Blondie and the art of the (very) long encore

My article on the band Blondie, including an interview with Chris Stein (the man beside, not behind, the blonde), is out today as the cover of the Austin360 entertainment tab (the Thursday pullout section of the Austin American-Statesman).  I don’t usually inject myself so much into articles like this, but given that I’ve been listening to their music and seeing them live since I was 18, it seems that I’ve measured out my life in Blondie concerts.  I’m particularly happy that the sidebar was included, which lists those concerts and namechecks Long Island, Boston, Mansfield, Ljubljana and, of course, Austin. If Blondie can keep it up, so can I.

The Ugly Beatitudes

No, I haven’t abandoned this blog! It’s just that time flies when you’re…well…really busy with a bunch of challenging stuff. But never mind about that…today’s all about how I’ve gone back to my rock-writin’ roots with this article in the Austin American-Statesman profiling the Ugly Beats, a  ’60s-inspired garage-rock/power-pop combo that’s been plugging away since 2003. There are so many musicians and bands in Austin that it’s hard for all but a select few to get any significant press coverage, so I was glad to be able to give a bit of well-deserved local publicity to this hard-workin’ bunch of nice folks who make well-crafted music that’s fun to listen to. Cheers, and buy their CD.

By the way, the headline for this post is my original headline for the story, which the Statesman (wisely) decided not to run with. Yeah, I do appreciate having an editor when it counts.

Success Is Just As Bad As Failure

A Song For Our Times, For My Time, and For All Time

Lyrics and music by Wes Eichenwald, ©2010, marca registrada, ad hoc, quo ipsit

Everyone who writes about music should write at least one or two songs in their own lifetime. This is the second one I’ll admit to (the last one was about 20 years ago); I wrote it in about 20 minutes on January 11, 2010, and revised it very slightly the following day. To be delivered with a song in your heart and a bounce in your step, two scoops of Manhattan cabaret and just a hint of the old soft shoe. You need not be the greatest singer in the world, but ya gotta have heart. Chanter et à vomir. Look for it soon on YouTube, maybe. If you’re a recording artist and want to have a shot at this masterpiece, call me and we’ll talk.

Success is just as bad as failure,

They both lead to indigestion,

And to the all-important question,

Just what I am I doing here?

Success is just as bad as failure,

But it’s not half as bad as dating,

Which gets me to contemplating,

Just what on earth I’m doing here!

When I’m alone, and doing what I’m doing well,

Strangers in the street don’t make a sound.

If I was a little girl I’d fall in a well,

But since I’m me, I stand my ground.

For it is true, it’s much more than a rumor,

If my ambition had flesh it would be a tumor –

The only sense I have is humor,

Around which everything can fall.

For success is just as bad as failure,

They both lead to indigestion,

And to the all-important question,

Just what am I doing here?

Concerning self-delusion, I’m the master!

All they ever say is ‘Go to hell!’

You’d think my life was a disaster.

But by me, I’m doing well.

Success is just as bad as failure!

So stick around through thick and thin,

And screw all of those dirty bastards –

I know that in the end, I’ll win!

Veterans’ Day special

The Austin American-Statesman is running this article of mine tomorrow about an American soldier from Texas who didn’t make it out of Iraq alive, along with over 4,000 of his comrades (and who knows how many Iraqis and other soldiers of how many nationalities). A few of his e-mails to his wife made their way to the pages of the New York Times, where Austin musician Elana James, of the band Hot Club of Cowtown, read them and set one of them to music.

It was one of those stories where I really didn’t know where I was going with it until I went ahead and wrote it, as if the subject matter took me over and said, “Write this — I know what you need to say.”

It’s understandable that there’s been so much focus on the election and its aftermath lately — and it’s good to know Hope isn’t just a town in Arkansas anymore, and Chicago isn’t just the former stomping grounds of Richard Daley and Al Capone — but let’s not forget those guys over there, no matter what you think about the purpose and justification of the Iraq war. At least we’re on the downslope now.

How I got to this point, part II: Christy’s letter, the groom’s toast and farewell to Slovenia

As I wrote in my preceding post (which you should read before this one), Kirsty’s death sent me into a downspiraling period of prolonged and somewhat inexplicable grief in the first weeks of 2001, quite out of proportion to my connection to her (never met her, never spoke with or wrote to her; I was a fan who saw her in concert once and had a few of her records). Perhaps the best way I can explain my reaction is that it seemed to me, at the time, to be a personal insult; here was someone whose taste and craft I admired, who had something to say to the world in general and to me in particular, and what does the world do with her? Have her killed by a speedboat owned by someone who never even had the grace to admit guilt or even apologize, instead framing a hapless boathand to take the rap. Agh.

Of course, I didn’t know Kirsty, and it wasn’t my tragedy. Not really. But still I felt as if I was connected to it in some way, and wanted the world to notice as far as I could. Writing about it for the Boston weekly seemed a good excuse to pay my respects; I was far from the only person who felt going to St. Martin in the Fields was something he had to do.

The day after Kirsty’s memorial service was a classic gray, cold and rainy day in London. Looking for something with which to occupy myself, I visited the colorful Indian neighborhood around Brick Lane in the East End. After lunch and a bit of walking around, I boarded a double-decker bus for the ride back to my hotel, and climbed to the upper deck, which held no other passengers except for me.

I stared out of the windows at the gray and the rain, listening on my Walkman to a cassette tape of an ’80s band from Boston, music I knew very well. I began to cry, for Kirsty and myself and the world and for the hopelessness of it all, for all the shattered dreams of lost childhoods, for vanished youth and wasted potential, for the finality of death, for anything and everything. For its own sake.

Something cracked inside of me, huge sobs arose from deep inside and I began heaving and bucking around the bus, and I cried like I hadn’t since the death of my mother over a decade before.

Something had to change; that I knew. Something had opened up inside, and I knew it was important that I investigate what was going on.

But for now, it was time to return to Slovenia.

*****

As noted, I had taken to singing in the days and weeks following Kirsty’s death. I didn’t sing in public, but I would grab lyrics off the Internet for songs I liked, everything from the Johnny Mercer classic “Laura” to “I’m Talking To You” (a single released in 1979 by a Boston band called the Maps), print them up, memorize them, and sing them out loud, by myself, in my kitchen. Was I trying to get closer to the source of music? Assuage my grief with self-therapy in this way? Whatever it was, it helped.

I also dug through the collection of CDs I’d brought with me from the US, looking for sounds I hadn’t heard in awhile. One of them was a record by the alt-country Seattle band the Picketts, featuring Christy McWilson. I’d never paid particular attention to the Picketts before; I’d first encountered them back in the rockcrit days of 1990 when I came across a single of theirs, a cutesy country cover of the Clash’s “Should I Stay Or Should I Go?” The CD, Euphonium, came out in ’96, the same year I’d left Framingham for Ljubljana (anyone stuck in Framingham should move to Ljubljana, by the way; no contest there).

I played Euphonium again, and yet again. The world-weary wisdom in the songs — most of which McWilson had written — and her experienced yet tender voice spoke to me, and gave me comfort, especially these lines in a song called “Night Fell”:

Night fell as if retrieving

all hopes and boundaries from my sight

please tell me that the darkness is deceiving

and somewhere down this tunnel there is light

Sometimes when you need help you receive it from where you least expect it, such as from a CD you’ve had for five years and never paid too much attention to before.

Come to think of it, I hadn’t even given Kirsty a thought for years before her death, before everything changed.

It was painful, slow and difficult, but I gradually succeeded in knitting myself back a little more into the fabric of humanity. I felt it was about time I took some serious steps in that direction.

Donna and I continued e-mailing each other.

*****

On my previous Web site, I’d written about meeting Christy McWilson in person at a folk festival in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on the first day of September, 2001 (this was a few days after I’d first met Donna in New York). However, I didn’t tell the whole story behind it.

As a side effect of the Kirsty grief, I’d gone on a limited mission to Appreciate Artists While They Still Lived! and Tell Them How Much They Mean To You! which in real life can get kind of awkward — it meant I was a man in his early 40s writing fan letters (or, more usually, e-mails) to musicians I knew slightly if at all, something that should have gotten me drummed out of the Rock Critic club (as if I even cared to belong to that little band any longer). But I did write an actual letter to Christy McWilson, who had recently released a solo album, The Lucky One, which I ordered directly from her label stateside. I told her about how she’d helped me through Kirsty’s death, and thanked her for putting her own songs out there, and some other things which are none of your business.

Some time later — two or three months, perhaps, it was July — I received in the mail a large padded envelope from Seattle, containing a homemade CD and a two-page handwritten letter from Christy McWilson.

The CD — which she had her then-husband Scott McCaughey, of the Young Fresh Fellows, burn for me — contained the Picketts’ cover of Kirsty’s “Chip Shop” and the YFF’s cover of “They Don’t Know,” neither of which I’d heard before. (I was a YFF fan too, and I’d actually met and interviewed McCaughey back in 1991 when I traveled to Seattle in service of a piece on that city’s burgeoning music scene for the Boston Phoenix; this was about five minutes before Nirvana broke, and although Scott made a passing reference to them, I didn’t mention Cobain and Co. in the article at all; who knew? If you’ve never heard of Scott McCaughey, he’s a noted indie rocker with a great sense of humor who also plays with R.E.M., Minus 5, and various other side projects.)

I don’t make a habit of putting letters people have written privately to me on the Web, and I apologize if I’m offending anyone, but this stone is just too pertinent to be left unturned:

Christy told me that she, too, had been affected by what happened to Kirsty. Death and transition are at the bottom of all of this, somehow (she said).

“I’m a huge Kirsty MacColl fan,” Christy wrote. “Her death looms large.

“I’m not sure what I believe — or what is proven — I just know what I know — and I’ve come to know that there are no coincidences (finding-refinding Picketts etc.).

“I think music, and maybe my kind of music in particular, acts like a dog whistle. Some people hear it — or the dog whistle tones of it – and most people don’t.” To her, it suggested an image out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, of all sorts of people gathering to meet at the foot of Devil’s Tower.

*****

Dog whistle or not, I did travel to the Johnstown FolkFest, in an area of rural western Pennsylvania whose green rolling hills reminded me strongly of Slovenia.

I found Christy sitting at a portable table set up outdoors near a stage, and after I ascertained that it was her, I told her I was Wes. (Oh, yeah: I hadn’t told her I was coming.)

“You’re Wes,” she said. “You’re Wes.”

She then stood up and gave me a hug.

We talked a bit between her sets, and I made a point of telling her my life was on an upswing, and she said she was intuitive and could tell that. We made our goodbyes, and I went off to find my car in the vast parking lot. (We haven’t had any contact since and I don’t want to bother her, but I’m glad she’s still out there recording and if she ever plays Austin again, I’ll be there. )

*****

Donna, the future Mrs. Pogoer, who grew up on a tree-shaded suburban street in the Vailsburg section of Newark, had an interesting past — in addition to a successful career as a corporate writer, she was a skilled musician proficient on several instruments. Her principal instrument was double bass, which she had played with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and other classical ensembles, and with which she had also made something of a name for herself on the small, but very happening, lower Manhattan cabaret circuit. Donna’s natural habitat was a piano bar. She had worked closely with, among others, the singing ringmaster of the Barnum & Bailey Circus as well as this guy, and was an excellent and dedicated cook, a Reiki practitioner, and a very entertaining raconteuse (without even trying, she had had encounters with a large number of celebrities, from Kathleen Turner and Liza Minnelli to Jackie Mason, Harvey Fierstein and Jonathan Richman, the latter of whom she had even helped inspire to write the song “You Can’t Talk To The Dude”). Clearly, this was someone worth getting to know.

After I returned from Pennsylvania, on our second rendezvous in early September, the future Mrs. Pogoer and I wound our way through midtown Manhattan from Bryant Park to Central Park, where, sitting on a bench near a lake, I gathered my nerve, said some things I’ve totally forgotten, and kissed her for real-no-mistake, startling her but not in a bad way, and we nearly ended up doing indecent things in public.

I returned to Ljubljana a few days before 9/11 — Donna had had a dream about the towers’ fall a few hours before it occurred, yes, she really did — and we stayed in touch and agreed to meet in October in London, where the Kirsty fans would be meeting to celebrate her birthday by playing her songs in a pub (a tradition that’s continued every year since; Kirsty’s family and friends often stop by, and now there’s a memorial bench in Soho Square where the event commences).

We indeed met up in London, and decided to move in together back in the States, and after a while, after considering various other cities, we decided to set up shop in Austin, Texas because it seemed like a good enough place to make a new start, and Donna wanted to leave the New York/New Jersey area and I didn’t want to go back there myself.

And so I went on a “farewell tour” of Central Europe, stopping in Budapest, Bratislava and Brno, and put my things in storage and flew home to New York on the day after Christmas of 2001. After a few weeks staying with a friend in Brooklyn, we winged our way to the Lone Star State.

The rabbi at our wedding, who knew our story, remarked at the ceremony that it took the death of a poet to bring us together, and that out of tragedy new beginnings and good things can come.

And here we are, nearly five years since that day, and we have three-year-old twin boys walkin’ around here and everything, and there have been challenges and struggles along the way, and still are. (That’s life, that’s what the people say.)

But I still think that if Donna agreed to marry me, I can’t be all bad as a human being.

And you know, that’s good.

And even if Kirsty died so senselessly, yet our lives are utterly changed because of this tragedy, and there are two new people beginning to unfold their own stories in this sad yet sometimes beautiful world.

As Matthew Fox wrote in his book Creation Spirituality:

Compassion is a kind of fire…it disturbs, it surprises, it ignites, it burns, it sears, and it warms. Compassion incinerates denial; it especially warms and melts cold hearts, cold structures, frozen minds, and self-satisfied lifestyles. Those who are touched by compassion have their lives turned upside down. That is not necessarily a bad thing.

And I think of what Christy wrote on the CD I gave her to sign back on the first day of September in 2001:

To Wes–

Here’s to them mysterious mysteries.

Christy Sue

Kirsty MacColl 1959-2000: Seven years on

Note: It’s certainly not my intention to turn this blog into an endless succession of memento mori, but sometimes that’s just the way the ol’ dice roll. The following article, which included my eyewitness account of Kirsty MacColl’s memorial service, was originally published in the Boston Phoenix weekly newspaper on January 26, 2001. The service itself took place on Saturday, January 20, 2001 (in a bizarre coincidence, the same day George W. Bush was sworn in as U.S. president — oh, the irony, and how many mouthfuls of ashes I must have swallowed that weekend). I traveled from Slovenia to London for the occasion, and met many of Kirsty’s most loyal fans before and after the service. The day itself remains indelible for me; since my report isn’t available anywhere else on the Web, I offer it up here in Kirsty’s memory on the seventh anniversary of her death, which was and remains regrettable beyond words.

LONDON — Kirsty MacColl was no friend of cheap sentiment, and anyone the least bit familiar with the late singer/songwriter knows she wouldn’t have wanted an overblown, maudlin memorial service. What took place at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square last Saturday was profoundly emotional but true to MacColl’s feisty, clear-eyed spirit; you’d like to think she was looking on and saying, “Yep, not too badly done.”

MacColl’s family, mates, colleagues, and fans filled the pews. Whatever religious beliefs they might have had (and as the Reverend Nicholas Holtam noted, Kirsty wasn’t a believer herself), many were still in shock over her passing, at the age of 41, on December 18. In the month since, casual listeners in England and throughout the world had been jolted to attention and had realized what they’d lost. Her picture landed on the front pages of the London papers; editorials lamented the loss of a musician’s musician, one of England’s best living songwriters and a sadly underappreciated talent in her prime.

We were all trying to make sense of something that made none. Struck by a speedboat off Cozumel, Mexico, while off on a half-hour diving lesson with her two teenage sons. Probably happier than she’d ever been. Bliss with a new lover, six years after her divorce. Having shaken the stage fright and depression that had plagued her for years. Playing her best live sets ever. Vacationing in the kind of Spanish-speaking tropical paradise she sang of on her final album, 2000′s Tropical Brainstorm (V2), an upbeat mix of Latin rhythms and her razor-sharp wit that reflected several years’ infatuation with Cuba and Brazil. At one with the sea she loved as an emblem of freedom. Especially when you consider that the victim was a professional ironist, this was irony laid on with a trowel. MacColl would have rejected it as too insipid.

Ron Wood sent flowers. Bono from U2, one of her innumerable friends, sent himself. Billy Bragg, graying now, upright as a fundamentalist, and looking uncomfortable, took the podium with his acoustic guitar and strummed a slow, mourful version of “A New England,” which he’d written but which MacColl had sung with a new warmth. This wasn’t a media-manufactured celeb grief orgy — it was a genuine occasion filled with low-key but real anguish. Some fans had come from as far afield as New York and Philadelphia. These hardcore MacCollites, male and female, straight and gay, remarked on her down-to-earth approachability, how she herself had invariably responded to their letters. They all said they felt they’d lost a friend.

MacColl was a whip-smart, flame-haired South London girl, the daughter of noted Scottish folk musician Ewan MacColl [note: he was actually born in Salford, Lancashire to Scottish parents]; she grew up with her mother after her parents divorced early on. Although she flirted with punk and had the attitude for it, upon signing as a teenager with hip Stiff Records she busied herself with updating ’60s girl-group pop, multitracking her vocals à la Brian Wilson (a trademark throughout her career). She grew up to write and sing pure pop tunes with subversive, twisty lyrics, the personal prevailing but seasoned with politics (leftist, populist, but never preach) and the delectably bizarre. In her varied career, she wrote a hit for Tracey Ullman (“They Don’t Know”), sang a duet with Shane MacGowan on the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York,” and had a charming novelty hit of her own, “There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis.” She was a rarity in the music business: a fully realized, emotionally whole adult grounded in real life. Her versatility — as attested by any spin of her greatest-hits compilation, Galore (IRS) — hurt her career more than it helped, since she was impossible for marketers to pigeonhole and regularly bounced from one label to another; even in the UK, some of her albums are hard to find. (The music industry, she once said, “gets slightly less to do with music every year.”)

MacColl had written her share of somber, London-gray numbers, but at the service we heard her recording off “Us Amazonians,” a witty, lusty anthem from Tropical Brainstorm, along with funny and sometimes profane reminiscences from mates, and the most moving one. “I didn’t only lose my daughter, I lost my best friend,” her mother, Jean, told us, voice breaking, then exclaimed, “Kirsty is still with us, she is still touching the hearts of all the people she loved.”

MacColl’s 10-piece band concluded the service with her 1989 anthem “Don’t Come the Cowboy with Me Sonny Jim,” with Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Holly Johnson handling the vocals. As it slowly ground along, clunky and awkward, one thought roared through my head: this is the saddest thing in the world. It was an archetypal image, a leaderless band, in real time, and in those moments it couldn’t have been clearer just what we were all going to miss.

_____________________________________________________________

Afterword: You can find another, more detailed account of the service here on Freeworld, a/k/a kirstymaccoll.com, the primary home on the Web for all things Kirsty. If you’ve never checked it out before, you should now.

Seven years on…and the Justice for Kirsty campaign continues. If you care about her music and her legacy, please consider doing what you can to help.

Still missing you, Kirsty.

Meditations on rock in the 40s

 

It’s probable that nobody’s ever mentioned Mary Battiata and Jon Ginoli in the same sentence up to now, but remedying that situation is what this blog is for. Not that I ever expect to see them collaborate on an album, or even perform on the same bill. And although both these talented songwriter/performers are well aware of and knowledgeable about a wide variety of other bands and musicians, I’d be surprised if either one had ever even heard of one another before, well, this post.

More to the point, Mr. Pogoer, you ask, exactly which dots are you trying to connect here?

Let me try to explain. If this blog has any continuing “theme,” it probably has something to do with trying to explicate my particular musical tastes, make plain how they relate to my life, and maybe yours as well. In my first website, Pogoer.org, I drew up a list of favorites under the title Music for the Real World. It was an attempt to draw a line in the sand between today’s media creations and tabloid sensations and, well, musicians more or less recognizable as belonging to the same species as regular folk. In other words, I wrote, “They live in the real world, like the rest of us.” They also share the following qualities: Attitude, tenacity, originality, style, a sense of perspective gained through a certain amount of life experience, a kind of wisdom, and at least a hint of spirituality at odd moments. And for whatever it’s worth, they tend to be over 30; actually, it’s been a while since a number of them have seen their 40th birthdays. (I spent my 40th alone on a rainy day at the Beer and Flowers Festival in Laško, Slovenia — also a while ago. I don’t spend my birthdays alone anymore.)

Most people, at least the musically sensitive among us, have a natural affinity for artists of their own generation, and I make no apologies for being no different. I’ve previously blogged about what I see as the salient qualities of my generation’s artists: a sense of humor, perspective and a quest for spirituality primary among them. Now that we’re getting up there, and the ranks have thinned due to fatigue, jobs, families, obligations and even death — in other words, when the real real world interferes with, even shortcircuits, Music for the Real World — the question is, what abides, besides the Dude? What remains, besides the Remains?

As far as Mary B. and Jon G. go, the one thing they have in common (besides being musicians/songwriters over 40) is that they’re both sincere about what they do, are rather good at it, and have reached a certain level of ease in performing. Why do I like such different artists, the expressionistic alt-country poet and the forthright, punky gay jokester? I’m sure they appeal to different pleasure/pain zones in my cerebral cortex, push different buttons that need pushing on different nights, at different times.

And why do I still seek out artistic affinities, even though not as often as two decades ago (the kids and all, the seen-it-all)? On two nights in October, I went looking for some answers in downtown Austin when these two out-of-towners showed up to play. Not, alas, on the same bill.

October 1, 2007: The Mean-Eyed Cat, West Fifth Street

The train whistle blows in the night.

First night of October, ought-seven. Year of Self-Discovery and Re-Redemption? Whatever. Down at the Mean-Eyed Cat, a Johnny Cash shrine in a converted chainsaw emporium on the west side hard by MoPac, a shack, really, and a pretty cool place. Not as dangerous at all as it might seem on first glance. Downright friendly, in fact. First time there. Monday night jam session, as low-key as they come.

Mary’s in town from D.C. with a few of her Little Pink mates. I’ve written about Mary before — a former journalist and foreign correspondent for the Washington Post who also happens to be a genuinely talented songwriter and heartwrenching singer. Her songs, in the main, are deceptively quiet and meditative, but if you listen closely, they contain the fury of the universe and the sleepless nights of the heart.

It was the last night of a mini-Texas tour, and Mary and her friends were just there to sit in and contribute a couple of slow numbers to the Frito-pie-and-beer flow of the evening. Sitting and listening, if you’re lucky, you begin to apprehend the clockworks of the universe and how we’re all connected — not in a spacey ’60s hippie/LSD kind of way, but, well, in a 21st century indie rock fan’s way (works for me).

Such music calls down the power, grace and mystery of it all. Christy McWilson (whom I will discuss in a later post, and who reminds me more of Mary more than does anyone else, although their respective styles are hardly identical) once suggested in a letter to me that this kind of music works like a dog whistle that only some can hear — but it serves as a connection to draw together those who can hear it. (I mention this not to congratulate myself on my high level of coolness and impress you the reader with same, but — oh, just to better explain myself to myself along with any of you onlookers and bystanders who are just odd enough to care. It has to do in part with a love for lo-fi, minor keys, the attraction of darkness and outlines in the shadows that draws one in, is all I can say.)

After the show, Mary and I chat for a while and I tell her about Christy McWilson, and she gives me a few Little Pink stickers, which still sit on my desk while I decide what the best use of them might be.

And so, it’s back to the real world for a while.

October 17, 2007: Red 7, East Seventh Street

In ATX, all the hole-in-the-wall punk clubs on and near Red River have a default decor suggesting post-apocalyptic wasteland, virtually unchanged in aesthetic since their ancestor clubs in the mid-’80s not only in Austin but across the land. Basically, they’re foul pits. The other thing they have in common is pleasant outdoor courtyards in the back, well fenced in from the street and furnished equally wastelandishly, but providing a refreshing breeze and a place for a quick smoke of one leaf or another, if that’s your thing. With Austin’s hellish summer weather (which extends from mid-May well into October), it’s a necessity.

Since I arrive downtown with over an hour to spare until the first bands come on (there will be four in all), I head over to Casino El Camino on Sixth — it’s another pit, but a real neighborhood hangout unlike most others on that drag, and it’s the dive in Austin that reminds me the most of the Rat in Boston circa 1986 — great, quirky kitchen and all (go to the back and put in your order yourself at the kitchen window, then return in 20 minutes to pick up the grub). I request a plate of the “medium” Buffalo wings plus requisite bleu cheese, celery and carrot sticks for sides. The “medium” turns out to be some of the hottest such wings I’ve ever had in my life; I like spicy food quite a bit, but this is a bit much, and I suck up my accompanying Guinness in record time and go downstairs for several paper cups of water to cool my throat to an acceptable degree. I then head back to Red 7 and await the main attractions: Pansy Division and the Avengers.

I end up liking them both (it’s the second time I’ve seen PD, I think, and my first time for the Avengers, the reunited legendary ’70s San Francisco punk combo), but I’m really here to touch base with Jon Ginoli, whose songwriting I’ve admired since I reviewed the debut album of his former band, the Champaign, IL-based The Outnumbered, for the music rag Boston Rock back in 1985. (I won’t go into my entire history with the Outnumbered here, but you can read the backstory on my older Pogoer.org site – scroll down to near the end for the relevant bits.)

When I greet him near a stand by the front door, where he’s chatting up visitors and selling Pansy Division CDs and singles, Jon’s first words to me are, “So you’re not in Slovenia anymore!” (Uh, yeah, it’s been a while since we’ve been in touch.)

Jon’s subject matter since the Outnumbered days has done a complete 180. Back in the ’80s, he specialized in lovelorn-confessional and society-is-broken diatribes (at times a bit over the top and painful to listen to, but usually spot-on, the voice of a decent guy waking up and dazedly looking at the surrounding wreckage — no accident that the Outnumbered’s best-of CD on Parasol is titled Surveying the Damage). The one and only time I saw the Outnumbered play live, it was at Green Street Station, a long-since-vanished club in the working-class Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. The crowd was sparse, and several in the audience seemed openly hostile to their unique brand of all-male garage-band feminism.

With Pansy Division, which Jon founded in 1991 in (where else) his new home base of San Francisco, he went for something completely different — namely, in-your-face punk songs about, well, to be extremely polite about it, the things gay men like and what they like to do to each other in bed. PD were at the forefront of a loose early ’90s movement called queercore (though the band itself now states on its website that the movement is over and disavows the term in relation to themselves). PD have had quite a lot of success; among other things, they opened an arena tour for Green Day in 1994 and have released at least seven albums.

Their live show was, in a word, fun — impossible to take seriously, but you thought that was the point? They don feather boas and a sparkly minidress (well, one of them anyway) and the sizable audience, composed of GLBTs, old punks and others who live the “Keep Austin Weird” slogan every day, ate it up and cheered them on. (Hey, way to spend a Wednesday night.) Who needs to moan about how “great” the old days were when you were in your lonely 20s, when you think about the difference between Green Street Station in ’87 and Red 7 in ’07?

Jon looked great and seemed happy both onstage and off (he was, he told me later, indeed very happy with life) and I was happy for him. Jon was back fronting his breakthrough band on what may turn out to be one of their last go-rounds (the members live in different cities these days), though never say never, and it didn’t seem at all like a farewell tour. All in fun, but still straightforward, honest, tuneful and energetic, good beat and you can dance to it, with that irreverent sense of humor. Are you in on the joke yet?

“Hey,” I told Jon before we said our goodbyes, “we’re both still here and we’re still going.” Which isn’t nothing. It is, in fact, definitely something.

It was one of the latest nights out I’d had in quite a while. After returning home and watching an episode of Kitchen Nightmares with Mrs. Pogoer (who had been quite busy herself giving a class in knife skills at our place to eight women from the local neighborhood playgroup), I hit the sack at around 2:30. After arising Thursday morning (Mrs. P graciously let me sleep later than usual, despite getting less sleep than I did), while making my morning java I found myself humming that Pansy Division classic, “I Was a Bad Boyfriend.”

Maybe that’s the best thing you learn after a certain time on earth: Once you learn not to take yourself so seriously, everything gets easier. You get a chance to be, actually, happy.

So goes the scene in the 40s.