And on and on it goes…we seem to have been stuck in a time loop for at least the past 24 years where this debate is concerned, and round and round we go again. Nothing seems to change but the names, the places and the dates. And we tuck our soundbites away while we wait for the next Stockton or Newtown. 

To set the scene: In the summer of ’85, after four acclaimed but non-hit albums, X had hit an artistic plateau and was on the cusp of what their Wikipedia article refers to as their “commercial era” (1985-87), which ended up being, well, not all that commercial. They had just released their fifth album, Ain’t Love Grand!, leaving behind their longtime producer Ray Manzarek to dance with the German hard rock/metal producer Michael Wagener. Some eyebrows were raised. Exene had grown a bit suspicious of the media by this point and tended to be wary, even contemptuous, of music critics, frequently referring to them as “glorified gossip columnists,” even though X had generally received very positive press throughout their career (more on this topic in the piece itself).

I was a bit intimidated at the thought of speaking with Exene, who had a reputation for not suffering fools gladly, but pushed through it, taking it as a personal challenge to break down her initial reserve and flinty attitude. In the end, I think we made a decent connection; I regarded our interview as a significant assignment for me at the time and still do. I certainly have great respect for Exene’s artistic integrity as well as her resolve to persevere with her career through myriad professional and personal difficulties (she suffers from multiple sclerosis, for one thing) up to the present late day. Like Billy Zoom said, ”If you’re gonna spend your life beating your head against a wall, you should at least find a wall you like.”

From the vantage point of all these years later, I’m amused that both Exene and me already had the challenges of aging on our minds, well before either of us would hit 30. By the end of the interview, Exene struck me as the opposite of a self-important, egotistical artiste. She was able to hold things in perspective. “We’re old enough to realize that there’s more to life than being in a band,” she told me. “You get to a certain point and you realize you’ve done nothing with your life except made these records — big deal. There’s so much more you can contribute.”

And so, to the piece. Boy, do I not write like this now; boy, am I ever a different person today who would do something totally different with the subject. But I hope you find it a worthwhile read. My best to Exene, and to you.

_____________________________________

X

by Wes Eichenwald

This is the fourth story and third cover story about X to appear in Boston Rock since 1981.

“I’m not surprised,” says Exene Cervenka.

First there was the article in BR #22 (October ’81), by Michael Hafitz, chronicling the already-fabled Exene, John Doe, Billy Zoom and D.J. Bonebrake. To quote Hafitz: “Although not blessed with an eight-octave range, they sing with exceptional plaintive, romantic whine.”

Then came Gerard Cosloy’s cover story in BR #31 (August ’82), three years ago this month. Cosloy quoted photographer Phil ‘n’ Phlash horning in on the conversation to ask Exene, “How long have you had dreadlocks?” and getting the answer, “I don’t have dreadlocks. I just don’t comb my hair.”

In BR #44 (October ’83), Bruce D. Rhodewalt checked in with a funny account of how bad the interview went. Rhodewalt said theirs were “homemade vocal harmonies.”

To scoot over to the last issue of NY Rocker (spring ’84), we have writer Andy Schwartz quoting Doe quoting Zoom: “If you’re gonna spend your life beating your head against a wall, you should at least find a wall you like.”

Yeah.

Remember when you first heard X? How full you thought they were of…fresh air? How they mixed punk poetry (gimme that oldtime violence) with our incomparable all-American musical traditions? Remember when it was a big deal that John and Exene were married? Remember those names Exene Cervenka? And John Doe? Finally, how great you felt that such a band was on the planet?

Another X record is out. Another State of the Band Address is due. Ain’t Love Grand is X’s fifth album in five years, its third on Elektra, and the first whose producer is not Ray Manzarek. This time the band went with Michael Wagener, producer of an infamous single for them last year, a cover of the Troggs’ “Wild Thing” that had people who cared screaming “Joan Jett!” and not in a complimentary way.

Referred to the band by a contact at Elektra, Wagener is a German previously known — gasp — for his work with heavy metal bands like Dokken and Accept. Yet Aint’ Love Grand is a long way from metal, or even “Wild Thing” — on Wagener’s insistence, according to Exene. So there.

“Everybody was so scared,” she mocks. ” ‘Oh no, oh no. They’re changing producers, oh no, oh no.’ They didn’t have any faith in us. You can only make so many albums that sound the same. The band was just sick of the way we sounded. We wanted to sound grander.”

Did Manzarek mind being, well, dumped? “I don’t talk to him anymore. I think he did. I’m not sure. I think everyone’s surprised it wasn’t sooner.” After all, Exene points out, look at how much Talking Heads, for example, plays (rock) musical chairs; and X didn’t want to bring in outside musicians, so…(more on snobbish purists later).

A year and a half elapsed between the fourth album, More Fun in the New World, and Ain’t Love Grand. This past spring, according to Exene, was “the first time off we’ve had in eight years”; she went to the library, and spent days in blissful boredom. Because of the slackened workload and lack of overlapping commitments, she says, Wagener was able to work closer with the band than was ever possible with Manzarek.

During 1984 and early ’85, Exene was also busy writing poetry with Henry Rollins and Wanda Coleman (resulting in a book with the former and a spoken-word LP with the latter), and joining Doe, the Blasters’ Dave Alvin and others on a down-home country album by the Knitters (Poor Little Critter on the Road, on Slash), which she terms “a take-off on itself,” comparing it to Woody Guthrie affecting a hillbilly accent while broadcasting his radio show from…Los Angeles (X loves America, too. Their land is your land).

“John was in the mood to write songs and I wasn’t, so it worked out pretty well as always,” says Exene of Ain’t Love Grand. As a result, More Fun‘s political tinge has been replaced by a bias toward stately, Doe-penned love ballads with startlingly lush (to borrow a phrase) homemade vocal harmonies (“Around My Heart,” “I’ll Stand Up For You”). If that’s not for everyone, Exene did contribute several traditional X jamkickers (“Supercharged,” “Love Shack,” “What’s Wrong With Me”).

X always wrote ballads, Exene points out — “Blue Spark,” “White Girl” — “but no one would ever play it, because people wouldn’t get past the production. That’s so stupid.”

As for politics belonging in rock songs: “”Billy would say no, John would say yes, D.J. would say maybe. I would say yes, definitely. More Fun was very political; our concerns were more selfish this time. We were concerned with ourselves and our relationships with each other. We’ve all been going through some interesting things.”

The album’s release has helped return the band to an even keel, says Exene, along with kick-starting the familiar touring cycle (10 and a half weeks this summer and fall).

For a band supposed to be on a leading edge of rock ‘n’ roll — with fans to match — to hear Exene tell it, X is hexed with an awful lot of retrogressive fans and critics, whose unwitting intent is to imprison the band in its own history. But nyaah nyaahs Exene, “We’re not paying any attention to it.” The band has a love/hate relationship with critics; many have placed them on a pedestal, holding them to impossibly high expectations related to memories of a past either outdated or romanticized. Exene is wont to dismiss such creatures as “glorified gossip columnists,” adding, “They’re all adult males! They’re not kids! What do they know?”

However, she is about to have her sweet revenge: she reveals having written a song, for the Knitters, about critics. Does it have a title? “Probably ‘Talking Critic Blues,’ I would guess. Talking about the critics and complaining.”

Have the L.A. writers been freaking out over the new record? “Oh, God, yeah, They’re trying to find reasons. There aren’t any reasons, you just make records!” (If someone could only convince those adult males, eh?)

The original quartet has been together almost nine years now. Is Ms. Cervenka proud of this? “Yup.”

Exene’s roots are not Californian but Midwestern, specifically the south Chicago suburb of Mokena, Illinois. She  moved with her family to Florida at age 15, and didn’t hit L.A. until 1976, hooking up with John Doe and her destiny a mere couple of months later. Exene named the band. “I just found ‘X’ in my mind,” she recalls.

Exene recalls with delight the accumulated false gossip about the group. “All those rumors about heroin addiction; ‘John and I have just broken up, we’re getting a divorce’ — people just make up all these terrible things about you. I’ve been ‘pregnant’ about five times” (including once with Darby Crash’s baby, just after Crash died).

Exene never cared for hardcore too much: “In L.A. it was really violent, I don’t care what anybody says.” Back in 1982 — when the L.A. hardcore world equated X with Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen — Exene did venture out to a few shows. “Every time I’d go, some girl with heavy black eye makeup would come up to me and go, ‘I hate you, Exene, I hate you!’” Eventually, Exene began to get annoyed at this.

The singer appreciates a 50/50 blend of domesticity and rock ‘n’ roll world. “People who aren’t into the rock lifestyle (at all) are real boring,” she says. On the other hand — and, as is seemingly inevitable this summer, talk turns to the Live Aid concert — when she was watching Zeppelin, “Robert Plant looked like he had vodka injections in his face or something. I don’t want that. I want to be healthy.”

“(Live Aid) reminded me of mythology,” she continues. “Where all the gods are on Mount Olympus, and one day they say ‘Let’s go down and help all the humans!’ And they go down, and it’s like, ‘Look at us, we’re so famous and so wonderful!’ and then they say ‘Bye!’ It was really funny…although it was for a good cause, I suppose.”

Exene was amused at a letter to a Los Angeles newspaper castigating X for not playing at that concert. “As if anybody would conceive of the idea that we would be invited! We’re not gods! You had to be a god to be invited to that one…although Rod Stewart wasn’t there.”

When a band goes on for almost a decade — or a job or marriage, for that matter — one of three things ensues:

1)  Desperation sets in

2)  Sameness tends to stultify

3)  Every year it gets better!

X and desperation have had a special relationship, but Exene places choice (1) way in the band’s past: “In the beginning you’re really desperate, but you’re having fun so it doesn’t matter.”

The answer, of course, is (4): a little of each, all of the above. X is growing older, and for the first time, Exene is ready to admit it, have it over with, and get on with things.

“You’re so used to people accusing you, you defend yourself. But you do change,” she says. “We’re old enough to realize that there’s more to life than being in a band. You get to a certain point and you realize you’ve done nothing with your life except made these records — big deal. There’s so much more you can contribute.”

“I have no idea of the future,” Exene adds, but allows as there probably will be at least a sixth X album, and another Knitters LP. As for the current tour, they look forward to playing the Orpheum in October — “or is there another place in Boston now?” she asks. “We’d pick the Boston area over the New York area if we were given a choice; we’ve played New York so much.” (And not to get anyone’s hopes up, but she did mention the band wants to hit all the area college towns…)

X are still not huge commercial successes, and probably won’t be this year. So what? Their albums sell between 100,000 and 150,000 copies apiece. It pays the rent. It keeps them going. “We don’t feel like failures,” says Exene, who shouldn’t. “It goes by so fast we don’t really have time to think about it too much.”

I conducted the interview from my first-floor studio apartment at 220 Kelton Street, Allston, where I lived for nine years — nine long years when I often thought that I might never, ever get out of that particular place and space. I remember having some trouble with my tape recorder, losing some of the transcript, and arranged with her publicist to do a second interview (!), to which Lydia obliged politely with only a semi-waspish joke about how she was doing her art “when I’m not talking to you all the time.” But whatever you think about Lydia Lunch and her work, I felt she was honest and sincere with me and as you might expect, needed little prompting to start spilling the beans.

These days I occasionally conduct interviews with various entertainers, usually comedians, actors and musicians, for the Life & Arts section of a mainstream newspaper. I like the work I do and believe it contributes to the stream of general knowledge in its own way (and I definitely feel I’ve become a much better writer than I used to be), but there’s something to be said for a 2,000-word article like this that you would never, ever find in a daily newspaper anywhere. (The original manuscript, which I still have, was only minimally edited; I’m not one of those ego cases who doesn’t like to have his prose touched and I see plenty of room for editing now, but I’ve only made a few slight changes from the piece as it was printed in BR, checking it with the original copy.)

I’m a vastly different person, praise be, from the guy who wrote the following, and I suspect Lydia is too; we’ve both moved on, but we’re both also, at least, still here.

So Lydia, if you ever read this, how about a follow-up chat?

The photo of Lydia I’ve chosen here, taken by Michael Lavine, accompanied the original article.

WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN

LYDIA LUNCH

EXPLAINS

by Wes Eichenwald

It’s not that nihilistic doom-and-gloom-and-death-and-nuclear-war-and-sex-and-black clothing-beat (let’s not call it rock, for reasons to be explained) doesn’t have its place. It’s just that it’s too often been done so badly (done to death, you might say) by people who, uh, just don’t care. There’s not caring…and then there’s not caring. And beyond that, there is Lydia Lunch.

Sweet little Lydia needs little introduction here. Her profession is shoving her reality in other people’s faces. One newspaper headline once called her “the princess of perversion.” She once called herself “the red-hot poker up everyone’s ass.” Her familiar baleful black-haired visage stares out from countless ‘zine covers and alternative-record-store posters, calling everyone’s bluff. Veteran of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Beirut Slump, Eight-Eyed Spy, Slow Choke et al, she has been singer, ranter, film actress, poet, performance artist, collaborator with a multitude, Spin journalist [she interviewed Pat Benatar], femme fataliste for our time.

As I said, she needs little introduction.

The original excuse for a recent phone chat with Lydia from her digs in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge was the recent release of the charmingly titled and typically lydiaesque Stinkfist album, a big-beat exploration with Clint Ruin, D.J. Bonebrake and other impressive drummers, featuring the sounds of Lydia hoofing it on sheet metal for good measure.

(Relax. There will be no expressions in this article like “Elpee noise to tear the flesh from yr bones, chomp chomp.” Just say no to magazine hyperbole, you’ll feel better.)

Over the phone, she is torrentially verbal, intelligently dogmatic, and funny; cascades of rapid Lydia Diatribe pour out the wire to an anxiously awaiting world. (Although ladylike subtlety isn’t her strong suit, every third word out of her mouth is not “fuck,” either.) A few words as a goad and she’s off riffing and ranting — on the brainwashing of the individual by the white male sexist racist supremacist power establishment, the way females are dominated (“I can’t think of anything worse than being a little girl”), the pecking order of the universe.

Lydia is no messiah, not even an Antichrist. As she is the first to admit, she doesn’t have any answers, but she’s got a few provocative questions to act out. “The only cause I have is to make people think in the first place. Priorities, that’s what I’m always questioning.”

The one-time enfant terrible of the ’70s New York No Wave scene will be 30 this summer. “I’m nearing the end of a cycle,” she says. “It’s the end of youth.” She welcomes it, going into a Diatribe about how Society values youth and shallowness so much.

“Some people think I’m older (than I am), and some people think I’m the same age I was when I started.”

You might have guessed she wasn’t the family type, but yes, we ask her if she ever thinks about going the Patti Smith route, mellowing out, getting hitched. “All the time. Know anyone with that much money? Neither do I.”

“I think a family should be made up of people who have things in common with each other, not people you hate who you see twice a year for stupid pagan holidays. If you live the other way you can give them presents every day, you don’t have to wait for a holiday.”

At times she sounds definitely hopeful in the face of the void, but, she hastens to add, “I’m still as full of hate and rage as I always was.”

She is not about to have preciously named children or record love songs to them. Rest assured. These days Lydia finds herself, not creatively exhausted, but, she explains, “I’ve done all I could do in that format, I’ve explored all the possibilities. I just feel like I would like other aspects of information to come in before I relay any other ones.” She now devotes most of her energies to going over the still-unreleased shards of her vast output. “It’s not the writing,” she says, “it’s all the bullshit after you finish your end of the work that makes it exhausting.”

Lydia’s new spoken-word LP is called Oral Fixation, a live recording of a performance at the Detroit Institute of Art. She is also producing an Emilio Cubeiro record called Death of an Asshole, and will act Off-Broadway in a Cubeiro play called Saigon 69.

She also wants to make more Super-8 short films: nothing for a mass audience, “because they wouldn’t be interested in the revulsion.” She plans to write an autobiography: “That’ll be the next book. I’m waiting for an important figure in my family to die, which should be any day now, actually.”

Other than that, her calendar is empty.

When she started as a runaway, sixteen, seventeen, just down from Rochester, New York, she was the unpleasant upstart from Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. You recall the shots on the Manhattan underground rock scene then: Talking Heads, Patti Smith, the Ramones, Television. “They were all ten years older than I was,” Lydia says. “I looked at them as the enemy. I didn’t like rock music.”

She laughs at ever being considered a punk. “There was a big division between New York, London and Los Angeles…as far as output and intention during the so-called punk era. I think everyone in New York [who were her friends] just thought that the whole movement was so foolish and cartoonish, and also based on such bullshit, because they were trying to destroy rock by using the very most basic format of what they were trying to destroy. I couldn’t understand why punk rock was so rock-oriented, when that was what they were supposedly against. That always insulted my intelligence and listening pleasure. If they were claiming to destroy everything and start new, well, why didn’t they translate that message to the music?”

Still a radical statement, from a person still on the fringe. Agree with her or not, you have to admire her consistency.

Where does she draw the line? With a pencil, or with a crayon?

“That’s undefinable — ‘Would you, you know, would you kill someone or yourself for your art?’ I don’t know — then it’s not art, is it, it’s murder, it’s another form. Immediately the extreme comes to mind when you asked that question, but I mean, I don’t usually find I’m the one drawing the lines — it’s everyone else that wants to draw the lines around what you do, so it can be categorized.

“I don’t think a so-called artist sets out to either cross a line that’s already been drawn, or, one word that I always hate that gets dumped on a lot of people, is shock. ‘Do-you-want-to-must-you-do-you-have-to-be-are-you-do you-consider yourself shocking? No fuckin’ artist considers themselves shocking. They’re trying to express what they feel, not trying to make something out of nothing or to exaggerate. I mean, the real artists, the people I respect.”

Does she consider herself a writer, performer or musician? The response is predictable. “Not if I can avoid it. I like to consider myself a confrontationalist; I don’t see why it has to be broken down into specific categories connotating what implement I’m using in my tortures.”

Lydia is known for whirling 180 degrees around with every new band/project, which she says is “more true in the past than now…I haven’t had a band in five years. I have a stubborn resistance to performing music. I don’t go out to rock clubs, dance clubs or discos, and I don’t like to be employed to perform in them. It’s a lot of hassle, aggro and little reward.” Think of her recent “bands” as affinity groups recruited to work on specific recording projects. (The historically minded are referred to Hysterie, a double album, four-band retrospective of the first decade, on Lunch’s own Widowspeak label. Personally, I love 8 Eyed Spy, like Slow Choke, and find the early stuff unlistenable.)

Lydia Lunch started out as a Catholic girl. Does she fall in with the popular Catholic-school-mauled-me-for-life rant? Yes and no.

“I had the basic eight years of Catholic school. I had the religious hallucinations, I saw God, I saw Satan, I received communion. It influences you insofar as that when you’re a very young child, and you’re under the fist-print of religious upbringing, the mythology is so strong, the images are so vivid — Catholicism is so extreme, it’s so brutal and ugly and gory and graphic, and — I mean, I guess I’m no different, you know. Me and religion have a lot in common!

“I think that’s of course a guideline to help control you, because that’s what they always want to do anyway, and religion is a great form of controlling, by threatening [children] with something that they can’t scope out whether is real or not.

“I’m not very influenced still, but of course I am influenced by early experience and knowledge of horrors of the Catholic church.”

Given her demeanor and attire, some might think Lydia preoccupied with death (no, really!). She has a propensity to get out of thorny philosophical investigations with a timely wiseass quip, but then, who doesn’t, or wishes they could? Her thoughts on the afterlife: “I hope myself, personally speaking, that it doesn’t continue. I hope that it’s a pitch-black velvety ditch, the end, over, goodnight, finis, black velvet, no smells and sounds. But what you hear, from people who have supposedly tasted the other side, is that it’s the exact opposite…white and light and airy and cloudy. I don’t know about that. They try to claim that energy goes on, but I would like to think there’s eventual peace.”

What does Lydia Lunch’s vision of heaven look like? “Oh, it’s the ivory tower I live in in Brooklyn…it’s not what it looks like, it’s what it feels like, which is relief. How do you paint relief? I don’t know. It could be a new commercial. It’s a lifting of the heavy weight that congeals in your lungs and chest.”

For now, she’s stuck in New York for the six months or so she’s not someplace else. Although she hates “being ground down” by the city, she sees it as an experiment, with herself as the white rat.

“The important thing is to maintain. You’ve got to deal with it. Balance, y’know, balance, because there is so little of it outside of my own reality. And that’s, I think, why I like to always be in such tight control, because I am able to run such a small ship in the face of the battle.”

What does our Lydia care about the most? (Shout, shout, let it all out…) “My peace of mind, first and foremost, which is an ongoing battle. ‘My peace of mind’ meaning a balance between the raging frustration and hatred that threatens to throttle my every movement, because I cannot turn the blinders on in my existence. Some kind of balance there so that it doesn’t have to be constantly a screaming raw nerve either, out of feelings of inadequacy, knowing that you are unable to do anything about the situation.

“Not being personally plagued and raped by the condition the world is in. Trying to avoid chronically being too sober in reality. Because I’m a very sober person, and it’s obvious,” she laughs, “why a lot of people would prefer not to remain sober 24 hours a day.”

So where does that leave all the other sufferers?

“Same place as me.”

Some of my headlines.

As you may have heard, the Boston Phoenix, a storied 47-year-old alternative newsweekly, is no more, a victim of the online age and the resulting revenue free-fall that has left print media decimated and gasping for air everywhere in the First World. Since the announcement a week ago, when the publisher suddenly removed the paper from life support, tributes, eulogies and encomiums have poured in from the four corners, mainly from former staffers and freelancers, from Susan Orlean in the New Yorker to Camille Dodero on Gawker to Charles Pierce on grantland.com to the Phoenix’s own editor-in-chief, Carly Carioli, on its in-house blog. (For a clear-eyed view of both management failures and the paper’s diminished role in today’s media landscape, see Peter Vigneron’s piece on the Boston Magazine blog.) All of them speak with far more eloquence and insight on the subject than I could hope to provide, and the greatest favor I could do you, gentle reader, is refer you to them. But the feeling persists that I should say a few words about my history with the Phoenix. I know, of course, that it’s not all about me, but this paper — or more correctly, its staffers — did play a significant part in my growth as a writer, and I learned certain useful things there that have stayed with me to this day.

I freelanced fairly regularly for the Phoenix between 1989 and 1996. Aside from an abortive stint as a freelance copy editor, I was never on the paper’s inside crew and had only brief glimpses of its inner workings, mainly when I would come in to discuss a piece with an editor or even, in those pre-Internet days, bang out a piece on one of its vintage computer terminals. The paper had a well-deserved reputation in those days — beginning way before I arrived and continuing way after I left — of not paying its staffers well (or, God knows, its freelancers), but attracted an extraordinary amount of talent by offering them a different coin, that of allowing them the freedom to write about things they cared about as long as they cared enough to perform due diligence and, oh yes, to write well. (For lists of the distinguished arts critics and investigative reporters who toiled for a time at the Phoenix, I refer you to the links above.)

The first piece I wrote for the Phoenix was an article about gift calendars that ran in a holiday supplement in December of 1985. It was assigned to me by the then editor of the lifestyle section, Sandra (Sandy) Shea. I remember her joking with me, as we were walking outside the Phoenix’s offices on the grittier end of Newbury Street, about how editors at the paper were paid less than fresh hires at the local TV stations. Her remarks had nothing to do with it, but it would be nearly four years before I’d start writing for the Phoenix again (my recollections are hazy as to why this gap ensued, but it was probably a combination of my freelancing for other outlets, the non-receptiveness of certain Phoenix editors to my pitches, or simply the time not being right).

November of ’89 pretty much coincided with Caroline Knapp‘s ascension from columnist to Styles (as in Lifestyles) editor. I first met her a few weeks before that, when I complimented her on a column she’d written and she acknowledged it with a shyness almost painful to witness. Caroline — an intensely self-directed, really smart person who exemplified the David Foster Wallace quote about writers being “exhibitionists in private,” since she let it all out in print and nowhere else (at least nowhere I observed) — must have seen something in me that I probably didn’t even see in myself, since my relationship with her — which never extended outside of the office — was instrumental in my broadening my horizons from record and concert reviews to writing about subjects like the arts scene on South Street and the South End of Boston; the resurgence of religion, in newer and more interesting forms; the so-called “men’s movement,” midwifed (or mid-husbanded) by Robert Bly, which made the cover, subtitled “Why are so many men dancing, chanting, spear-throwing, and running naked through the woods?”; ruminations on the baby boomers vs. Generation X, a trendy topic in late ’92; and a long piece on the science of memory, for which I interviewed the director of the Memory Disorders Research Center at Boston University’s medical school.  Working on such pieces, I developed a journalistic voice that still appeals to me — one without a spin or agenda, at least not an overt one. It’s a voice that, ideally, just presents the facts and lets the readers make up their own mind about which side to take. To this day, I enjoy interviewing people — I like the challenge of thinking up interesting, out-of-the-ordinary questions that might illuminate some hitherto unknown aspects of the interviewee’s character.

For some reason — perhaps I was unconsciously looking for mentors — I found myself especially drawn to those Phoenix staffers I perceived as being adults, Serious People, like Caroline and the dignified, reliably sober Carolyn Clay, who had been the Phoenix’s theater editor and chief drama critic since time immemorial, in which post she continued until the bitter end. There were a couple of other editors and writers I’d known before their Phoenix days, but I suppose I felt most comfortable around the Serious People; I liked the challenge of winning them over (which succeeded, well, some of the time).

Throughout all these excursions I continued to write about musicians and comedians for the arts section, along with a bunch of cheap-eats restaurant reviews and even an article on the rising Seattle rock scene, reported from on location in the Pacific Northwest hub, which was published June 21, 1991, mere nanoseconds before the release of “Nevermind” (no, I wasn’t prescient enough to score an interview with Kurt, Courtney and company, though I did at least chat with Messrs. Pavitt and Poneman, the lords of SubPop, and Scott McCaughey of the Young Fresh Fellows). For what it’s worth, I also wrote one “Cellars by Starlight,” the longtime local-music column which, in the hands of a succession of accomplished, dedicated writers, did much to promote, cohere and, I’m sure, encourage generations of Boston musicians. I took over for the issue of July 17, 1992; it was an honor. (Just for the record, I think the relationship between musicians and the people who write about them isn’t parasitic, it’s symbiotic, or at least it should be. Writers tell people things they should know; musicians show people ways they can feel.)

My contributions to the Phoenix are largely offline and likely to remain so, except for a very few pieces archived in a piecemeal fashion on bostonphoenix.com. Aside from a couple of short record reviews, my online Phoenix archive consists of a 1996 recap of a post-Grateful Dead music festival at Great Woods and my next-to-last article for the paper, this July 1999 article about my home at the time, Slovenia (picked up by the Weekly Wire website). If newsprint exists only in some writer’s dusty, yellowing scrapbooks and not online, did it ever matter beyond the day or week of publication? In some people’s memories, perhaps, if one is lucky; but one can’t know such things. I hope the online archives continue to be maintained in a reasonable way by someone, somewhere.

My very last piece for the Phoenix was a report on the memorial service in London for the singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl, which ran in January, 2001 (for some reason it’s not archived on the Phoenix site, but you can find it elsewhere on this blog). By then I’d long since moved on from Boston, and the Phoenix, both physically and mentally.

And yes, again, I know: It’s not about me. Dozens of staffers are currently looking for another job, and who knows how many important articles, reviews and columns won’t get written.  The cruise ship has sunk in the North Atlantic, and freezing, wet journalists in life jackets are clinging to the wreckage. (Okay, I’ll stop.)

I sometimes reflect about the natures of journalists — whose role in life is, ostensibly, to tell the rest of us about stuff we at least theoretically ought to be paying attention to, stuff we should know — and how, at least in the alternative-newspaper universe, they’re so often put down by outsiders, the normals, to be, well, kind of weird folk. The Phoenix was the antithesis of a buttoned-down workplace, and it’s striking to me that in all of the reminiscences I’ve read about the paper, almost none of it relates to the work itself, the stuff that was written; all of the writers’ memories have to do with their relationships with the other writers and editors on the staff. As if they’re taking for granted that the work was important, but that the work speaks for itself. What’s not so apparent, perhaps, what could use a little publicity, has to do with journalists explaining themselves to themselves, why they chose that life, or why it chose them.

The Boston Phoenix closing its doors is sad, for sure, but the atomized molecules of the staff will eventually recombine, coagulate and express themselves in different forms. One day you look up from what you were doing, look around, a bit dazed perhaps, and realize that you’ve built a life in a certain place; that it was as permanent as anything could expect to be in this world, that is, not permanent at all; but if you’re lucky, you have other people around you who knew what it meant to you, knew what you did there, and valued you and were, in turn, themselves valued. It has to have meant something.

That’s the news this evening. Good luck, all.

Be my steady summer date (yeah yeah)

Come on baby, don’t hesitate (yeah yeah)

I like you, and you like me;

Let’s try it, baby.

Ooh, yeah.

As long as I can remember, that unassuming 45 was always in my parents’ record collection. I don’t know why; it was hardly their taste, and I never remember anyone else playing it besides me.  As for Vikki (a/ka Vicki) Tasso, I can find hardly anything about her online. She seems to have recorded only two 45s in 1962, “The Sound of the Hammer/Foolish Me” on Colpix, and “Dear Ricky/My Boy” on Jeffrey, after which she dropped off the face of the earth, or more likely to a quiet domestic life in Queens.  (Here’s a link to an oldies blog with all four of those songs.)

We’ll go walking hand in hand

Leave our footprints in the sand.

I like you and you like me,

Let’s try it, baby.

We’ll go swimmin’ in the sea

Splash splash, you and me.

We’ll go dancin’ every night,

Hold, hold you oh so tight.

Assuming that Vikki Tasso and Vicki Tasso were one and the same, I don’t know why I’m apparently the only person on the Internet who’s ever heard of “I Love You So” b/w “BMSSD.”

Say you like my company (yeah yeah)

We’ll have fun, just you wait and see.

Be my steady summer date,

Come on baby, don’t hesitate.

(bridge)

(repeat last two verses from “We’ll go swimmin’…” to end)

There’s Don Johnson, Don Corleone and Don Cornelius…but we’re talking about the greatest Don of them all. You think you know Don? You don’t know Don.

1. Don Cheadle was an original member of The Beatles and wrote most of their songs. The good ones. It is a little-known fact that the group’s original name was The Cheadles.
2. Don Cheadle invented hummus in the kitchen of his apartment in Detroit, Michigan, in the fall of 1973.
3. Don Cheadle scored the winning touchdown for the Chicago Bears in the final seconds of Super Bowl XX in 1985.
4. Don Cheadle was born in Belgium but became an American citizen in 1972.
5. Don Cheadle is responsible for Elizabeth Warren’s election as a US Senator in 2012. He was the first person to tell her that she should run and campaigned tirelessly for her, organizing a network of thousands of volunteers throughout Massachusetts.
6. Don Cheadle holds the record for the parachute jump from the highest altitude, 25 miles, one mile higher than the so-called “record” achieved by Felix Baumgartner on 14 October 2012. Cheadle’s jump took place approximately two years earlier (on 4 October 2010), but apparently nobody took much notice of it because Cheadle shuns publicity for accomplishments of this kind.
7. Don Cheadle taught the Pope how to use Twitter.
8. Don Cheadle has mastered the time-space continuum.  Captain Planet? More of a documentary than anything else.

In the film Ples v dežju (Dance in the Rain), 1961

During my years in Slovenia (1996-2001) I became quite fond of the local version of cabaret theatre, not necessarily the kind that was current in that era but also from decades earlier. In particular, I grew to love the songs of Duša Počkaj (1924-1982), a theatre and film actress who occasionally recorded in the chanson tradition, or, as they say in Slovenia, šansoni. A CD compilation of Počkaj’s songs was produced by Slovenia’s Ministry of Culture in 1998; since I was living in Ljubljana then, I snapped up a copy on sale at an Old Town kiosk during the holiday season.  I treasure it still. (If you were wondering, her name is pronounced DOO-sha POACH-kye. The word duša also means “soul” in Slovene.) The songs on the compilation, titled simply Šansoni, were collected from various radio and TV broadcasts, films and stage performances of Počkaj’s during the 1960s and ’70s. Although she never performed specifically as a singer and never released an actual record during her lifetime, her expressive, world-weary alto was perfect for the chanson genre. Počkaj had tons of innate style, her natural snap and wit rendering even the darkest lyrics palatable for eager consumption by her fellow Slovene sophisticates in the audience. Thirty years after her death, she still has a place in Slovenia’s artistic canon, if an understated one. Last October, during the annual Mesto žensk/City of Women arts festival in Ljubljana, a performance inspired by Počkaj’s life and art, Draga Duša (Dear Duša) was presented in, appropriately enough, Duša Počkaj Hall, an intimate 60-seat performance space in the Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana’s answer to Lincoln Center. (Here’s an English-language link to a short description of the piece.)

Počkaj was born in November 1924 in Lendava, a smallish town near the Hungarian border in Slovenia’s a remote northeastern corner.  Lendava is part of the Prekmurje region, which I think of as Slovenia’s answer to northern New England in its isolation, spareness and relative poverty, and one of the country’s primary incubators of folk traditions.  (The balladeer Vlado Kreslin, who has been called Slovenia’s answer to Bruce Springsteen, also hails from Prekmurje.)

Počkaj studied architecture in college for a time but then enrolled as one of the first female students in the new Academy of Dramatic Arts in Ljubljana, which was founded in 1945. She soon found work onstage in the National Theatre and made her first film in 1953. Počkaj was a busy trouper to the end, performing nearly constantly in TV shows and movies for domestic consumption along with stage productions. I don’t know if she ever appeared in any foreign productions, or performed in any other language besides Slovene, which made her a star at home and utterly obscure beyond Slovenia’s borders. According to her Slovene Wikipedia entry, she actually died of a heart attack during a stage performance in Ljubljana, at the young age of 57, on June 24th, 1982, while appearing in ‘The Forest’ by the Russian playwright Alexander Ostrovsky.

Here is a link to Šansoni (I haven’t downloaded it myself since I have the CD, so all I can say is good luck and be careful). Here is another one with which to try your luck, which includes the CD cover and liner notes.

So much is missed for lack of translation; so much great art never gets heard by people who would appreciate it.  Here are the lyrics to one of my favorite songs on that album, Življenje (Life), first in the original Slovene, then in translation — I couldn’t find an English translation so I translated it myself, and it’s probably spotty and inaccurate at points — I don’t get to practice my Slovene much these days — but I at least tried to improve on Google Translate.  (You experts in slovenščina should feel free to suggest alternate wordings. If you suspect I’m trying to sneakily crowd-source a better translation, you’d be correct.)

The thing is, if Duša Počkaj thought it was important enough to expose her fellow Slovenes to translated versions of song poems by the likes of Dylan Thomas, Brecht/Weill (“Pirate Jenny” and “Barbara Song”) and Robert Burns, along with poems by her fellow countrymen (who have a grand poetic tradition dating back to the ubiquitous 19th century national hero, France Prešeren), shouldn’t I at least try to return the favor and translate a lyric by the Slovene poet Kajetan Kovič, as best as I can, for whoever is intrigued enough to read this far?

So, here’s a link to Duša’s recording, on YouTube (titled for the occasion Čudno Življenje, or Strange Life).

ŽIVLJENJE 

(Kajetan Kovič)
Tak čudno je naše življenje,
srečno in hkrati nesrečno.
In kratko je naše življenje
in eno samo za večno.

Dokler smo tu sta nebo
in zemlja v naši oblasti,
vendar mora drevo
o sojenem času pasti.

Tak čudno je naše življenje
s svojo mračno zavestjo,
da se pesem konča
v plitkem jarku za cesto,

da se včasih konča,
preden se je začela,
brez zemlje in brez neba
kot roža nedozorela.

Tak čudno je naše življenje,
srečno in hkrati nesrečno,
o pesem nedokončana
in ena sama za večno.

My translation:

LIFE

Such a strange thing is our life,
Happy and unhappy at the same time.
And this life is a brief thing,

And we only have one, forever.

As long as we are here, the sky
And the earth are under our power,
Yet still, the tree
Is judged during its fall.

Such a strange thing is our life
With its dim consciousness
And the song ends
In a shallow ditch on the road

That sometimes ends
Before it began,
Without earth and without sky
Like a flower yet to bloom.

Such a strange thing is our life,
Happy and sad at the same time,
An unfinished song
And one alone, forever.

#####

Happy belated 88th birthday, Duša.

The CD cover

Back in 1998 I wrote an article about Coney Island for Historic Traveler magazine. I was actually living in Ljubljana, Slovenia at the time, but returned to Coney and did research during a trip home. The article is still available online, but only the text; since I love the old illustrations that accompanied the piece in the magazine, I’ve scanned the thing for anyone with an interest in Coney and its storied history. Click on the links to read — clicking twice will get you a very enlarged version. By the way, Coney Island USA, which I discussed at the end of the article, could use a lot of help right here, right now.

These are a few of my favorite things: Punk rock; classifying stuff; college radio. All three were combined in one special week of radio 26 years ago that I still remember, but first, a bit of explanation might be in order.

I miss college radio. When I lived in Boston I listened mainly to WMBR out of MIT and Harvard’s WHRB, and when I lived in Ljubljana I often tuned into Radio Študent, out of the University of Ljubljana, which was just as good. The freeform nature of it, the priority placed on hearing good music (not just a narrow band of preprogrammed hits), the casual anarchy that really wasn’t anarchy but was better, the assumption that neither the DJ nor the listeners were stupid, the following story notwithstanding.

Back in the spring of 1991 I visited Seattle and interviewed Jon Poneman, the co-founder of Sub Pop Records, for an article in the Boston Phoenix weekly newspaper. Sitting at a table at the Virginia Inn tavern across the street from Sub Pop HQ, along with his partner Bruce Pavitt, Poneman provided me with this memorable quote that’s now and again come back to me over the years: “With all respect to the rock-music listeners in the world, a lot of them have become accustomed to being treated like stupid animals. So we figure if we can herd them around like stupid animals, we will do so. It’s just being able to find the right marketing techniques and the most seductive forms of manipulation possible. And we find that actually, ironically enough, stupid animals like being reminded that they’re stupid animals on a regular basis.”

To quote my article: “Asked to explain, Poneman goes into a spiel on the role of the aesthetics of ‘dumb’ in rock history. ‘The pure essence of what we’re speaking about has been manifest in the work of the Ramones, the Dictators, Iggy and the Stooges, Jerry Lee Lewis…The idea of something being “dumb” is appropriated stupidly by people who don’t seem to quite get it. And that’s what I mean by the whole stupid-animals thing, because you can essentially regurgitate the same images in popular culture over and over again in a thinly veiled guise, and people will react to it.

‘I feel like a lot of the things that we assault the audience with should be very insulting and very ironic in nature, but, you know, amazingly enough, people react to it innocently, as if it’s the Summer of Love all over again.’ “

On the other hand, there’s dumb, and then there’s dumb.

Which brings us to “You Make Me Sick” (or was it “You Make Make Me Sick”). During the week of May 12-18, 1986, WHRB’s underground Record Hospital program (which exists to this day) devoted its entire schedule to a retrospective of the first decade of punk rock — back then, basically the complete history.  I’ve included a graphic of both sides of the original flyer. The graphic depicting the week’s schedule seems to me to be a masterpiece, perfectly reflecting the genre’s energy and diversity. The show actually delved into punk’s ’60s and early ’70s ancestry before diving full-tilt into the Ramones, Pistols and their progency. Although it was a Boston-area station, Boston punk bands didn’t get any more airtime than their counterparts in Chicago/Minneapolis, Canada, Texas, or Pennsylvania and NJ, and a full 17 hours on May 15 were devoted to West Coast hardcore. Many hours were given over to playing singles by bands even most committed punk fans had never heard before, and great pains were taken to representing international artists. I’d be very surprised if the event isn’t still regarded as one of the greatest weeks ever in the history of American college radio.

The orgy (the WHRB term for its theme shows) was coordinated by one Corey Loog Brennan, a/k/a T. Corey Brennan, later of the bands Bullet LaVolta and the Lemonheads, and still later a distinguished professor of classical studies at Rutgers University. But to me, he’ll always be the guy who helped put together that great week of old-school punk rock during one week in May of ’86.

Click on the images and enlarge them. It’s fun!

Bruce Pavitt (L) and Jon Poneman outside Sub Pop HQ, 1991

Just sayin’.