’ that Wendy would let me take her by the hand and show her a better
life. Oh, Wendy-darlin’, I’ll hold onto
those memories like a precious Union caaaaaarrrrrrd!!!!
Pretty good, huh? But then I realized that I was just hallucinating from the
exhaust fumes of rush hour traffic. I
applaud Bruce’s effort, though, because not only did I think I was driving a
Chevelle, he actually had me believing I was Catholic.
The fact is that The Clash did a much more
convincing job of working class woes -- despite Joe Strummer being the son of a
diplomat! What’s wrong, do the funny
accents bring out the xenophobe in you? Embrace the faux Cockney dialect and listen to Clampdown or Police and
Thieves. Fer chrissakes, Rock the
Fucking Casbah has more legitimacy than anything on this album! And The Ramones, for all their
one-trick-poniness, proved that even the bare minimum of talent combined with
the propensity to sniff glue could yield dividends when compared to this
tripe.
Just because you come from a shitty background
and work a shitty job doesn’t validate your existence; just because you possess
the temerity to throw a few hackneyed sentences together doesn’t make your
opinion any more important, it doesn’t make your existence any more
relevant. By that argument there should
be numerous twelve year old Malaysian kids cranking out hit singles about
working 20 hr. days in Hollister sweatshops. But they have more important things to do, like survive. They don’t have
time to sit around and wonder whether rhyming “class politics” with “Banana
Republic” will make Greil Marcus’ ears perk up. I honestly can’t believe that this is the same guy who wrote Nebraska.
And you talk about breaking through the
mundane…are you sure you don’t mean embracing or regurgitating it? All that I can
muster from this release is one big sigh. So disappointing. But I will
agree with you on one thing: Those
saxophones sure are “wailing” – like a toddler with a diaper full of shit. I’m not kidding. I felt like one of those
poor Baptist mothers you read about; the ones with seventeen children and a
negligent husband just before she attempts to see which one of her brood can
hold their breath the longest in the bathtub. And screeching guitars (This is the part where I thank HBO for
perpetuating the visage of Little Steven – er, Steven Van Zandt, as if his guitar playing wasn’t mediocre enough, now we
have to watch him “act”) and swirling pianos aside, Max Weinberg is the most
overrated drummer ever. Seriously, I
can just imagine the studio engineer, after the umpteenth take of “10th Avenue Freeze-Out”, throwing his hands up in exasperation. “Uh, Max…that was a nice try, but do you
think you could use both hands this
time for that snare drum roll intro?” I’ll
say his drumming is merciless. Worst.
Snare-Drum. Roll. Ever. Or maybe I’m
being a little rough. Maybe Weinberg’s
lack of chops makes him a forefather of punk? Eh, I somehow doubt it.
Classic
Rocker -- An IROC???? This coming from a man sitting
in rush hour traffic...in Pittsburgh? Tell me, Mr. Garrison, you weren’t sitting in that car listening to a
triple play of Bruce Springsteen on WDVE’s drive home, dreaming of the sweaty
guilt of eating a Primanti’s sandwich, and a drinking a couple of cold Iron
City beers, were you? Is that this
week’s new slumming indie chic, or has the capitalist market already co-opted
it, and you boys are on to something else; I hear one can still get PBR on the
cheap.
But all ribbing aside, I never expected you to
get or understand Springsteen or his
thematic elements. See Kurt, let me
break it down for you. In America some
people have to work. I know, I
know...being a college grad (I’m guessing English Lit, paid for by your
parents), It’s hard to understand that some people actually have to WORK to buy
all their music and libation. They have
to WORK to pay rent. They have to WORK
to buy their hip gadgets. We can’t all
live the indie rock lifestyle of sponging off of mommy and daddy our whole
lives, while making the type of music that questions all logic and taste.
Life like that is just not in the cards for a
lot of people. So be these working type
people lunkheads or morons in IROCs (how wonderfully elitist by the way), they
are still a class of Americans that have worked to make this country the
sexist, unfair, mediocre, but still probably better than other countries,
nation we have today. And what
Springsteen has done is he has found a specific theme and created art out of
it. You can talk all you want about the
Ramones and the Clash and being minimalist...minimalist doesn’t make something
great. Christ, I’ll bet you’re one of
those who refuse to listen to Iron and Wine now because he actually made music
beyond those shitty home recordings. Not indie enough?
And the fact that you chose to mock everything
about Born to Run and its eternal
message of love/loss/redemption/and dreaming for something better, shows just
how bad the indie snob element has gotten, and it confirms what I’ve always
believed about indie rockers: they are a group of over-privileged snobs with no
real musical sense; they’re merely banal charicatures who snub what is real and true and honest in art in favor of
plastic paradises. And this is why no
one cares about art anymore. Mr.
Garrison, your people are responsible for a world of Britney Spears vagina
photos and bad music.
One last thing....yes, your Springsteen lyrics
are amusing, but let me drop a few indie lines to keep a balance.
Sick of this girl (insert maudlin guitar part)
/ She’s so over-educated and untouchable (insert maudlin guitar part) / Sick of
my mom / Sick of my dad / They don’t understand the aesthetics of Truffaut
(insert maudlin guitar and horribly sloppy drums )/ But I’m still sick of this
girl / She’s high society / She takes the best drugs / I love the way she sits
at home and asks her aunt for money / We bought a bag / Life is rad / Then we
drove off to listen to Pavement and when she cried over Gram Parsons and the
band Love / I gave her a tissue.
Great stuff, huh? Okay, I guess you’re up now....I have to go outside and warm up
the IROC because it’s snowing again in Buffalo.
Indie
Rocker -- Well, I gotta admit, I’m disappointed with
both of these releases. Unlike Astral Weeks(editors: featured in last issue’s column), there were no pleasant
surprises in Born to Run. For this I blame the programmers at WTPA
back in Harrisburg for polluting my adolescent mind with this drivel. It’s unfortunate because I really don’t like
having my time wasted, even if it’s something as innocuous as listening to an
album. Contrary to popular belief
(okay, Groucho’s belief ) I do like Bruce Springsteen; I just don’t care for
this album. And it’s unfortunate that I
came away from The Hold Steady’s Boys
and Girls in America with the same lack of zeal. The thing is I really wanted to enjoy Boys and Girls…, because I like The Hold Steady (actually, I like
Craig Finn’s lyrics), but it’s like running into an attractive girl you knew
from college or high school who’s now married with kids; she talks about the
good ol’ days and still remembers you with fondness, but she’s put on a few
pounds and generally carries that look of defeat. Basically, her best days are behind her. Yeah, she might be involved with volunteer
work or still have a great sense of humor, but you just find yourself unable to
look past the changes. Who knows? Maybe
she’ll drop a few pounds, ditch her louse of a husband, and make a stunning
return to form. But her future, much
like The Hold Steady’s, could go either way.
As stated above, if there’s one thing that I
do like about Boys and Girls… it’s Craig Finn’s voice – it’s the coolest throat
in music right now. Plus, the
combination of lyrical imagery with the tonality in those vocals makes for an
intriguing listen. A lot of it was
about (surprise!) drinking, and while I enjoy the finer points of imbibing,
it’s kind of a tired subject to write about. But despite this I did find myself hanging on every word. It’s just that the music often times fell flat
for me. I found it redundant. I thought the background vocals were corny,
and I even found myself thinking, “Uh, 1974 called and it wants its guitar solo
back.” during one of the guitar parts. Seriously, I thought I was reviewing
Foghat or something.
Boys
and Girls… falters in that I’ve already heard this style
of music before…and I didn’t care for it much the first time around. I appreciate Groucho’s blatant
generalizations about why I feel this
way. But what can I say? Just as you have no desire to hear the incessant
whining of some over-achieving dork with a 4-track and a trust fund, I have no
desire to hear songs about people who, well, keep making the same fucking mistakes over and over. That’s all that I heard in Born to Run. It would be one thing if the characters in the songs did work
hard, and had a desire to better themselves, but it’s just too much “I drank a
lot last night, missed applying for another dead-end job this morning, and just
discovered that Wendy’s got another bun in the oven” nonsense. There’s too much talking and not a whole lot
of actually doing. So fer chrissakes, put down the bottle, sign up for classes
at the local community college, and invest in birth control! The only thing I got out of it is that at
least I now know where Toby Keith cribs from.
Still, I can see why the editors chose these
two records for review. There’s a
bar-band mentality regarding both releases; a rawness that certainly appeals to
the seemingly downtrodden and manages to stay well within the parameters of
Rock Phonics. Let’s face it: there’s certainly no drawing outside the lines
here – in fact, I can almost see the training wheels. Unfortunately, this sound is as East Coast as Sonic Youth and
Hip-Hop. But unlike SY and (some)
Hip-Hop, that sound is the reason why I don’t really care for either of these
albums. There were too many times
during Boys and Girls… where it
reminded me of an adolescence where every single frigging person clung to the
belief that “Stairway to Heaven” was the greatest song ever written. It reminded me of music that I don’t care
for. It reminded me of Born to Run.
And yeah, I’ll admit it: I bought that Rolling Stone issue in 1999
with Britney Spears on the cover, and I always adamantly refused to change the channel when her viddies came on. Granted, if I had known that she’d turn into
trailer park trash, slumming around, and getting knocked up by a no-talent
half-wit then I would never have signed on, but back then she was an incredible
piece of ass.
Classic
Rocker -- Garrison, somehow I KNEW you’d hate this
record. I remember listening to The
Hold Steady the first time, and while I really hated it at first (I thought,
who are these fools, and why are they trying to create a bygone era of rock,
or, more blatantly, why are the ripping off Springsteen), I grew to like the
disc a great deal, and even ended up saying to myself “gee, this is going to be
a boring IR v CR because I’m sure Garrison likes this. But then I wised up and thought: “Garrison
won’t like The Hold Steady, it’s not maudlin enough, and wasn’t recorded by
skinny white boys in ironic t-shirts with neatly done beards. I was right.
Well, you claim to like the disc.... or Craig
Finn’s voice anyway. And he doesn’t
even really sing. I’ll give him credit,
he sings more on Boys and Girls in
America than he did on Separation
Sunday (yes, New Yinzer, if you’ve done nothing else for me except locking
me in to writing this drivel, you have given me a new band to enjoy. I’ve spent my hard-earned cash on other Hold
Steady discs...well, the one I could find anyway.). Since Craig Finn doesn’t sing, I’ll take a guess here and bet you
don’t really even like that and are only admitting some taste for The Hold
Steady because they are still a heavily talked about band during breaks in
those drag shows at the BBT or Gooski’s (see, I don’t even have to live in
Pittsburgh anymore to know the same dumb shit is going on there weekend after
weekend). But enough about you for a second,
Kurt.
Finn’s talk-singing turned into a commentary
on an America that was never really written about but is gone—mostly my
so-called Gen X experience; the people still in college after Cobain died. The rock festival kids of the mid-nineties. Couple that with a basic bar band premise of
plodding drums, keys/piano, piercing guitars and bass, and I was hooked. I took me a while to get past the lyrics,
but the songs (most of them) and the band had me. Like I said, I went right out and bought Separation Sunday.
Then I began learning about The Hold Steady
and realized I liked them as people, which I never do with people. I read music articles about them, and
learned they were guys in their 30’s, like me, and that they’d struggled to get
where they were. Their album was tops
everywhere, and best of all it beat the goddamned Decemberists on a lot of
polls. I won’t make a big deal about it
here, but the Decemberists typify everything I HATE about whiney white boy
indie rock music right now. All of this
made me enjoy the music further.
For people who haven’t gotten into them yet,
and appreciate a band trying to make REAL rock and roll music, go and get Boys and Girls in America. If you like poncy little sad boys making
songs about architects and whales stay away from this disc, and go see the
Decemberists when they come to town. Kurt?
Indie
Rocker -- So, you just knew that I wouldn’t like Boys and Girls…, eh? Well, good for you, Kreskin, you’re finally
starting to realize that I don’t always subscribe to what other people might
think is great. I’ve heard you claim
the same thing -- except that my criticisms aren’t based on a thought process
that revolves around petty slights I might have experienced in my adolescence
(or, in your case, your entire existence). Either way, I don’t recall hating Boys
and Girls…I just didn’t see what all the hoopla was about, so there’s no
reason to rehash all the reasons why I wasn’t impressed by it. But here’s a reminder in case you
forgot: I prefer variety while you
embrace predictability.
But before we continue, I’d like to state that
I had no idea you actually knew The Hold Steady. Are they your peeps? Do
you get together and play Pinochle? Because that’s the impression that I got when you said you “liked them
as people”. Well shucks, I bet they’d
be super-psyched to know that you like them considering you’re the barometer
for what’s cool and stuff. Y’know what
else is awesome? That you can “relate”
to Craig Finn when he sings/talks about the “so-called Gen-Xer experience, the
people still in college when Cobain died, etc…” yet still have the nerve to mock indie-rockers for being
“maudlin”. I guess we’re all a little
sentimental, eh Groucho? Then again,
you are the Classic Rocker of this piece, so if anybody’s gonna live in the
past, I suppose it would be you (although it goes without saying that I
wouldn’t trust your judgment enough to pick out a decent flannel shirt). If people only knew how pathetic they sound
when reflecting on an era that probably wasn’t that exciting for them when it initially
happened. Oh, and another thing;
regarding your use of the word maudlin:
I’d ease up on the Thesaurus-talk – someone might mistake you for a member of
The Decemberists.
John Grochalski, TNY’s resident Classic
Rocker, is a writer formerly from Pittsburgh. He lives in Buffalo now with his
wife and two cats. Grochalski's book of poems "The Noose Doesn't Get Any
Looser After You Punch Out" will be released via Six Gallery Press in
2007.
Top
Five Bands That Shoulda Made It Big But Didn’t:
1. I Don’t Know
2. I Don’t Know
3. I Don’t Know
4. I Don’t Know
5. I Don’t Know
(If they were any good they would’ve made it!)
Kurt Garrison, TNY’s resident Indie Rocker,
kicks the traps for indie-rock heartthrobs Workshop. He also plays banjo
(poorly) and has a cat named Isaac.
Top
Five Bands That Shoulda Made It Big But Didn't:
1.
Archers
of Loaf
2.
Gun
Club
3.
Beta
Band
4.
Unrest
5.
Seaweed
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